Important Technical SEO Considerations for WordPress Sites

This is the third part of a WordPress SEO talk I gave at WordCamp in Asheville. The first defined SEO. The second talked about measuring SEO efforts. While this is specific to WordPress, I’m sure it will help you even if you don’t use this platform. If you don’t want to read this transcript, you can watch the video.

If the first thing in SEO is measurement, the second is whether Google can crawl and index your site. And this is where we all take a moment and thank God that we’re at a WordPress conference, where Google has a really easy time with WordPress sites.

Allow Googlebot to Crawl Your Site

Except if you don’t allow them to view your site. This button, you know how much money I’ve made from audits? From well-meaning developers who forgot to uncheck that when I launch a site? Yes, you can prevent me from making money by making sure you are not discouraging search engines from indexing the site. The checkbox says it’s up to search engines to honor this request. I’ll tell you what, Google definitely honors that request. It can be the robots.txt, too. I know somebody who accidentally forgot to remove the robots exclusion from the robots.txt, and launched the site: traffic drops. “Oh, my gosh, what happened? Oh, oops, I forgot to update the robot.” Google listens to that. That’s really probably the biggest crawlability problem on a WordPress site. Because we’re still using a server-side language, Google can easily understand WordPress.

SEO is Mobile-First

But we have to consider mobile when we’re building sites today. I mean, this is old news for you. I think most of you know this. As of two months ago, Google has been using a mobile-first algorithm. So that means when Google evaluates websites for ranking, it looks at the mobile site first. If you have a poor mobile experience, you will never rank in desktop search results, because Google pulls from a mobile-first perspective. Now, this means we do not just need responsive websites. What this means is we have to change the way we think about designing a site. We should build the mobile site first and build up to the desktop site. Usually, we say, “Here’s the beautiful desktop site and here is the mobile.” But if we change the way we think and we take mobile first and we build up, this will affect a lot of things that will benefit you from a mobile perspective. So, start by thinking mobile-first, even as you’re designing. Some of your clients won’t get it. Explain it to them. Most traffic from Google is mobile across almost every industry. Don’t make mobile an afterthought. Don’t take a desktop site, crack it, break it down, and make it mobile. Think mobile first.

Google has a wonderful tool. The mobile-friendly test. Is this page mobile-friendly? Yes or no. Test, throw this in every URL. This is a URL by URL basis, so you’d have to test. What I do is, when I use WordPress, I will test an example or two of every page generated by every template file. Just throw it in. Yes or no, mobile-friendly or not. And if it’s not, it’ll tell you what the problems are. It’s pretty simple. On a more scalable fashion, thankfully, because you’ve installed Google Search Console. Under search traffic, mobile usability. I’m not [mobile friendly] (you know, the cobbler’s kids got no shoes). I have seven mobile usability errors on my site, right? This is a little more scalable way of looking at the problem. And it tells you more. On some pages, I have content that extends beyond the screen, and some of my clickable elements are too close together—good, more data. Measure first, figure out what’s better second. Use these tools to decide whether or not you need to make mobile improvements.

Page Speed is Important for SEO

While we’re talking about mobile, we can’t help but talk about speed. As of last month, Google is not only evaluating our mobile site to decide how to treat it; it is also measuring our desktop searches based on the mobile speed of our sites. That’s why we should start with a mobile-first design perspective: we are adding features for desktop rather than removing them. That will help your site load faster. According to Google, you have three seconds. That’s it. Most people aren’t gonna wait more than 3 seconds to view a page. You’ve got 50 requests and 500 kilobytes per page. That might mean some things need to be cut. That might not be a bad thing. You know, clients have to have this and have to have that, and this department has to be satisfied, and this division, and, God forbid, the CEO gets involved. That’s rough. But it’s doable, because we have to cut.

I just took Google’s mobile dev certification, which I highly recommend. One of the big points they make there is that the first element loaded is the one you didn’t add to your page, right? Yeah. And sometimes the best thing to do is say, “no”. “Listen, you won’t benefit from that extra slider. Ain’t nobody waiting for 17 slides at 10,000 pixels per image. Nobody’s waiting for you. You can have the most beautiful page, but no one’s gonna wait to view it. So, let’s cut things down.” Make it as fast as possible, not only for SEO, but for all of our marketing channels. [For example,] Email marketing: most emails are consumed on your mobile device. If your call to action is to go to your site, ain’t nobody’s gonna wait longer than three seconds for that page to load. So, you just wasted your money on your email. God forbid you pay for a search. It is a worthwhile investment to improve your page speed. Hour by hour, the biggest improvement you can make to any of your marketing efforts is to make your site run faster.

Google has a wonderful tool, Page Speed Insights. Again, URL by URL basis, and it will break things down by mobile or desktop speed (cobbler’s kids got no shoes, uh oh, got some work to do on my homepage). If we all ran our own site, let’s admit none of us would, right? But what I like about this tool is that it takes time out of the equation. Time is a function of how good the connections are, you know, I got Giga Fiber at home. I’m fast. If I judge based on how it feels like things are loading, I’m not getting an objective analysis. This is a score between 0 and 100. I’ve seen a score of 6 once (that’s where that 17-page slider of 10,000 pixels [example] came from). It will tell you what you need to do to improve your page. Now, this is on a page-by-page basis, again. With a WordPress site, I go through a couple of examples of every template file as rendered and review how these page speeds are.

Thankfully, you’ve installed Google Analytics. If you go into behavior > site speed suggestions, here is a list of your page speed scores in one nice, friendly place for you to begin improving. Nice. Now, it’s a little more scalable problem. The nice thing about this process of pulling this report is that now my contact page here is the worst. 77 ain’t too bad (but I’m just saying it’s not too bad because I’m speaking to you guys about page speed; I need to work on it). But I bet you if I improve the 77 on my contact page, I will accidentally improve all the other pages, as things work. Start at the bottom, work your way up. I was working really hard this week to finish off my recertification (it expired on Monday, but I wanted to get it all done for you guys). Google’s Academy has a lot of great stuff, and its mobile site certification is especially strong. I am not a real developer, but you will get much more out of it than I did. It is well worth your time. They spend so much time talking about page speed improvements and what you can do. Please discuss how to use Chrome Developer Tools to pinpoint where your problems are. Worth your time if you’re building sites. So highly recommended.

You Can’t SEO a Hacked Website

When talking about crawlability and indexing, make sure your site can be updated. I know some clients have to have this or that, and you end up cracking the heck out of WordPress to accommodate their ultra-demanding needs. We all know that if we can’t update WordPress, we’re leaving big security holes. And Google will remove websites from the index if it believes they’ve been hacked. And the reinstatement process is not fun. It is actually, I think, harder than when you get banned for doing beta SEO. Google has recently started hiring an entire team to manage reconsideration requests from hacked websites. Please make sure your sites can be updated. Maybe that means you don’t use WordPress. Did I say that out loud? I mean, I love WordPress. But it might not be the solution if your client requires certain things in specific ways. and you end up cracking open WordPress to the point where it can’t be updated. So that might be a better solution for them. Or maybe they need to realize that what they’re asking is totally not worth it, which is probably the case most of the time. But yeah, can’t do SEO on a hacked website.

Next: What WordPress Developers Need to Know About Content and SEO