9 WordPress SEO tips for 2022

Creating a WordPress blog on a laptop with WordPress SEO tips for 2022

 

Generally speaking, WordPress is kind of an all-in-one solution many websites are built on. It powers almost half of the websites on the internet, thanks to the universality it provides. Depending on the complexity of a website, sometimes you don’t even need advanced technical skills to create one. Best of all, it offers a variety of improved features through its themes and plugins. As for SEO, WordPress is one of the best options. With so many available built-in solutions, you can quickly improve your website’s visibility, increase traffic, and win those hardly reachable top-ranking positions. But, since SEO trends are constantly changing, you will first need up-to-date information about WordPress SEO tips for 2022.

What 9 WordPress SEO tips should you focus on in 2022?

There are a variety of steps that you can take to boost your website traffic from Google and other search engines. The higher a website ranks in search engine result pages (SERPs), the greater its potential to garner visitors. With the ability to tackle and optimize various website elements, these SEO tips below can significantly improve your marketing efforts. Sometimes though, you can optimize your website on your own, but it’s advisable to get professionals in the marketing field to assist you in most cases. With a dedicated team, business websites have a higher chance to retain their competitiveness.

Here are 9 WordPress SEO tips you should take into account in 2022

1.) Carefully plan your website creation

Your website has to appeal to the taste of specific targeted groups to rank high in SERPs. Previous marketing research is required if you want a particular audience to visit your website. First, it has to offer a remarkable user experience (UX) from the first impression to browsing through your pages. Your website has to load fast, appear performing and work on all available devices. Second, your website needs to offer relevant and valuable information. It’s not enough to optimize the content and elements to search engines only. Your goal is to attract and keep human visitors and create something bots will crawl through and index.

This is especially important in the coming years since Google, in particular, is giving immense importance to the user experience websites provide. Given these points, you will need a well-thought-out website to satisfy and check all the boxes in both search engines and users lists. 

Getting ready to click on the Design button in WordPress.

Caption: When making plans about your website, consider everything that can contribute to and improve its online visibility.

2.) Select reliable hosting

For your website to work as intended, it’s not always enough to think only about your WordPress website. You also need to take into account other factors that can affect its availability and performance. This is why selecting a hosting provider you can trust is fundamental. You will need someone who can guarantee everything required for your website to function well, from security to uptime, capacity, and support. This is particularly important for SEO since Google, for example, favors websites with quality user experience. To see it happen, choose a hosting that can provide you with:

  • at least 99,9% uptime
  • proper servers with enough bandwidth and memory
  • advanced security solutions and measures
  • an easy panel to manage your website with convenience
  • great customer support

Fortunately, there are many great hosting providers out there. And their services are affordable.

3.) Don’t mix up www and non-www URLs

To make it clear, none of the options for your domain has any particular SEO advantages. SEO-wise, they act the same. However, for your WordPress website, it’s important not to mix them up. Choose one of the URL options and closely stick to it. The thing is, Google considers these as two separate addresses, which can cause a lot of trouble for your SEO efforts in the future. After all, you don’t want to split your marketing efforts; you want to combine them. In addition, make sure you set the proper permalink structure for your pages. The default (numeric) way is not intuitive, is hard to remember, and is not exactly convenient for your SEO.

SEO website headline with a field to enter URL address in the right format.
URL optimization is essential for SEO

4.) Design with SEO-friendly theme

A good theme is what makes your website look appealing and functional. However, a quality theme is also very SEO-friendly. You will notice that there is a lot of emphasis on user experience here. That’s because it’s constantly increasing in importance. And more than a few factors can affect it.

Back to the point, when choosing a theme, make sure it’s responsive, fast, and regularly maintained, updated, and supported. There are numerous themes out there, and a vast majority of them are free. But, if you want an SEO-friendly theme, premium examples are your best bet.

5.) Get plugins that can help you with SEO

There are many SEO plugins for WordPress. However, one stands out – the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin allows you to optimize your website quickly, evaluate different elements, and access and customize a variety of metadata. You can get a free option, which is more than enough for most of the tasks. But, if you want to go one step further with SEO optimization, there is also a premium paid version. Overall, this is one of the essential SEO plugins every WordPress website owner should install and use.

6.) Use the right keywords

As for the keywords, we will not dive deep into explaining general knowledge. There is one specific tip you should try out in 2022 – using long-tail keywords. There is probably a lot of competition over general and ordinary keywords. And their usage and optimization, although necessary, require a lot of effort. Instead, you should try something else in 2022. And that is to try to compete for long-tail keywords and terms. Or to enhance existing keywords by transforming them into their longer counterparts.

7.) Focus on the quality of your content

As always, the focus in 2022 will remain on quality content. Continue to direct your efforts into creating and offering relevant, quality, and exceptionally useful content to your viewers. If visitors don’t benefit from it, search engines will detect that.

8.) Carefully build your link profile

Maintain your efforts to get high-quality backlinks for your website. It’s one of the strongest ranking factors, especially if they are naturally acquired backlinks. Also, interconnect the pages on your website carefully and improve engagement with internal links.

9.) Build your social media presence

Last but not least – pay attention to social media. A lot of turbulence has been occurring with social media networks lately. This is one of the reasons you can expect changes soon. Don’t fail to maintain your social media presence, and be ready to utilize new channels as they appear.

The globe enveloped in buildings and social media icons.
Keep a close eye on social media networks and maintain your profiles in relevant places

Overall, SEO is probably one of the most effective marketing strategies. It’s constantly evolving, allowing us to always try something new. Some older strategies are slowly diminishing into forgetfulness, while others emerge and wait for us to try them out. Everything that can help you improve valuable ranking positions in search engines is very well worth trying. Use these WordPress SEO tips for 2022 to enhance your SEO and be ready if changes happen.

Meta description: Learn which WordPress SEO tips you should focus on in 2022 to keep your digital marketing efforts on the right track.

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author avatar
Christine Penchuk Founder
Owner of Search Strategy Marketing