Best Off-Page WordPress SEO Practices

WordPress SEO effort doesn’t only apply to your website. There are actions you can take outside your site to improve its rankings. This strategy is called off-page SEO. Off-page SEO helps gain more traffic to your website and build valuable links.

1. Make the Most of Your Social Media Presence

Even though social media is not a direct WordPress SEO ranking factor, it can improve your strategy in several ways:

Boosts content performance. Social media sharing exposes your content to a broader audience. When more people engage with your content, positive signals are sent to the search engines about its performance and user experience. This may help improve your SERP rankings.

Helps gain backlinks. With a wider audience, more people may discover your content and deem it valuable. This increases backlink opportunities from your social media audience.

Increases brand recognition. Social media will expose your website to diverse audiences. This also improves brand reputation, as users may check your social media profile to see the legitimacy of your business.

Improves audience engagement. Some people prefer social media profiles because they can interact with the business and see more updates.

It’s worth noting that Google indexes major social media platforms. Therefore, optimizing your social media profiles can help them rank on SERPs along with your website.

That said, using social media for SEO requires consideration and proper planning. Here are some recommended social media strategies to get you started:

Optimize your profile. Include valuable details about your website. Feature some industry-relevant keywords to increase your social media profile page’s ranking.

Share content regularly. Use compelling captions and images to attract users to your blog posts.

Install a WordPress social media plugin. Plugins make it easy for readers to share your posts on their social media profiles. Some social media plugins display the share count of a page to show a post’s popularity.

Engage your followers. Encourage interaction with polls, surveys, question-and-answer sessions, and custom hashtags.

Choose an appropriate platform to build your social media presence. The platform you choose should depend on your website’s niche.

The following social media platforms are particularly effective for boosting your site’s SEO:

• LinkedIn. The professional networking platform can help increase visibility on search results, especially when using relevant keywords.
• Twitter. This platform can help your website rank better on SERPs with more shares.
• Facebook. This social media platform makes it simple for users to share different types of content.
• Medium. The blogging platform helps you increase exposure. Medium articles can also rank on SERPs.

2. Get Unlinked Mentions

Some websites may mention your brand but don’t link to your website. These are called unlinked mentions.

Unlike nofollow external links that prevent search engines from crawling, unlinked mentions have no hyperlinks. This makes it impossible for search engines to detect them.

This is why you should add unlinked mentions to your link-building strategy. Link building is an SEO effort to get backlinks or inbound links from other websites that lead to any page on your website. These backlinks will improve your Google PageRank authority and position.

There are two main steps to transforming unlinked mentions into backlinks.

First, find unlinked mentions on other websites. You can do this with Google search’s advanced modifiers. However, this method may take more time.

Another way to find unlinked mentions is by using Ahrefs content explorer and excluding your domain name:

• Log in to Ahrefs → Content Explorer.
• Search your brand and add the modifier to exclude your website. For example, “hostinger” -site:hostinger.com
• Use the filter to narrow down the results. To get a list of quality pages, we recommend filtering pages whose Domain Rating (DR) is higher than 70 and has 50+ organic traffic per month.
• Export the results to a CSV file.

Once you get a list of URLs that mention your brand, use tools like Screaming Frog and ScrapeBox Free Link Checker to verify the results that don’t link to your website.

The second step is outreaching the website owners. However, you shouldn’t reach out to all the unlinked websites, especially the ones that mention your brand negatively.

3. Build Dofollow Links

Building dofollow links is another effective strategy link-building strategy.

Dofollow links let Google crawlers follow the links leading to your website, creating link juice. By default, most content editors apply dofollow when adding a link to any text.

Since these links are on someone else’s website, there’s little you can do to customize dofollow links to your liking. Fortunately, there are ways to obtain inbound links from other websites:

Recover broken links. If you find a broken link on other websites, it’s an excellent opportunity to offer your website as a replacement. Contact the website owner and alert them about the broken link. Then, explain why replacing the broken link with one of your pages is better.

Email outreach. Find high-authority websites and contact the owners. Ask them to link to relevant and valuable high-quality content on your website.

Write high-quality comments on other websites. If the website allows user-generated content like comments or forum threads, it’s an opportunity to insert a backlink to your website. That said, ensure the comment is helpful to other users and not spammy.

4. Write for External Publications

Writing for external publications or guest posting is another off-page method to boost WordPress SEO. This involves creating high-quality content for other websites that contain links to yours.

There are two ways guest blogging can benefit your WordPress site. First, you can build backlinks, improving your site’s authority. Guest blogging for high-authority websites lets you pass link juice to your site.

Second, you can increase the number of online mentions of your brand. As a guest blogger, you may be able to mention your brand in the content. Even if the mentions are not linked to your site, Google still gives them value.

There are best practices you should follow to successfully build links from guest posts:

• Write high-quality content. Write about a topic that the website hasn’t covered and add visual elements to make the content more engaging. However, avoid overselling your product or service.
• Monitor your posts. Use Google Analytics to see how the guest posts perform over time and if they attract more traffic to your WordPress site.
• Use your author bio to generate leads. Some websites allow contributors to add a link to their website in the author byline. To generate leads, use this opportunity to add a link to your email newsletter form.

5. Create a Newsletter

Although email newsletters don’t directly affect SEO, their benefits may help optimize your website.

By creating email newsletters, you can drive traffic to your website by notifying subscribers when new content is published. Since the subscribers are already interested in your brand, they will likely be good-quality traffic with a higher session time and lower bounce rate.

Newsletters also increase your content awareness, increasing the chances of getting backlinks.

Use WordPress plugins to help your newsletter campaign. In general, you will need two plugins – a subscription form plugin to gather subscribers and a newsletter plugin to manage and send emails.

WordPress SEO Checklist

Download our WordPress SEO checklist to keep track of all the steps and methods. The checklist also recommends how often you should perform each task for optimal website performance and rankings on SERPs.

How to Hire a WordPress SEO Professional

WordPress SEO is a long-term process that requires persistence. Performing every task on your checklist can take a lot of time. Nevertheless, SEO is essential to drive organic traffic to your site and reach your target audience.

Instead of optimizing the site yourself, you can hire a professional. A WordPress SEO expert will help analyze your website and implement the necessary changes. They can assist you with traffic, social media, and marketing optimization.

Here are a couple of reasons why you may want to hire an SEO professional:

More time for other tasks. Hiring someone will free up your time to focus on other responsibilities, such as content production and branding.

Get updates and new ideas. SEO and ranking factors are constantly changing. WordPress SEO professionals keep up with the latest developments and can bring new ideas.

The cost of hiring a WordPress SEO professional varies. Website owners may pay hourly, monthly, or per project depending on the agreement. The average rate of an SEO service is between $50-$250/hour, depending on the scope of work.

Before hiring a professional to work on your WordPress SEO, consider the following:

• Experience. Check their previous SEO work by reviewing their portfolio and success stories.
• Skills. Make sure that the SEO professional knows how to optimize a WordPress website. In addition to understanding SEO and WordPress features, they should be familiar with useful WordPress plugins.
• Testimonials. Check comments and reviews from previous clients.
• Duration. Decide how long you want to hire the WordPress SEO professional. Consider a short-term contract and extend it if you are happy with the results.

An SEO professional should be honest about their process and what they can achieve. Avoid candidates who guarantee unrealistically quick success. Remember that quality SEO takes time to build.

And before hiring an SEO expert, ask them to give you a cost rundown to avoid incurring additional charges.

We recommend looking for an SEO specialist on freelance marketplaces like Upwork or Fiverr. These platforms provide detailed information about each candidate, their hourly price, and client reviews.

Alternatively, check out social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook. This way, you might be able to hire a professional with a more flexible rate. However, it will be harder to get proper testimonials from previous clients.

You can also purchase the services of a professional agency, like WordPress SEO Experts. With an experienced team, you will be able to accomplish a lot more SEO work.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization helps improve your website’s rank on SERPs. It involves several tasks, from on-page optimization, like enhancing the user experience and creating quality content, to off-page optimization, like link building and guest posting.

In this article, we’ve discussed 30+ WordPress SEO tips. To recap, here are the highlights on how to improve SEO on a WordPress site:

Optimize website security and performance. Install an SSL certificate to protect the connection between your website and browsers. Use an SEO-friendly WordPress theme and compress images to improve website performance and user experience.

Set up the permalink structure. Customize your site’s URLs for better structure and readability. Avoid using special characters and numbers.

Submit XML sitemaps to search engines. Provide search engines with updated and accurate information to help with crawling and indexing. Use Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your site’s XML sitemap.

Utilize SEO plugins and tools. Many tools can help optimize your WordPress website. Use a WordPress SEO plugin, such as AIOSEO, Yoast SEO, or RankMath. In addition, utilize search engine tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Conduct keyword research. Search for the right queries to target in your content. We recommend long-tail keywords for new websites.

Improve user experience. Google measures the core web vitals as an indication of user experience. Better user experience also prevents website visitors from leaving your website.

Write the meta title and description. Drive more traffic by writing a unique meta title and description for every page and blog post. They must be relevant to the content.

Optimize content and media files. Include target keywords, use proper headings, and write alt text. Make sure that your content is accessible to screen readers.

Add internal and external links. Help users and search engines understand your content better. Linking your content to other local pages and trustworthy websites will pass the link juice and improve your site authority.

Optimize local SEO. Register for Google Business Profile so that it will appear on local search queries.

Build links. Obtain backlinks to your website by writing guest posts and reclaiming broken links or unlinked mentions on other websites.

Remember, yielding good results from your WordPress SEO strategy will require time and continuous effort. Hiring an SEO professional is a good alternative if you want to focus on other important business tasks.