Yoast For WordPress: Simplify Your SEO Strategy
For small businesses setting up an online platform for the first time, consistently hearing unfamiliar technical buzzwords like “SEO”, “CRO” and “algorithm”, can be intimidating.
When you first enter the digital marketing or e-commerce space, attempting to navigate and truly understand technical jargon is one of the first hurdles you’ll likely face. You may have created the perfect site using WordPress, but you’re struggling to implement SEO (Search Engine Optimization) correctly.
The timeline of a small business preparing to build their presence online can look something like this: You’ve spent months building or creating your product, coming up with brand strategies and copy, you’ve poured time and resources into creating the perfect WordPress website, and then finally you’re ready to launch.
A small business budget may not allow you to bring a marketing consultant on board to meticulously plan a site launch, or to research the perfect keywords to improve your WordPress SEO rankings.
So, you’re left with the daunting task of not only creating a product and building a platform to sell it on, but now you have to market it, too?
Well, fear not!
As we’ve discussed in previous posts, we have faith in WordPress and WooCommerce, using both respective tools to build your website and get your e-commerce store up and running.
We’ve also mentioned WordPress plug-ins, and how you can truly expand the functionality of your site by using them. Not only does WordPress make it easy for you to create a beautifully functional and professional e-commerce website, but there are additional plug-ins that can become the ultimate tools to help you perfect your WordPress SEO.
Yoast SEO WordPress Plug-In: How Can It Help Your Business?
Yoast SEO plug-in is widely known as a fantastic tool to optimize the keywords you are using on your site, in order to attract traffic and visitors and increase your conversions. It is the most popular WordPress plug-in available for SEO.
Following the best practices of WordPress SEO can be one of the most influential factors when it comes to growing your business. Similarly, it can also be detrimental to your business if WordPress SEO is not utilized effectively, or worse, not utilized at all.
Yoast SEO Premium plug-in, simplifies the process for you even more. By using the Yoast SEO plug-in, you have access to the minds of SEO experts, who have done the hard work for you. By installing this plug-in, you are essentially able to ‘outsource’ your site’s SEO needs.
Yoast SEO increases your site’s discoverability on Google, well known as the most influential search engine of all.
The power of Google, while well known, can be difficult to harness. For small businesses, it can be a struggle to have Google recognize your site, and push it to its users who are searching for your keywords.
Google wants to know, why should I push your site and products to people? What are you offering people that are worthy of a click? What are you giving them that other websites aren’t?
By employing a professional web designer, you can be sure you are utilizing the functionality of Yoast SEO within WordPress website to its full potential. For small and medium-sized businesses, giving yourself the best chance of success from the word go is crucial.
Business owners should be aware of the importance of SEO and ensure it is done well by using the Yoast plug-in. Kodaworks can guide you in the right direction when it comes to optimizing its functionality. But it’s up to you to write the core content that keeps customers returning to your site!
The functionality of Yoast SEO Plug-In: What Does It Do?
So, we know the Yoast SEO Plug-in simplifies the process of implementing SEO on your site.
We know SEO attracts more traffic and more customers. But how does it do this?
When you spend time writing high-value content for your site or e-commerce business, Yoast SEO can analyze this content. It ensures you are using your chosen keywords the optimum amount of times, and in the right context.
This type of input is invaluable, especially for small businesses. Where resources may already be scarce, why waste your time writing content that is not going to be effective for your business?
Yoast SEO ensures you are writing the correct type of content to ‘please’ the search engine algorithm.
Yoast SEO not only analyzes the keywords you input, it also analyzes all variations of those keywords, to ensure you are covering all bases. This really is the true definition of ‘optimization’! Ensure you are reaching your targeted audience by implementing this function.
Yoast also acts as a type of ‘translator’, by telling Google exactly what your webpage is about, offering more context to the search engine, so it is better able to understand your content.
This improves the overall effectiveness of the tool, giving Google a ‘complete picture’ of what your website and content are about, and who it is targeting.
Benefits of Yoast SEO for Small Businesses
As well as giving Google a full picture of your content and optimizing your keywords to reach your perfect audience, the further benefits of Yoast SEO are endless.
A further function of Yoast SEO is that it allows you to view your webpage search results through the eyes of your visitors. This gives small businesses a unique perspective, rather than viewing their website search results through the ‘fishbowl’ of being the creator.
1. View Your Site Through The SEO Looking Glass
Using the Yoast SEO plug-in will show you exactly how your site links and search results will look to your potential customers. It allows you to see this clearly, and answer a valuable question: Would your audience click on your link?
Often, small business owners find it difficult to create content for website visitors. We know that the longer a visitor spends browsing your product pages and content, the more familiar they become with your brand. This is a stepping stone in building that all-important relationship with your customer.
2. Make Your Content Attractive and Accessible
Website visitors are masters at skimming content. Are you writing your content in a way that makes it easily readable and navigable for your visitors? Are you writing in a style that entices them to keep reading, or are you publishing novels on your website that drives them away?
Yoast will tell you exactly how readable your content is to your visitors, and exactly how to structure your information in a way that is most effective. It is an invaluable input to have for any online business, to have a tool that will help you to attain and retain visitors on your website.
3. Keep the Bugs Out
Another amazing functionality of Yoast SEO, which is especially effective for small businesses lacking technical knowledge, is the ability of Yoast to make some tweaks to your site metadata.
It can be extremely beneficial, when you make the Google Bots jobs easier, by ensuring you remove any ‘roadblocks’ or ‘obstacles’. Google bots will crawl your website, getting a feel for what you do, and deciding how and who to push your content to.
Streamlining this process can be difficult for small business owners who are juggling ten tasks at once, and who may not have the experience in website design or coding to monitor and fix errors as they arise.
The Yoast SEO plug-in also keeps your sitemap and URLs in tip-top shape for when Google Bots come to crawl your content. Yoast plug-in is also frequently updated, to ensure any changes in Google’s algorithm are picked up on, allowing Yoast to adjust accordingly, with no extra effort from you!
How Do I Install Yoast SEO Plug-In?
The Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress is easy to install by following the built-in ‘set-up wizard’.
This allows you to start optimizing your website without delay, giving your business the best chance of reaching more customers, as soon as possible.
The default settings Yoast SEO comes with will start optimizing your site content for SEO very effectively once installed, but your business may benefit from some professional input as it grows.
Professional web developers like Kodaworks can ensure Yoast SEO is installed correctly and operating to the best of its ability for your website, making the most of your resources.
This allows you as the business owner to focus on the more tangible aspects of your business as it grows, such as product development and building customer relationships. We also ensure Yoast SEO is operating to the best level it can, thus maximizing your marketing potential.
How To Get The Most out of Yoast SEO Plug-In
The Yoast SEO Plug-In operates most effectively when business owners and web developers take the time to properly research their keywords, which will attract the target market to your site.
The WordPress SEO tool allows you to input the keywords and phrases you’d like to optimize your site for, and will analyze your written content, to ensure you are effectively using these keywords.
When creating content for your website with SEO in mind, it can be tempting as a business owner to ‘cram’ your content with keywords, in the hopes that more keywords equal more visitors to your site.
This is not a good strategy! The Google algorithm is smart, and will actually lower your site rankings when you do this. The key to attracting visitors to your site, again and again, is to produce real, valuable content, written for real people.
Yoast SEO helps you to optimize other factors of your content that influence search engine optimization, like readability. While it is always important to optimize your content to rank with the right keywords, no reader will buy from you if they can’t understand your content, or if they feel you are simply ‘spamming’ them in order to get a sale.
Yoast SEO plug-in will give you detailed feedback about your content, which you can put into practice to ensure you’re pleasing the algorithm, while not forgetting your customer in the process.
Don’t worry about your own writing style being erased, either. Yoast is a nuanced tool that preserves your voice and amplifies it in the most effective way to those most likely to be searching for your product.
Writing SEO content can be a fine line to balance on, but the support of this WordPress SEO tool is invaluable to small and medium-sized businesses. Especially for those who are trying to break into the online sphere for the first time, this support is vital.
It can be intimidating as a small business owner, likely with no technical knowledge or background, to build a website from the ground up. Ensure you do yourself a favor by making use of the multitude of WordPress plug-ins available.
Making The Most of WordPress Plug-Ins
There are amazing WordPress tools out there that will allow you to implement SEO best practices and increase your sales. But what good are these tools if you,
A. Don’t know about them!
B. Don’t implement them properly?
Kodaworks are experts in building, maintaining, and optimizing your WordPress/Woocommerce website, and can ensure you get the maximum benefits from WordPress plug-ins, too.
Allow us to walk you through the steps of implementing these tools, and ensuring they are performing at their maximum capacity, to bring key benefits to your business.
Search engine optimization is one of the most important factors a business should implement within its website. With the Yoast SEO plug-in, you can have peace of mind as a small business owner that the technical aspects of SEO are taken care of for you, and the content you are producing for your customers is of a high standard.
Half the battle when growing your website is ensuring that search engines can easily find you and ‘crawl’ your website. We would love to take away the technical uncertainty of this for you and cut out hours of frustration for your business.
Contact us to learn more, and give yourself the freedom to focus on the aspects of your business that you love.
Allow yourself peace of mind in knowing that we can implement the tools which will grow your business at a rapid pace, and place customers right where they need to be within your site.