Many dealerships use WordPress.
There are lots of premade themes available that look great or you can have a custom website designed for you that still uses WordPress’s content management system.
Is one the easiest and most search engine optimization friendly platforms that has ever been created.
It also comes along with a huge number of built in tools and features that ensure that you get the most out of your optimization efforts.
But are you actually utilizing those features and tools?
If your website is in WordPress, here are ten tactics you need to use right now.
1. Use the plain English URL generation feature.
URLs that are easy to remember or, at the very least, make sense when you read them, are far better for SEO than the nonsensical URLs that are generated when you post something.
You can generate your own plain English URLs that use no strange character and, instead, include a keyword.
While it is important for your URLs to contain a keyword, you’ll also just look more legitimate if your URLs can actually be read and reflect the content of the website that your readers are viewing.
2. Switch over to AMP HTML and JS.
If you are still using plain old HTML and JavaScript, it’s time to make the switch to Accelerated Mobile Pages HTML and JS.
This make your webpages load much, much faster, especially on mobile devices, where a slow loading webpage can mean an extremely high bounce rate and, therefore, a much lower ranking than your website actually deserves.
This actually makes the pages lighter, so they load faster and look better on the smaller screen and less powerful processing system in a mobile device.
3. Make sure your meta titles and descriptions are in place.
If you are not yet using the Yoast SEO plugin, it is probably time to install it and start using it religiously.
What does it do?
It makes sure that all of the content that you post meets the basic requirements for being search engine optimized.
Essentially, it makes sure that you have used your keywords in all of the places you should have used them, have used them the appropriate number of times, and that you have meta titles and descriptions that meet the needs of your website.
4. Add titles and alt tags to your images.
All you need to do to get this done easily is to log into your CMS, go to the admin area, and look at your Media tab.
You will see all of the images you have posted to your website and will be able to edit their data, which includes adding the titles and alt tags that are necessary to make them a function of your SEO strategy.
Make sure that, when appropriate, those titles and alt tags include the keywords that your website has been optimizing for.
5. Use a rich snippet.
What is a rich snippet?
It is something that Google uses to make sure that the results it shows its searchers actually look meaningful to those users.
This is the little bit of information including under your website’s link and before the meta description in the search results.
It draws attention to your listing and makes it far more clickable than the other options the searcher might be presented with.
6. Make sure your website is secure.
WordPress is a great platform, but it is not perfect.
It is just as susceptible to hacks and malware as any other platform.
This means that you need to install a plugin on your website that secures it.
This will improve your website’s reliability and make your website look more legitimate to the people who visit it.
7. Use a caching plugin.
If you want to decrease the amount of time that it takes for your website to load and you want to make it more user friendly, you should install a plugin on that website that actually caches it and its functions automatically.
The next time someone who has already visited your website comes back to that website, it will load faster and provide them with more a more customized experience.
8. Make sure to include social share buttons.
When appropriate (on your website’s blog, for example), you should make it very easy for readers to share what they are engaging with to their social media accounts.
There are lots of plugins that give you this capability, but look for one that loads those buttons in a staggered way, so that they do not slow down the overall load speed of your website.
9. Make sure you backup your website.
If you really want to protect your website, especially from the possibility of it being wiped from the server hosting it, you should make sure that you have a backup plugin installed on that website.
You usually have to pay a little bit of money for these plugins, but they save a copy of your website so if anything bad were ever to happen to it, you would be able to get it back online quickly.
10. Make sure your contact forms are secure.
If you are not using a CAPTCHA on your contact forms, now is the time to start.
X`You can add a very simple plugin to your website that adds CAPTCHA to any form that you create, so that bots, hackers, and spammers cannot abuse those forms.
