As a WordPress development agency, we believe WordPress is the most amazing CMS platform for all businesses. It offers abundant features and benefits, which makes managing, updating and maintaining a website easy. It not only makes content management simple but also helps improve SEO campaigns.
There are many different features for SEO in WordPress that makes it the most preferred choice by top marketers. As such, read below to know why WordPress is the best CMS for SEO.
Reasons Why WordPress is the Best CMS for SEO
1. SEO-friendly WordPress Themes
One of the best things about creating a WordPress website is the availability of a wide range of themes. WordPress provides you with a host of premium SEO-friendly themes that help to improve your site’s performance. A high-quality WordPress theme will ensure your site not only looks professional but is also well-structured with proper HTML mark-up.
An easy-to-navigate and visually appealing website, in turn, will ensure that the visitors stay on your site for a longer time which will increase the dwell time resulting in higher rankings.
2. Mobile User Optimization
With the rapid growth of smartphone users, businesses must optimise their website for the mobile users to improve their ROI. Also, with Google’s mobile-first indexing, not having a responsive website could negatively impact your site’s rankings. Thus, when you choose WordPress to build your site, this is taken care of as almost all WordPress themes are responsive.
A responsive website ensures your site is accessible from all mobile devices and across all browsers. It improves user experience and leads to faster crawling & indexing of web pages, which help boost search ranking.
3. Website Speed Optimization
Slow page speed affects your site’s ranking in Google SERPs as a sluggish website frustrates users leading to a high bounce rate. Being an SEO-friendly CMS, WordPress helps optimise your site’s speed by offering amazing plugins such as:
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- W3 Total Cache plugin helps reduce load time and improves user experience.
- NitroPack is an all-in-one performance optimization plugin that helps with caching, image optimization, code minification, CDN and more.
You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights (free tool) to analyze your website speed. This tool provides you with helpful suggestions on how to make your website faster.
4. Metadata Management
As a digital marketing agency in Surrey, we understand that WordPress and SEO go hand-in-hand. One of the perks of WordPress is that it makes metadata management easy, which is an important on-page SEO factor. Adding SEO titles and meta descriptions to all your web pages are essential as it helps search engine robots and users understand what the web page is about. By adding relevant keywords to your title and meta description, you can improve the ranking of the web page, and it helps improve the click-through-rate.
The best part, you can easily automate this task by using one of the must-have WordPress plugins – Yoast SEO – which makes adding metadata seamless.
5. Image Optimization
While images are essential to break the monotony of text on your web pages and blog posts, unoptimised & heavy media files can bloat your database and make your website slower. The good news is with the WordPress Smush plugin you can compress, resize & optimise your website’s images swiftly, freeing up the disk space and improving the page speed.
As one of the best CMS for SEO, WordPress helps you to add ‘ALT text’ to images. This facilitates faster and accurate indexing by search engine robots. More importantly, optimised images help you generate traffic from image-based search engines such as Google Image Search.
6. Availability of WordPress SEO Plugins
One of the reasons why WordPress is good for SEO is because of the availability of ample SEO plugins. The top SEO plugin – Yoast SEO – offers you a wide range of features such as easy creation of XML sitemaps, in-depth Schema.org integration, full control over your breadcrumbs, simple setting for canonical URLs & meta tags, robots.txt, keyword optimization, etc. In short, it takes care of all your on-page and technical SEO factors.
Another powerful WordPress SEO plugin that you must install is the Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin by MonsterInsights. This plugin connects your WordPress site with Google Analytics and allows you to view various reports right from your WordPress dashboard in real-time.
Further reading: How To Install, Activate And Setup Yoast SEO For WordPress
7. Social Media Integration
When it comes to promoting your brand or increasing brand awareness, social media marketing is one of the best techniques. Though it is not considered a ranking factor by Google, it can still help drive traffic, generate leads, and improve your SEO rankings.
WordPress makes social media integration with various social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram easy. Through WordPress social media plugins, you can customise social media buttons for your blog, making content sharing simple. It allows you to automate various social media marketing campaigns. It also enables you to embed social media feed on your website.
8. Customised Permalinks
When it comes to WordPress search engine optimization, the ability to customised permalinks is by far one of the best features. By default, your permalinks – URLs for your web page, categories and blog post – may look something like this:
This permalink structure makes it difficult for search engine robots to read & index your web pages and posts. Thus, with the customised permalink option, you can easily edit the permalink to the format you want. This will make your permalink look appealing as well as informative. Plus, from an SEO perspective, you can add relevant keywords to the URL structure, which will help enhance the SEO campaign.
Here’s an example of a customized permalink:
9. Structured HTML Markup
While WordPress is written in PHP, it does create HTML pages which makes it easier for search engines to understand your website. Most of the latest WordPress themes are coded in HTML5, which further optimises your site. Plus, it allows you to create a sitemap in HTML version that is added to the website’s footer and meant for site visitors.
10. Add Structured Data
Search engines make use of Structured data (or Schema) to enhance your business listings and provide answers to users. It is a vital part of SEO strategy as it tells search engines what a web page is about so that they can index it properly. However, adding a Structured Data Schema can be quite complicated, and this is where WordPress comes on top when compared to other CMS platforms.
With the WP SEO Structured Data Schema plugin, you can add schema for local business, blog posts, news articles, videos, products, services, ratings, reviews, multimedia content, and other data types.
11. Improve User Experience
WordPress offers you a wide range of options for designing & customising your website that guarantees a good ‘user experience.’ When the website is user-friendly, simple to navigate, and visually-pleasing, visitors tend to spend more time on the website, which helps reduce the bounce rate.
Good user experience also helps increase the site’s dwell time, and all these metrics (bounce rate, dwell-time) helps Google gauge whether or not your website provides a great user experience which helps improve your site’s ranking in SERPs.
So, if you aim to drive organic traffic and boost ranking, then WordPress can help you to achieve this goal.
12. Simple Content Management
One of the primary reasons why WordPress is the best CMS for SEO is because it helps simplifies content management. High-quality and engaging content is the driving force behind the success of SEO marketing campaigns.
Thus, WordPress makes drafting and publishing content with images or videos easy. What’s more, if you have activated the Yoast plugin on your website, then it will help optimise your content with focus keywords, interlinking suggestions and much more. This will further help boost your SEO campaign.
13. Title Tag and Headings
For easy readability of both users and search engines, WordPress allows you to structure your content by offering the title tag and headings functionality. The title of a page (h1 tags) is an important on-page SEO factor. Whereas the other H tags (H2-H6) helps you to bifurcate your content easily into main headings and sub-headings, which helps enhance user experience.
14. Easily Integrates with Other Essential Tools
Apart from Google Analytics, WordPress also allows you to integrate other essential tools that you need to boost engagement and improve SEO. Some of the tools include GSuite, MailChimp, Sucuri security tool, among others.
15. Robust Security
All your efforts of optimising your website for SEO can go down the drain if the security of your site is weak. A website that is riddled with spam, malware, or has been hacked can have a negative impact on SEO. Here, WordPress is the strongest contender when it comes to website security as it provides regular updates not only for the installed plugins & themes but also for the WordPress core. This keeps your site safe and secure.
Moreover, apart from security plugins like iThemes Security and Wordfence Security, WordPress also offers excellent backup plugins such as UpdraftPlus, BackWPup and more.
