{"id":42691,"date":"2017-10-18T06:00:54","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T13:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/?p=42691"},"modified":"2019-07-08T14:22:59","modified_gmt":"2019-07-08T21:22:59","slug":"wordpress-and-seo-problems-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bruceclay.com\/blog\/wordpress-and-seo-problems-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"5 More WordPress SEO Enhancements You Wish You Had \u2013 Part 2 by Bruce Clay"},"content":{"rendered":"
Read the whole series: Part 1<\/a>, Part 2, and Part 3<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Are there certain things you wish you could accomplish with your SEO<\/a> in WordPress, but the functionality is just not there? Me, too.<\/p>\n Last time I wrote about WordPress SEO enhancements<\/a>, I talked about the popularity of WordPress as a platform for some of the world\u2019s best-known websites. I also discussed the challenges that WordPress presents for doing SEO effectively, further challenged by the gap in functionality of SEO plugins out there today, even with 52,000 WordPress plugins in the marketplace.<\/p>\n So I created a list of WordPress SEO enhancements we wish we had, including:<\/p>\n At the end of the last post I asked for your vote. We wanted to know what functionality you would like to see in WordPress SEO, and here are the results:<\/p>\n Which of these WordPress enhancements do you want from an SEO plugin?<\/strong> Today, I\u2019ll outline five more WordPress SEO enhancements you wish you had and why.<\/p>\n Existing WordPress SEO plugins make recommendations for keywords based on fixed SEO best practices, rather than customized guidance per keyword. The problem with that is best practices are good to know, but experienced SEOs realize that each keyword creates its own playing field in the search engine results pages.<\/p>\n We know that content is one of the top ranking factors, and so search engines will analyze all the top pages about a topic as a population to determine what attributes they share in their content.<\/p>\n This includes things like the total word count, title tag length, meta description length, the number of times keyword is used, the reading level and other factors.<\/p>\n The search engines will evaluate a newly published web page against the top competitors for a query to see how many of those top attributes it shares before the page is ranked among them.<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it be nice if an SEO plugin could size-up the competitors and tell you, for example, how long your page needs to be before you publish? Or, how many times a given keyword should appear?<\/p>\n The gap: A plugin that evaluates the top-ranked pages for your keywords in real-time, and then gives actual recommendations for keyword usage in tags and content, even word count, based upon these competitors. Just reporting usage is easy, but recommendations is what is needed.<\/em><\/p>\n As your website ages, you add more and more content. And, more people author those pages and posts, leaving it hard to know how many times you\u2019ve written about a topic in the past at-a-glance, and how those posts are performing.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s WordPress SEO plugins don\u2019t address those challenges. For example, when choosing what keyword to focus on when creating content, it would be helpful to see:<\/p>\n There are ways to stitch this information together outside of WordPress by looking at Google Search Console and Google Analytics, but this takes time and resources away from the goal: creating more targeted content.<\/p>\n The gap: A plugin that shows how much content has been written on your site per keyword, and how each of those pages or posts are actually performing using Google Analytics data.<\/em><\/p>\n Are you able to quickly tell who the top-performing authors are on your website? Within WordPress today, you can see a list of all your pages or posts, but you can\u2019t tell which pages are your top performers and who authored those, and that can change daily or weekly.<\/p>\n In Part 1 of this series, I talked about the need to see top-performing posts and pages to influence your plan for new content:<\/p>\n When you don\u2019t know which posts are resonating in organic search, it can hinder planning for future posts and social media campaigns. You\u2019re basically flying blind.<\/p>\n Knowing which posts and topics are succeeding allows you to create more winning content. It also helps you avoid wasting time promoting content with high bounce rates or which generates little interest and little traffic to your site.<\/p>\n What you want is \u201cunicorn\u201d content \u2014 your very best, standout content. You want to be able to find your best content, amplify it, and then make more like it. You can only do this with analytics data informing you of the unicorns in the herd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But what if you could also easily see how many posts an author has on the website, and how many of those posts are top performers? Things like page views and time on page could be useful metrics to gauge this by.<\/p>\n How could an organization use this data? Let\u2019s say you\u2019re a news publisher with hundreds of contributors, and you want to incentivize authors to properly optimize their posts so they gain more traffic.<\/p>\n With access to data that shows top-performing posts per author, you can stir up some healthy competition amongst contributors, and in turn, reward those top authors with recognition or goodies.<\/p>\n The gap: A plugin that shows the top performing posts or pages per author\/contributor to the website as measured by actual visitors over a selectable period of time.<\/em><\/p>\n Google may not have an official penalty for duplicate content on your site, but when pages are too similar, the search engines filter out the \u201cduplicates\u201d from the search results. That equals less real estate for your website. If it happens a lot, your site might appear low quality. These outcomes make duplicate content an SEO concern.<\/p>\n Today, publishers can<\/em> gather data about duplicate titles and meta descriptions in Google Search Console. If you\u2019re on top of it, you\u2019ll check regularly and fix those issues \u2014 but it\u2019s easy to neglect.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why website publishers using WordPress don\u2019t have an easy way to know if they\u2019re inadvertently creating duplicate content. This can happen, for example, when someone copies an existing title tag or meta description, or if someone mistakenly publishes the same page under two different URLs. Using canonical tags can prevent the auto-generated types of URLs from being indexed as duplicates \u2014 and your SEO plugin should add a canonical tag automatically, if your settings are right \u2014 but this is no cure for the inadvertent duplication of content in newly created pages.<\/p>\n The gap: A plugin that easily notifies website publishers when there is a possibility of duplicate content, like meta information or the content on a page.<\/em><\/p>\n Reading level is just one of the many criteria that search engine algorithms may take into account when evaluating web pages against one another.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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SEO Plugin Gap No. 5: You Can\u2019t View Customized Keyword Recommendations<\/h2>\n
SEO Plugin Gap No. 6: You Can\u2019t See Content History per Keyword<\/h2>\n
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SEO Plugin Gap No. 7: You Can\u2019t Gamify Publishing<\/h2>\n
SEO Plugin Gap No. 8: You Don\u2019t Know if You Have Duplicate Content<\/h2>\n
SEO Plugin Gap No. 9: You Don\u2019t Understand Your Content\u2019s Reading Level Score<\/h2>\n