Holiday SEO: Is Your WordPress Website on the Naughty or Nice List?

by Vipe Team in WordPress SEO; Published on 16.12.2021

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With the holidays approaching, you have to prepare for the family reunion and explain what you do for a living to every curious relative. No one seems to comprehend what digital marketing is or how this could be a legitimate profession.

As you try to explain that digital marketing is a real career, kids are rushing around the house, excited for Santa Claus to arrive. After considering their actions over this year, he concluded that they deserved to be on the nice list.

However, have you considered that you may need to do the same? The holiday season is an excellent opportunity to evaluate your marketing strategies and efforts.

One of the aspects you need to give more attention to is your SEO. If you want to make sure you’ll end on Santa’s nice list, you need to consider some of your marketing practices in terms of search engine optimization. There is still enough time to amuse Father Christmas, so you better get started.

In today’s article, our WordPress development agency will take you on a Christmas journey through your marketing and SEO strategies and determine whether they deserve to be on the nice list or they are going on the naughty one.

Naughty SEO Practices of Your WordPress Website

Our WordPress development agency believes that anyone should know why they wouldn’t find a present under the tree this year or in our case – traffic to their site. Therefore, we are going to look at the naughty list and see which practices find their place there.

Broken Links

Building an internal and external linking strategy is undoubtedly one of the best practices when it comes to SEO. However, that’s only true if done properly.

Our WordPress development agency suggests you imagine this scenario: a user finds your blog, then reads one of your articles, and finds it informative and valuable. In the end, they are convinced to click on the anchor text that redirects to a link. They click and the disappointment overwhelms them: the link is broken! Now you lost a potential sale and a reader!

Having many broken links will harm your reputation in the eyes of customers and the eyes of Google. This will affect how your website ranks in the search engines and whether it reaches its target audience. Even worse: Santa wouldn’t be able to find you and give you the deserved presents.

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Duplicate Content

There is no digital marketer, website owner, or SEO strategist that will be surprised when our WordPress development agency says that content is crucial for the success of any company online. However, creating content is a process determined by many components: planning, researching, writing, editing, publishing. That’s why big businesses have whole teams dedicated to creating content.

Because of the complexity of this process, many fall into the trap of duplicating content. This can be accomplished by repurposing their content and repeating it on various pages of their WordPress website, or by stealing content from other writers and copying and pasting it into their blog. Our WordPress development agency reminds you that this can have negative consequences for your brand since you’ll lose your trustworthiness.

Furthermore, Google will get confused about which page is the primary source and may rank your less important pages higher than your desired ones. What is more, there is a risk for the famous search engine to prevent your website from ranking at all.

Keyword Stuffing

There were times when stuffing your content with keywords gave results – websites were able to rank high enough in the search engines by adding massive amounts of keywords. The texts were only optimized for the search engines and they didn’t have any reading value. The algorithms became more complicated as the Internet, SEO, and digital marketing grew in popularity. Google now rewards only high-quality content that has a proper keyword strategy.

Our WordPress development agency advises you to add the proper amount of keywords (around one in every hundred words). We also suggest you ensure you’re using the right keywords for your business. Do not aim to rank with unrealistic ones. If your industry is highly competitive, using popular keywords won’t be beneficial for your SEO. You can include competitive keywords, as long as you add diversity too.

Low Speed

It is unthinkable for a website in today’s modern world of technology to take too much time to load. If your website is slow, our WordPress development agency reminds you that it’s almost hundred percent sure you’ll be getting on the naughty list this year. One of the most important criteria in determining whether or not your website is successful is its speed.

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Slow loading increases bounce rates, affects the users’ satisfaction with the website, and results in a low ranking. When pages take too long to load, they will impact the customer experience and your SEO strategy. Ignoring this issue is improbable. Even if you feel like you don’t have control over the problem, you still need to contact the website owner to fix it.

Not Being Optimized for Mobile

There isn’t a single SEO expert who won’t end up on the naughty list if the WordPress site they manage isn’t mobile-friendly. Most users browse through their phones – to read, to watch videos, to shop. The latter makes mobile optimization crucial for eCommerce websites that aim to achieve high sales.

Apart from affecting customers’ experience, mobile optimization is a key factor for Google. The search engine ranks higher than the sites that offer mobile-friendly experiences. That’s no surprise – our WordPress development agency reminds you that half of the searches appear on phones. Getting mobile traffic is something you most definitely need to consider.

Nice SEO Practices of Your WordPress Website

Websites that have put efforts in perfecting their SEO strategy to the last detail have secured a place in Santa’s nice list. Our WordPress development agency knows that this takes a lot of struggles, dedication, and efforts, thus the gifts will be well-deserved.

Developing Quality SEO Practices

SEO is science and art – you need to understand a little bit of everything. From marketing tactics through programming languages to what interests the users, optimizing your website takes a broad knowledge and a set of diverse skills.

Our WordPress development agency knows that implementing SEO instead of paying advertisements is something many prefer because of the organic traffic. The latter is considered to be more effective since users find your website naturally and are more willing to buy a product.

Creating Valuable Content Frequently

Our WordPress development agency previously mentioned that content is crucial. Any website that wants to rank high in the search engine must create user-optimized content. That means what you deliver must be interesting, informative, and valuable for the end-users. Otherwise, it will lose its point.

Nonetheless, creating content may not be enough. Promoting and disturbing it properly is a huge part of any SEO and content marketing strategy. Readers will expect to receive content frequently. It is best to have a schedule so users know when to expect new blog posts or videos.

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Testing and analyzing

No matter how good your strategy may seem, you can’t be sure whether it gives the wanted results or not without properly analyzing how things are going. It is natural to make mistakes and successful SEO strategists are well-aware of this fact. Instead of pitying themselves, they put their efforts into bettering the strategy and try to learn from every mistake. That is something Santa Claus can’t pass.

Trying different things is also a step in the right direction – short-form and long-form content, different types of landing pages, etc. See what works for your business and your audience. What is more, our WordPress development agency would also advise you to perform frequent A/B tests to see which pages are doing better. The most convenient solution to analyze how your website is doing is the beloved Google Analytics.

Give Your WordPress Website The SEO Gift It Deserves!

We all have been told that to get on Santa’s nice list we must behave well all year long. The same goes for your SEO strategy. You need to make constant efforts to perform and optimize your strategy. Implementing proper keyword research and creating that blasting content must happen every day. If you have been neglecting your SEO all year it may be too late to get on the nice list.

However, if you have made a few mistakes only, you still have a great chance to save yourself from being naughty and receive your long-awaited Christmas gift. Our WordPress development agency knows that the dream of any website owner and SEO strategist is to attract enough traffic. By taking a strategic approach, you most definitely can make this wish come true.

If you want to give yourself one more present for the well-done job, then you can consider a brand-new website built by expert WordPress developers. Our WordPress development agency has a team of specialists that can craft for you a top-notch website. Combining it with an excellently developed SEO strategy, success will inevitably follow. We would love to hear from you!