How to make a WordPress Blog SEO Friendly

If you’ve created a blog, odds are that you want someone to read it. Whether you’re posting a job or discussing politics, business, or fashion, there’s an audience out there you want to reach.

One of the best ways to start reaching your audience is by optimizing your blog so that it’s more search engine friendly. Focusing on search engine optimization can help you reach a larger audience than just word of mouth alone. Here’s how you can do that.

Micro Moments

What exactly is a micro moment? According to Google, they might just be one of the most important factors in driving customers to your site and readers to your blogs. Basically, a micro moment is when a prospective reader or customer uses their smartphone or computer to search for something. These are usually categorized as “I want” moments, such as:

• “I want to know”
• “I want to do”
• “I want to go”
• “I want to buy”

91% of people generally turn to their smartphones when searching for these kinds of things. 65% of people are looking for the most relevant content to their query, no matter the source. Thus, there are a whole lot of people who just want the information and don’t care who they get it from. So, how can you optimize these micro moments so that your recruiting website pops up first?

If you are a recruiter and want to start a blog, you might want to optimize either for “I want to know” or “I want to do” moments. A prospective candidate would want to apply for a job opportunity — that’s a “want to do”. Or they would like to know how to apply or may be how to have a successful interview for a job they have been wanting for so long. The latest would be considered a “want to know” moment. Either way you have to:

1. First, consider how Google favors webpages and places them in SERPs. They tend to rank pages that provide their visitors with as many detailed answers as possible with a minimum of clicks. Keeping your content simple and to-the-point will help in this endeavor.
2. Consider creating helpful FAQs and how-to articles (like this one!) to draw attention from the search engines.

Voice Search

Gone are the days where you actually have to type in your search terms, at least on a smartphone. Amazon Echo, Google Home devices, Siri, Google voice search, and Microsoft Cortana have made voice searches a thing. And people are utilizing these features regularly, too. In fact, more and more users are conducting searches through voice rather than typing on the screen. However, users have gotten used to typing as few words as possible in a search bar, but voice searches tend to be more conversational. This opens up a whole new world of search engine optimization for voice searches.

So, how do you optimize for voice searches? One good piece of advice is to think conversationally. If you have a business, note the kinds of questions your candidates ask over the phone or in chat. Then, optimize your content for these kinds of searches with the statements and questions you’ve gathered.

Another thing to keep in mind is that voice searches tend to be more specific than typed keyword searches. Instead of searching simply for a job in Los Angeles, voice searches tend to want a job opportunity with insurance cover, as an example. Offering quick, succinct answers to these questions will help optimize your blog for these searches.

Proximity as Ranking Factor

If your blog is the online face of your business, the number one factor in ranking on Google will be your proximity to the searcher. Maybe they’re in a strange city looking for work and need to know the location of your recruitment agency. Perhaps they have some family circumstances and they need a close-by company to work in. When they search, Google tends to rank their listings by which is closest to the customer.

If there are few results nearby for a user’s query, Google will pull matches from a further distance. This ties in with micro moments a good bit because a good number of searches are performed on smartphones and many of these are while the user is out and about.

Reviews

While proximity may be a major factor when it comes to local searches, one should not discount reviews. In fact, when it comes to organic local listings, reviews are the more important ranking factor. Reviews are important because they provide social proof that your product is good. 88% of customers will read reviews to determine the quality of a local business or the product they are looking to buy.

While Google Reviews gets a big slice of the pie, Google does utilize reviews from other sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other review sites, so these cannot be discounted as irrelevant. In fact, having reviews that match up on other sites as well as Google only improves your ranking.

Mobile First Index

We’ve already established that a great majority of searches are coming from a mobile device. Thus, optimizing for mobile searches is a must if you want to increase your SERP ranking and traffic.

Websites that are optimized for mobile access will go a long way towards raising your site visibility and user visits. Mobile searches are so important that Google is going “mobile first.”

What does this mean? In a nutshell, it does not mean that Google will begin ranking websites that are mobile-friendly higher than sites that are not optimized for mobile devices. What it does mean is that if you have both a mobile and desktop-friendly sites, and your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, your mobile site will still be considered your primary site. This can impact customers and readers impressions of your blog or your brand.

The takeaway here is that you will need to optimize your content to be available and easily accessible for mobile devices, even if you do so on a separate site.

AMP Pages

Tying in with the mobile trend, we have Accelerated Mobile Pages, known as AMP. Basically, this is coding that allows a site to load quickly on a mobile device. AMP will affect SEO in two ways: higher ranks and a higher page load speed.

Think of it like this: since many searches are now conducted on mobile devices, and many of those searches are not connected to a wifi access, they are using data. Depending on where a person is and their plan, it can either be blazingly fast or agonizingly slow. Search engines want to deliver the best experience they can, so they want to deliver up fast sites, not slow ones.

The sites that are thought to benefit the most from AMP are sites that produce actual content, ie: blogs, news, and update sections of sites. By installing the AMP WordPress Plugin to your site, activating it, and updating your .htaccessfile using a program like Filezilla, you can optimize your WordPress site for AMP.

Whether offering your services or walking newbie candidates through an applying guide or simply offering your takes on current work related events, your blog is an important part of reaching your customers and audience. Knowing how to optimize your WordPress blog to meet the coming trends is an imperative factor to obtaining the ranking, reviews, visitors, and customers you want. More importantly, it is a driving factor to customer and visitor loyalty.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash