Having a WordPress site has numerous benefits for the owner. Speed, aesthetics, rich features, and cost-effectiveness are to name a few of them.

Another is to have your website show up in top Google pages.

You may also have considered these factors before launching your WordPress platform. The reasons that may have influenced your decision can be plenty, like the ones mentioned below.

  • Most suitable for small businesses that operate on low budgets
  • Ability to be a blog, e-commerce or other such sites
  • The convenience of maintenance with no need for a middleman
  • Choice of an extensive range of themes for website designs
  • Comfortable addition of plugins
  • Quick installation
  • Free website upgrades and high security
  • SEO and Mobile-friendliness
  • Smooth integration with third-parties
  • Access to A/B testing services
  • Futuristic appeal

If everything went right and you felt happy with your decision, then what is the cause of your concern now? Are you worried because it is not coming up on the top pages in search engine results despite all the efforts that went into developing and launching it? Don't worry about it.

Whether Google penalized your site or competitors outdid it, or it is nowhere on the Google map, there can be some legitimate factors behind all this that influenced your rankings. Once you get to the roots, you will be able to address them and solve your problem.

So, here are the common areas you need to look into and fix them.

Content Length and Quality

The depth and quality of your content can influence its popularity. If the site features small content of 300 to 500 words mostly, then it can be a trouble. Google gives preference to an informative and detailed piece of writing that can meet the requirements, needs, and interests of the users and encourage them to take action. To start working on this, you would need to check Analytics in the search console and detect pages that are not attracting traffic and have high bounce rates. If users are spending less time on a page, it means it is not relevant for them. And if users move out of the search result page, it may indicate an issue with design, speed, ads, inbound links, navigation, etc.

You can sort out most of these challenges to a great extent by organizing your page layout. For example, including table of content can enhance the user experience. At the same time, you can add infographics, videos, and images to diversify the elements and make your page more appealing.

Selection of Keywords

If your domain is authoritative, you can use competitive keywords in your relevant pieces of content. Otherwise, you may have to resort to long-tail keywords. You can check domain authority through online tools effortlessly. Generally, businesses invest their time in targeting a three-word long phrase through quality content so that they achieve better rankings. There are several keyword tools also which you can use to identify the most useful searched keywords for your purpose. Some offer free services for a specific period with limitation on the number of trials per day, and some charge you a small fee.

However, don't merely rush for the keyword results they return. Identifying the competitive ones so that you can avoid them is critical. Typically, competitive keywords are generic, more profitable, highly searched, and has higher domain authority.

In this context, one more consideration can work in your favor, which is, don't build your SEO strategies around a single keyword. Keep your choices diverse to attract inquiries from multiple sources even though you rank on top position for a particular keyword.

Loading Time

Another critical factor that you may miss is the download speed of your site. The more time it takes to open, the more the chances of losing your visitors. And it is no way a good signal for Google as you may be aware. To make your website faster, you need to work on a few things, such as:

  • Hosting service
  • Cache plugin
  • Latest PHP versions for compatibility with plugins
  • Image optimization

There are many other factors also that you can take into consideration. But first, focus on these and see if there is an improvement. Keep patience until changes begin to reflect in the search engine and you start to show up in top Google results for your keyphrases.

Click-through Rates

Lower Click Through Rate (CTR) may also hurt your website's ranking in Google. There are a few tweaks that you can make here too to get people to click and read your page links. While the content body has to be impressive at all cost, there are some more tricks that you can apply for favorable results. These include:

  • Modify SEO titles and meta descriptions to make them exciting, captivating, and thrilling
  • Use better snippets, such as ones which show higher customer ratings
  • Update the time of the modified content to convey its freshness

Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and some other popular social channels play a significant role in all the SEO practices today because of their ability to generate higher and direct engagement with the target audience.

So, share your content regularly on these platforms to gain more visitors. The more likes, comments, and shares the published content garners, the more it will turn to your benefit. Google takes these as a positive signal. However, make sure your posts are well-customized and compatible with the design of these platforms.

SSL Certificates

Another most crucial thing for your WP site is the SSL certification. Most websites face Google penalties for not having SSL, which is vital for the safety and security of your property, users' information, etc.

Duplicate Content

This problem can particularly arise when you attempt to geo-target your landing pages for different locations. To avoid this issue, you have to ensure that each page has unique content, including graphs, videos, texts, etc.

In Summary

The list is endless. But you can begin with these problem areas first to see if your techniques are working. You can manage them on your own if you wish, but hiring an SEO agency, such as SEO JJEXC or some other, can be more fruitful for this task. As they are experts, they can find quick and long-lasting solutions to help your WordPress website show up in top Google searches.

 

About the Author: Sujain Thomas

Sujain is an experienced blogger who has written articles for several renowned blogs and websites about various uses of social media to engineer more business traffic on business websites.

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