WordPress Blogging Techniques to Boost Your SEO

If you manage an online store on WordPress, no doubt you are interested in improving your SEO for the increased traffic and sales it could bring. WordPress blogging is one way to provide more value to your users that will have a powerful impact on your search engine rankings.

Even if you never intended on starting a blog before, the future success of your eCommerce business may depend on it. Users are hungry for high-quality content and this is what Google is looking for as well when indexing your website.

A blog is the perfect companion to any business that wants to connect with their customers and build a better brand image, while also moving up in the search results. This straightforward SEO guide will cover some of the important qualities of WordPress and why it is such an optimal platform for eCommerce blogging, as well as general guidelines and techniques you should follow to make sure that your blog stands out.

Why Use WordPress For Blogging?

If you are not familiar with the history of WordPress, it originally started off primarily as a blogging platform and evolved from there due to the ingenuity of the WordPress community.

While WordPress can easily be adapted to fit any mold you need it to simply by installing the right themes and plugins, including full eCommerce functionality through WooCommerce, it shines as a blogging platform.

Here are just a few of the key reasons why you would want to use WordPress for blogging:

• Easy to learn and use. WordPress has a very small learning curve, especially for an open-source platform.
• Nearly unlimited customization. With thousands of different themes, plugins, and page builders, you can easily craft a unique and optimized experience for your users without needing to learn how to code.
• WordPress is optimized for SEO right out of the box and only requires a few adjustments and plugins to make it vastly superior compared to many other platforms in this area.
• Easy to create attractive looking blogs. Since WordPress is first and foremost a blogging platform, many themes allow you to create stunning-looking blogs with very little technical knowledge.
• WordPress gives you full control over your blog. Since you are simply installing software on your own host, and not paying for a service, you have complete control over all aspects of your website, including the database.
• Supports scaling and growth. You can always add functionality or pack up and move your website to a bigger server. WordPress makes it easy to grow without feeling constrained by arbitrary limits and caps.
• Embed media and social posts by cutting and pasting URLs. This is one of the most underrated features of WordPress blogging. You can simply drop the URL of a Twitter link, Pinterest pin, or YouTube video right into your blog and it will appear embedded on your website. An excellent way to increase engagement and create visually appealing blog articles. Supports all of the major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok.
• Integrations are available for just about anything. If there is functionality you want, you will be able to find it with a plugin, no questions asked.
• Plenty of support. WordPress has a massive user base and following, which means that you can almost always find the answer to questions or problems you may encounter.

These are just some of the many points that make WordPress an incredibly effective blogging platform. Whether you are already on WordPress and power your store through WooCommerce, or are hosting your store on Shopify or BigCommerce and are thinking of using WordPress solely for your blog, you won’t find a better option in terms of functionality and SEO friendliness.

Simple WordPress Blogging Guidelines to Follow

If you want to boost your SEO with blogging, there are several important points you will want to keep in mind. Even on a platform that is favorable to SEO like WordPress, you still have to put in the work if you want your efforts to pay off.

The key element of blogging is making sure to infuse that personal touch, whether it is your unique take on a certain subject, deep insight on your particular products or industry, or special brand messaging. The purpose of blogging is to connect with your audience and provide them with information that they can actually use.

With that being said, here are the key WordPress blogging tips that will help improve your SEO and bridge that gap between you and your users.

1. Be as Consistent as Possible

Consistency is a huge part of blogging, both in terms of user expectations as well as what Google wants to see out of an authority website. Infrequent posting infers laziness, and this isn’t the kind of atmosphere Google wants to promote, and it sends all the wrong signals to your users.

A neglected WordPress blog stands out more than no blog at all. It comes off as unprofessional and hobbyist.

At the same time, consistently updated content is one of Google’s known SEO ranking factors. It’s important to continually update your website with fresh content if you want your website to remain relevant in the search engines.

Consistency will also help with a number of other factors as well. The more content you have, the more potential keywords you could be ranking for and the more chances you have to help a user find what they are looking for.

Don’t mistake consistency for “quantity over quality.” Each piece of content you post on your blog should be as high-quality and comprehensive as possible in order to outrank your competitors and to be as helpful as possible to your users. Thin content will be soundly ignored by the search engines, and for good reason.

This leads us right into the next point…

2. Write to Inform and Engage Your Target Audience

Your only goal when writing on your blog should be to genuinely engage with and inform your audience. If you are simply trying to sell them a product through a thin veil of information, they will pick up on this fact lightning fast.

Your blogs should be full of valuable information that your users will appreciate. This can be how-tos involving products you sell, reviews of products in your industry, your firsthand experiences with products that your audience would be interested in, as well as general information about your industry.

The more you write with your audience in mind, the more natural your blog will sound and the better user experience it will create. This will translate into a lower bounce rate and better rankings in Google over time.

3. Your Title Should be Catchy and Informative

Blog titles are important for a number of reasons. First, they make that initial connection with your users and are typically the first thing they see when your article pops up in the search results.

Another important aspect of your titles is that they should be optimized with the search engines in mind. This means, ideally, that your title should contain your primary keyword or some variation of it. You also want to make sure that your title sounds natural. Users are far less likely to click on suspicious blog titles that sound salesy or too stilted.

4. Make URLs Short and Concise

You also want to be mindful of your URLs. WordPress allows you to fully customize your URLs for SEO purposes, but you may have to change a setting to get them to display the way you want.

A URL should resemble the page title closely, but without useless connecting words. Work to reduce the size of your URLs as much as possible while retaining the target keyword and any other impactful words that are contained in the title.

You can easily change the URL of each blog article that you write on your WordPress site by simply clicking the “edit” button beside the permalink on the blog page itself. Just remember to save your settings afterwards, and keep in mind that if you attempt to create a URL that is already live on your website, WordPress will automatically place a “2” at the end, which looks somewhat unprofessional and should generally be avoided.

5. Interlink Your Blogs For Better Indexing

Hyperlinks are what drive the Web. Google understands the quality and intent of a website largely based off of its interlinking profile. If most of your blogs are sitting on metaphorical islands and don’t have many outbound or inbound links, Google will assume that it is content that is either useless, or doesn’t support or refer to anything and is not worth seeing.

It’s crucial that you take the time to interlink your blogs if you want to seriously improve your SEO. This is especially important if you are an eCommerce business, as you likely have dozens or even hundreds of products that don’t have much context to other parts of your website and are sitting alone unlinked but through the navigation.

You can use interlinking to connect blogs to other blogs, blogs to products, and even products to blogs if the situation warrants. For example, you can create an in-depth how-to article involving one of your products, and include a link to this article in the product description on that item’s page. This will enhance user experience and help Google understand how the pages on your website relate to one another, which will get them indexed faster and ranking higher.

6. Use Large Social Share Buttons

Social media marketing (SMM) is not only an important aspect of running an eCommerce business and a successful blog, but it is also a known ranking signal. Google takes social presence into account when ranking pages, so the more one of your blogs is getting shared around on social media, the better.

There was once a time when small and out-of-the-way social share buttons were the normal convention, but these days, users want to see large share buttons that are easily clickable.

What social share buttons do you want to include in your blog posts? This will largely depend on the kind of content you produce.

As a general rule of thumb, a blog should have share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Other platforms such as Linkedin and Tumblr are less necessary but may be relevant in certain circumstances.

7. Include Links to Your Products or Services

While you don’t want to come across as merely trying to push one of your products, blogs are valuable sales funnels that can and should be used to link to products and services that you know your users would benefit from.

As long as you consistently generate quality content and create a trusting user base, you can reliably link out to products or services in your blog posts. This will actually help strengthen your SEO by interlinking and helping users find products that answer the questions and address their needs, which of course is the end goal of your entire online store.

As long as you approach product linking with the mindset that you are providing something valuable to your users and that you don’t expect anything in return, your efforts will be effective.

What WordPress Plugins Will You Need For Your Blog?

WordPress provides a decent amount of basic blog functionality as soon as it is installed, but you may want to beef it up a bit by using a few blogging plugins.

Some of the following plugins may already be installed on your website, in which case you likely already know how useful they are.

• Yoast SEO
• Broken Link Checker
• WP Smush
• W3 Total Cache
• WP-Optimize
• Akismet
• Mailchimp
• UpdraftPlus
• Elementor

Regardless of the plugins that you choose for your eCommerce blog, you want to make sure that you hit all of the major points of functionality that a well-managed blog needs in order to be successful.

This includes a powerful SEO plugin like Yoast that will help you craft optimized content, a mailing list integration plugin, Akismet to tackle spam comments, a caching plugin to help speed up your site, and a high-quality page builder such as Elementor.

Depending on how you manage your website, you may need slightly different functionality, but this list is a great starting point if you are looking for a strong core of plugins to begin with if you are unfamiliar with WordPress SEO.

How to Boost Your SEO by Creating Engaging Content

The cornerstone of your WordPress blog should be rich, engaging content that is both informative and entertaining. While everything you write doesn’t have to be a masterpiece or go viral on the Internet, you do want to make sure that every piece of content has a purpose and gives the users a reason to stick around.

What if you are not good at writing blogs? As much as we would like to say that there was some trick to blogging, there isn’t. Sometimes you just have to sit down and construct an informative and eye-catching piece of digital content that will draw in the attention of your audience and provide them with what they are looking for.

This doesn’t always require succinct writing or sophisticated analyses, but it does take a little understanding in regards to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to what users are looking for. If you want to give your SEO that extra boost, you need to pay close attention to what actually gets clicks and engagement online.

Start with infusing your blog pieces with plenty of media. This can be pictures of your products, photos you take with your phone going through a how-to process or cataloging your adventures or even high-quality stock photography that accurately describes what you are writing about.

Don’t stop there however. Video content is one of the best drivers of engagement online and should be used whenever possible. If your business uses YouTube you can take your uploaded videos and place them on your blog to reinforce your branding and add value to your articles.

Another important tactic you want to use is embedded social media posts. These look great on WordPress blogs and provide a ton of instant value. Despite how easy it is to embed a tweet or Instagram post into a blog page, this is still something you don’t see all that often and yet it instantly improves the look and feel of a page.

Experiment with different forms of media and see how they may drive engagement on your posts. You also want to keep social media in mind in general when constructing your blog. Upload high-quality vertical images to your blogs that would look great as pins, which will increase the likelihood that someone will actually pin your post organically.

If you can speak from experience on a topic, this will aid you in creating engaging content as well. You will sound more natural if you speak from experience, which is ultimately what your users are looking for. They want the opinion or knowledge of someone who has actually done what they want to do or bought what they want to buy, and are looking to your content to guide them in their decision-making process.

The best ways to improve SEO routinely involve direct user experience enhancement. You want to ask yourself how your users will benefit from the content you are creating, and if they would look at it with a critical eye or if they would accept it as natural and genuine. This is important because users are savvier than ever can sniff out sales tactics and spam a mile away.

How Your WordPress Blogging Efforts Improve Your Online Store

The time you invest in your WordPress blogging efforts will pay off by bolstering your rank in the search engines and helping your online store get more organic traffic and sales.

No matter what industry you are currently in, or what kinds of products you sell, your eCommerce business could be greatly improved with the addition of an SEO-optimized blog.

The increased brand awareness, user engagement, traffic, and potential for conversions are just some of the perks associated with managing a high-quality WordPress blog.

The issue is that you may not have the time or the skills necessary to properly run such digital marketing efforts by yourself. If you are strapped for time as it is, blogging is certainly something that may not even be possible for you.

This is where expert WordPress SEO services would be an amazing benefit for you and your business. You already know the benefits of blogging on WordPress and want to jump in, but subjects like keyword research and writing extensive optimized articles puts you at a loss.

You don’t need to try and tackle such a massive undertaking yourself. A professional eCommerce blog is not something that just anyone can create. If you want to really see dramatic results and create engaging content for your users that will help boost your presence in the search engines and get you the kind of traffic and conversions you are looking for, you need an agency that specializes in eCommerce SEO services and that can take this project on for you.

Let our team of SEO experts help you transform your online store with content that your users are looking for and that Google wants to see as well. Give us a call at 888-982-8269 or read more about our WordPress services here.