Hacking Your Way to 5x Higher Organic Click-Through Rates (and Better Conversion Rates & Rankings, too)

Posted by larry.kim

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

Last month we discussed why organic CTR is kind of a big deal. I believe that click-through rate is tremendously valuable and that achieving above-average CTRs can lead to better rankings, particularly on long tail queries.

But even if you don't believe click-through rate can impact rankings, optimizing for a higher CTR still means you're optimizing toward the goal of attracting more clicks. More clicks means more traffic and higher conversion rates — because if you can make people more worked up about your product/solution, that carries through to conversions, leads, and sales.

All great, important things!

So what the heck — why isn't every SEO obsessed with raising organic click-through rates like myself and many other PPC marketers are?

Why isn't CTR optimization a bigger deal in organic search today?

For starters, it's ridiculously hard to tell what your organic CTR is for a keyword. Thanks, Google.

In the Search Analytics section of the Search Console, Google only gives you a sampling of 1,000 queries. Because you only have access to a sample of keywords, you can't arbitrarily find out a CTR for any individual keywords.

It's much easier to find our your CTR in paid search with AdWords. You can type in any word and find out what your CTR is for that word.

Another challenge preventing CTR from being a bigger deal today is Google Analytics, which hasn't provided keywords to us for years. You can figure out the number of impressions and clicks for your top 1,000 pages, but the limited query data (1 percent of total) is a killer. It might be easy to see your CTR data, but it's hard to know whether what you can see is good or not.

Also, many people just don't realize how much leverage there is in increasing CTR. Donkey headlines (bottom 10%) tend to do around 3x worse than average, whereas unicorn headlines (top 10%) tend to do around 2x better than average. By converting donkeys to unicorns, you might not realize that by boosting your CTR could increase clicks to your site by 5x.

And one final important point (and yet another reason to kill your donkeys!): low CTRs typically also lead to low conversion rates — this is true for both organic and paid search. You can easily test this out yourself by analyzing your own website data.

Conversion Rate vs. CTR for one of my customers.

Introducing Larry's High CTR Pyramid Scheme

Let's look at a graph that shows the click-through rate by rank for my 1,000 keywords obtained through Google Search Console:

The blue curve shows the CTRs on average for any given spot for all keywords. But that's an average. An average includes all the top performers (unicorns) as well as the worst performers (donkeys).

There is considerable variance here.

• The top 10 percent (the unicorns) have CTRs that are more than double the average (~55 percent vs. ~27 percent in first position).
• The bottom 10 percent (the donkeys) have organic CTRs that are three times lower than average (~27 percent vs. ~8 percent in first position).

This is such a great opportunity. But it's hard to realize just how great your CTR can be.

You can increase clicks by as much as 5x or even 6x by identifying your crappiest keyword donkeys and making them into high CTR headline unicorns, rather than stupid "optimized" title tag formulas — like:

Main Keyword, Long-Tail Keyword Variation 1, Long-Tail Keyword Variation 2.

This is a title tag optimization formula from ancient times — we're talking B.H. (Before Hummingbird). This is no longer necessary because Google is now much better at inferring query intent.

Welcome to the new world. To help you adapt, I’ve developed a repeatable SEO workflow to turn your donkeys into unicorns.

Behold! It's Larry's High CTR Pyramid Scheme! Here's how it works.

Detecting your donkeys

This whole process starts by finding your underperforming content donkeys using another of my hacks — Larry's Donkey Detection Algorithm. Download all of your query data from the Search Console or Google Analytics. Next, graph CTR vs. Average Position for the queries you rank for organically and add a trend line, like this:

The red line here is your average click through rate.

You want to focus ONLY on the keywords at very bottom of your curve. You don't want to turn any of your unicorns into donkeys. You only want to turn your donkeys into unicorns!

Now you can sort by secondary metrics, such as conversion rates, if that's what you care most about. Which of those donkeys have the highest conversion rates? Focus on these first because when you're able to turn that page into a traffic unicorn, it will also convert more!

If you care most about engagement, then you can filter by that metric. If you can improve the CTR of this page, then you can be reasonably confident that more people will engage with your content.

Your content is a diamond in the rough — or a great book with a terrible cover. Now is the time to polish your diamond and help it become exceptional.

Warning: Don't go crazy reoptimizing your title

Image courtesy of Fox

This is important. You shouldn't change the title tag over and over every week because this will cause problems in your quest for a magical cure to your donkey blues.

For one, Google will think your title is being dynamically populated. For another, you're just guessing, which is probably why you have this CTR issue.

Also, multiple changes will make it hard to get a good reading on why the CTR changed. Is it due to the title tag change or is it something else entirely (a SERP change, a competitor change, seasonality, etc.)? If you keep changing it, you won't have enough statistically significant data to make a data-driven decision.

Additionally, your ranking position could change, which would also further screw up things.

Bottom line: Don't just go and change titles willy-nilly.

We can make a unicorn — we have the technology!

To improve your organic click-through rate, you'll need to collect some data. You can do this by creating ads on Google AdWords for no more than $50.

You're going to create an ad pointing to the page you're reoptimizing using 10 different headlines. The reason you need 10 headlines is so you can discover your statistical unicorn, the headline with a CTR that stands above the rest in the top 10 percent.

Think of it like a lottery where the odds of winning are 1 in 10. Your odds of winning are much greater if you buy 10 lottery tickets instead of just one, right?

You can absolutely create more headlines; 10 is just the minimum. If you really want to do this well, writing 12, 13, or 14 headlines dramatically increases the odds that you'll find a unicorn.

Don't half-ass your new headlines

Image courtesy of Fox

I can't stress this enough: You really have to try out different headlines. It can't be the same headline, just with insignificant little changes (e.g., commas in different places, different punctuation, upper case vs. lower case).

Pop quiz: How many headlines do you count here?

• 1. How to Write a Book Fast
• 2. How to Write a Book FAST
• 3. How to Write a Book…FAST
• 4. How To Write A Book...Fast!
• 5. How to write a book, fast.

Did you say 5?

WRONG!

No, the answer is 1.

These aren't different headlines. They're just different punctuations and capitalizations.

You have to REALLY change the headlines.

Write your headlines using different personas. Who is the person speaking to the reader? Is it the bearer of bad news? The hero? The villain? The comedian? The feel-good friend?

Also change emotional trigger in your headlines. You can use emotional drivers like amusement, surprise, happiness, hope, or excitement:

Source: Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

Other emotions include anger, disgust, affirmation, and fear. All four of these can become huge winners.

Vary your headlines. Get super creative!

What keywords should you choose?

Add the keywords that you were hoping to appear for when you created the content, along with keywords you're currently ranking for using query data from Google Analytics. Set those keywords to the broad match keyword match type.

Broad match is the default keyword match type and reaches the widest audience. It makes your ad eligible to appear whenever a user’s search query includes any word in your key phrase, in any order, and any syllables.

For example, if you use broad match on "luxury car," your ad might be displayed if a user types "luxury cars," "fast cars," "luxury apartments," or even “expensive vehicles,” which doesn’t include any of the terms in your keyword. Broad match will, in a way, act like RankBrain does — testing your headlines against a diverse set of queries, including related terms.

It's a perfect keyword sample set.

10 awesome tips to help you write outstanding headlines

Ultimately, you want to think about three things when writing your ads: your target customer; the persona you want to use to speak to them; and what emotionally-charged words you can use to incite action.

Steve Rayson of BuzzSumo recently shared some great research on the five elements of viral headlines. Here's what your headlines need to have:

• Emotional Hook: This could be a certain emotional word or superlative — words like: amazing, unbelievable, shocking, disgusting, or inspiring.
• Content Type: This tells the reader exactly what your content is — is your content images, quotes, pictures, or facts?
• Topic: Think of this as your keyword — it could be something evergreen like "content marketing" or more news-oriented like a Google algorithm update or SERP test.
• Format: This sets the expectation of the format your content will be in, whether it's a listicle, quiz, ebook, or something else.
• Promise Element: The reader benefit — tell the reader why your content will solve a problem, make them smarter or better at something, or that it provides vital information they need to know.

Here are five additional tips:

• Choose your words wisely: Go either extremely positive (e.g., best, greatest, biggest) or negative (e.g., stop, avoid, don't) with your headline word choices.
• Be specific: Make it clear to the reader what your content is about.
• Be unique: Show some personality. Create content that nobody else is doing (or improve on what others have already done). Dare to be different from your competitors.
• Create a sense of urgency: What will the reader learn, lose, fail at, or miss out on it they don't click right now?
• Be useful: How does clicking on your content benefit the reader?

So let's go back to our earlier headline example, How to Write a Book Fast. Based on this advice, what are some new headlines you could test? How about:

• Write Your Book Fast: X Trusted Time-Saving Tips
• X Surprising Tricks Nobody Told You About Writing Books Fast
• How to Finish Writing Your Book 5x Faster
• Write Fast Right Now: What Published Authors Don’t Want You to Know
• X Ridiculously Easy Steps to Write Your Book Faster
• What’s the Secret of Writing Great Books Fast?
• X Inspiring Tips That Will Help You Write Your Book Faster
• This Unusual Book Writing Technique Will Make You Write Faster
• Your Book is Doomed: How I Write Way Faster Than You

Which one of these do you think would win our ad test? The answer may just surprise all of us.

How would you reoptimize this headline based on this advice? I'd love to see your ideas in the comments.

Where to run your ad

By now you may be saying, "Larry this is great, but I'm a little worried about how much this all will cost. Any suggestions to keep costs down?"

YES!

We're just targeting English speakers. So you can save money by taking advantage of countries with lower CPCs.

Rather than running ads in New York City, where CPCs would likely be very expensive, maybe you could set up your ads to appear only in Canada (which has 29 percent lower CPCs on average than the U.S.) or in Ireland (which has 40 percent lower CPCs on average).

Prepare your Unicorn Detector

Make sure to set your ads to rotate evenly. You want to ensure that all 10–14 of your ads have a chance to run.

Before analyzing your results, you'll want at least 200 impressions per ad. This is actually the number of impressions Google AdWords uses before ascertaining a quality score, but more is better.

Also, you should bid to a specific position (e.g., bid to position 3, 4, or 5) using flexible bid strategies. That way you don't have to compare CTRs where one ad had a CTR of 20% in position 1 but a 2% CTR in position 8.

Now you can analyze your results and see which headline had the best CTR. Pretty easy, huh?

Usually one of your 10 ads will be a unicorn. However, if all the CTRs turn out the same (e.g., 2% vs. 2.1%) throw them all out and try out more headlines.

Your goal is to find an outlier, a headline that generates 2x, 3x, or 4x higher CTR than the rest.

Did it work?

Now we've reached the end. We've identified the donkeys. We have a workflow for auditioning new possible headlines. And we've identified the winning headlines. Now what?

You just swap them out. Replace your donkey title with the winning unicorn headline from your PPC ad test, and put it live.

To determine whether you've succeeded, track the number of clicks to the page to ensure that your CTR has indeed increased.

This is a ridiculously easy, low-risk, high-return strategy with a high probability of success because the new headline is battl- tested and should do just as well organically.

Conclusion: Say no to low CTR

Guys, this is crazy. First of all, think about all the SEO tasks you have to do. None of that is easy. It's all manual work.

Just take link building as one example. You're hoping for other people to link to you to help you rank better. In the end it's very much a hit-or-miss approach to SEO because you have no control over whether you actually get the link (or if it will even help).

Also, link building is more of an art, and one that some people just don't have the skills to do properly. Plus, when done poorly, bad link building can kill your rankings.

Here, the workflow — my High CTR Pyramid Scheme — is all within your own control. This is more like on-page SEO, changing titles and text, but this is a more methodical, data-driven way of doing it.

Optimizing for CTR is very leveraged. You can 5x your CTR if you're successful in turning a donkey into a unicorn. There's even more bonus points because it should result in ever better rankings, which should result in even more clicks. And your conversion rates will improve.

I personally believe that CTR is calculated both at a query/page and at the domain level (like domain and page authority in link building). Since we can't have CTR data for every possible page/query, it makes sense to have something to fall back on. So by killing off your CTR donkeys, you're improving your domain CTR score, which should help rankings of all the other pages on your site.

There's a famous Abraham Lincoln quote: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

Well, if I had one hour to spend on SEO, I would spend that one hour finding and fixing my donkey headlines, turning them into unicorn headlines. Hour for hour, I'm convinced you have a really great return here.

Your odds of winning the organic CTR lottery are 1 in 10. So go buy 10 lottery tickets!

Are you optimizing for CTR? If not, why?

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New Mobile Friendly Test from Google Search Console

Google is testing a brand new mobile friendly testing tool.  Dan Shure from EvolvingSEO was the first to spot the test, which seems to be added as part of a transition to new /search-console/ URLs in the search.google.com subdomain.  He shared these screenshots with TheSEMPost, showing the new design and features.

Here is what the new design looks like:

And here is how it currently looks for those not seeing the new style.

The blocked resources section is much more comprehensive, and now includes the full URL instead of the truncated version.  It still shows third party resources from common third parties, such as Facebook.

Here is how the blocked resources section looks now:

Here is the current version, with much less information for each URL:

When you click on the “Next steps” expander, it sends you to Google’s webmaster help forums.

For the curious, it does sent you through a few redirects.

For sites that are not mobile friendly, they have made it a bit more clearer to fix the issues:

Here is the older version without the “learn how to fix these errors” call to action:

 

It does seem to trigger the Google CAPTCHA when you run the test a few times (similar to the submit URL CAPTCHA Google recently added), including one with the image verification.

Also new is a link to a site-wide mobile usability report.  However, this just leads to the usual mobile usability page in Search Console.  Note that this isn’t anything to do with the mobile-friendly ranking boost going site-wide… that boost and tag in the search results is still on a page by page basis.

Dan also notes that it seems to run a bit slower than the previous version of the tool though.

Dan Shure also shared a video of clicking around the new mobile friendly tool.

Google has been heavily promoting mobile for the past couple of years, and Google is expected to give an additional ranking boost for mobile friendly search results this month.

The post New Mobile Friendly Test from Google Search Console appeared first on The SEM Post.

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Google Search Console Transitioning to New /Search-Console/ URLs

Google might finally be transitioning Google Search Console away from the /webmasters/ directory to /search-console/, to match their name change from Google Webmaster Tools last year.

Dan Shure, while running some mobile friendly tests, came across a link to the new mobile friendly tester, which was under http://ift.tt/1Z2PRiG rather than http://ift.tt/136dOuK

Here is his screenshot showing the new URL:

To access the new tool, he followed a help link to check a live version of the page.

And here is the new redesign for the  test.

It is unclear if it is rolling out slowly or if it is US only. But others are reporting the new URL structure as well, although not access to the new mobile friendly test.

Here is what I and some others are seeing, which makes me wonder if it is US only to start.

The post Google Search Console Transitioning to New /Search-Console/ URLs appeared first on The SEM Post.

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Drive Sales With These 12 PPC Remarketing Tactics

Display remarketing (also called retargeting) is a powerful marketing tactic but can end up being a bit of an afterthought. The methods to drive performance on this channel are quite different from search so here I want to lay out some great tips to help you shape remarketing performance towards your ends.

How it works

Briefly, in case you’re not clear on the basics, remarketing is based on collecting lists of users (you actually form a master list in the background and then subdivide it) who visit your website from any and every source. These users are known as an “audience list” and can be directly targeted for text and banner display ads across the ad network. In this instance, I will concentrate on Google Display Network but there are many platforms you could use to display on multiple networks at once using the same principle.

1. Visitor recency

To subdivide your audience based on how recently they visited, you use the “membership duration” variable to create custom lists. You would want to create different lists for people who have purchased and whom you want to encourage to repeat buy and for those who have yet to purchase.

To create the right segments of the audience for your website, you’ll want to look at how long it takes users to convert from last visit and at what point sales drop off. So you may find that users who visited 3 weeks ago no longer buy if they haven’t already. In which case, there’s little value in remarketing for people who visited 6 weeks ago. But if you find users convert within 24 hours of the last visit quite often, you may want to remarket heavily to recent visitors to increase the rate of conversion you have seen in the data. Ride the wave, so to speak.

Some of this data can be gleaned from the cohort analysis in Google Analytics.

Remember that to target users who visited 1 day ago separately from those who visited 2 days ago, you need to exclude the audience list containing the 1 day users in the 2 day list. Often, when you create a list, you’re using other lists to exclude users so as to correctly target the people you intend.

2. Incentives to return

Dreaming up some offers or specials that you put in the ad messaging aimed at returning visitors could be a great way to boost quality traffic coming back through remarketing ads.

3. Up-sell

If a user has purchased and there are options to upgrade to buy additional related items, remarket with this message to such a user. The Lifetime Value of a user should increase and at a more rapid pace.

4. Test ads

Just because they are not first-time visitors doesn’t mean they saw your ads before but, in any case, any advertising should be tested for effectiveness. This can only be done with A/B testing formats and you should evolve your ads constantly like with any digital marketing.

5. Different ads for weekends vs weekdays

Test the use of ads running for weekends only and for weekdays only so as to seem more real-time and to stand out. Remember, these are display ads and are not meeting a burning need expressed in a search in the moment but simply accompanying a user as they browse the web. Catching the eye is the name of the game here.

6. Low efficiency? Try reducing impression frequency

Display ads can be made more efficient in a number of ways but one you may not immediately think about is limiting the number of times a user may see an ad (or ad group). This is known as Frequency Capping and is a way of limiting your exposure to any single user by setting limits on the number of impressions an ad, ad group or campaign is shown to a user. If you’re finding low conversion rates but decent CTR, you could try reducing (or creating) the frequency capping. This basically means you may reduce your CPA. It is a case, however, of feeling your way to the appropriate frequency cap, being led by the data.

7. Customize frequency cap to user value

Split users that have abandoned a cart from those who never put anything in the cart so that you have separate ad groups or campaigns for these two constituencies. You would want to show more often (using frequency capping) to the former user than the latter. You could further extend this structure to the high value product shoppers over the lower value product shopper.

8. Suggest freshness in the ad messaging

If you can’t offer special discounts for coming back, or some other incentive, try at least implying there may be something new to see if a user returns. Something like “see our latest deals” or “check out today’s prices” or “newest range in stock now” doesn’t promise anything specific but does sound like there’s something exciting to see that they may not have seen last time they visited the site.

9. Leverage repeatability

If you sell annual insurance or a product that lasts a certain amount of time on average (such as vitamins or office supplies) you can start remarketing around the purchase anniversary or the time when the customer should start to need to re-up. Some sites have automatic shipping options but even these sites can benefit from this tactic by excluding from the remarketing audience the people who have setup the automatic shipping option.

10. Day parting

Even on remarketing, you may find some hotspots in the week or the day that should be where you concentrate your spend. Review data carefully as some products may have different patterns to others. This will allow you to structure your campaigns better and set custom scheduling (including bid scheduling) for your ads.

11. Exclude users carefully

You should look at eliminating people who bounced from your site or spent no real time on it. These are low value users and you will want to focus budget on those users who demonstrated engagement.

12. Structure by ad size

This may seem like overkill but it’s very important because it allows you to bid differently for each ad size and track performance for each creative more easily. Some ad sizes cost more to gain impressions than others due to the volume of screen real estate used or how prominently website publishers tend to display them on their sites. This can distort spend patterns if all ads are together in an ad group because one ad can suck all the budget away (normally the cheapest). With display ads, if certain sizes are more expensive in an auction, this is an indication that they are the most valuable to advertisers. Therefore, you don’t want to give over too much budget to the relatively lower quality traffic received from the cheaper ads.

Hopefully, these tips will give you plenty to evaluate and some ideas of how to enhance your own remarketing efforts. Do you have any other killer remarketing tips you’d like to share? Feel free to comment below!

The post Drive Sales With These 12 PPC Remarketing Tactics appeared first on The SEM Post.

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Google Adds Translations of Short Queries to Search Results

Google is now doing simple translations directly into the search results.  Now, if you type a query in a non-English language, Google will now show a Google Translate box right at the top of the search results.

Here is what it looks like:

If the query has multiple means, you can expand the box to see more.

Google Operating System blog was the first to notice to addition.

It only seems to work on short 1-2 word queries.  Longer queries just show the regular search results without the addition of the translate box.

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The Start-to-Finish Guide to Optimizing Your WordPress Blog Posts [Plus a Checklist]

Posted by sergeystefoglo

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. There's a good chance you'll need to optimize or work on a website that uses WordPress, if you haven’t already! Whether you’re a business owner, designer, developer, PPC expert, SEO consultant, or writer — getting familiar with WordPress is a smart move.

When I started out in SEO, I worked with local businesses that hired smaller firms to design or develop their sites. Naturally, most people gravitated towards WordPress as their CMS of choice: it was easy to customize, even easier to maintain, simple to use, and did the job well.

It wasn’t until I started working with websites that were using Joomla or Drupal that I began to appreciate the simplicity and flexibility that WordPress offers. Don’t get me wrong, Joomla and Drupal are both great, but they require a lot more setup and learning beforehand (especially if your goal is to optimize the site for organic search).

What this post is about

This post is going to walk through the process of uploading and optimizing a blog post using WordPress and Yoast SEO. I'll go into detail on both of these topics and provide you with a downloadable checklist that you can give to your team or use yourself.

Before we get started

Yoast SEO

While it’s true that there are a variety of SEO plugins available for WordPress, I prefer Yoast SEO and will be referencing it as an essential plugin for this post. If you don’t currently have Yoast installed, you can visit their website to download it or simply search for “Yoast SEO” in Wordpress and install it directly.

Pages and posts

WordPress has two basic sections for uploading content. There are pages (which are defined as landing pages on your website), and there are posts (which are essentially blog posts). One could argue that this article could be used as a guide to uploading and optimizing landing pages on WordPress, but I believe there's a different approach for that and therefore will keep the focus of this article around posts.

Uploading your blog post

Before you get to optimizing your blog posts for organic search, you need to get them live on your site. If you're familiar with how posting a blog works on WordPress, feel free to skip ahead to the optimization section of this article.

1. After logging into your site, hover over “Posts” and then click on “Add New.”

2. Copy and paste the title of your post where it says "Enter title here," then paste the body text of your post in the section below (don’t copy over images yet).

Pro Tip: I personally write all of my blog posts in a separate program (like Word or Ulysses) and then copy over the text into WordPress when I’m ready to post it. You can definitely write your blog within WordPress and save it as a draft if you aren’t ready to publish it, but if you like having a local copy of your writing I'd recommend simply writing it in a different program.

Pro Tip: You can alternate between the “visual” and “text” editor here. If you're familiar with HTML, I'd recommend “text," as you can spot any potential errors in the code and have more control. If not, the “visual” editor works perfectly fine.

Pro Tip: If you have links in your post (which you should), double check that they were added correctly. If not, you can add a link using the WYSIWYG editor. In general, try to at least have 3 relevant internal links in each of your posts. Don’t be afraid of adding external links, either! The important thing to remember is that if the reader will find it useful, it's okay to add it.

3. If you have images, place your cursor where you want the image. Click on “Add Media” and select “Upload Files.” After choosing your preferred settings, click “insert into post” to add your image in your article.

Note: There are various settings and options for sizing and aligning images. Please see this write up for a more detailed explanation of how images and featured images work in WordPress.

Pro Tip: It’s always a good idea to compress your images before uploading them so they don’t cause long load times. Here’s a great guide to compressing your images.

4. Scroll down a bit and you should see the “Categories” section on the right side of your screen. You don’t have to categorize your post (unless your site is organized by categories), but you can add one if you wish. If you do, WordPress will create category pages that pull in posts within that category. Here's a great write-up on how WordPress utilizes category pages and what you should consider from an SEO perspective.

5. Under the "Categories" section, you'll see the tags section. Similar to categories, you don’t have to use tags. In fact, I would argue that you should always noindex tagged pages that are auto-generated by WordPress, as oftentimes it can cause duplication issues. Nonetheless, you can add tags to your post here.

6. If you scroll down further you'll see an “Author” section, where you can choose the author of your blog post.

7. Scroll back up and find the section that’s called “Publish.” Here you can choose “Preview” to make sure everything looks right in your post before optimizing/uploading it. If something doesn’t look the way you want it to, just edit that section.

8. If you want a snippet of your post to appear on your blog homepage instead of the entire thing, simply place your cursor where you want the break to be and click on the “Insert Read More tag” button. Read this post that explains the “Read More” tag and its function in WordPress.

This should get you to a point where you're ready to optimize your blog — let’s focus on this next.

Optimizing your blog post

Getting down the foundational elements of uploading a blog post on WordPress is crucial, but we are marketers, aren’t we? This section breaks down what you (or your team) should be doing to optimize a post on WordPress as best as possible. My goal with creating the checklist at the bottom of this article is so that you and your team can reference it when uploading posts. Pretty soon it'll become second nature!

1. Assuming you’re still on the “Edit Post” page, scroll down until you see a section titled “Yoast SEO.”

Pro Tip: If you don’t see this section, make sure you have the correct plugin installed. If you do and still don’t see this section, scroll up to the very top right of the screen and click on “Screen Options.” From here, make sure that “Wordpress SEO by Yoast” is checked.

2. Click on “Edit Snippet” in the Yoast SEO section. The “SEO title” box will be where you input your title tag.

Pro Tip: In general, you want to include your main keyword first followed by your brand name or website name. Also, make sure that you stay within 40–65 characters here.

3. You guessed it — the “Meta description” box is where you'll input your meta description.

Pro Tip: Although not necessary, including your main keyword in the meta description can be a great idea if it flows well with your content. Google has explicitly mentioned that meta descriptions aren’t important to search engine rankings, but that doesn’t mean using a keyword won’t help users click on your post. Because of this, try to make your meta description as enticing as possible to a potential user. Why should they click on your blog post instead of the other options available in the SERP? Also, as a general rule, stay within 70–156 characters here.

4. A new addition to Yoast SEO (although not WordPress), the “Slug” section allows you to edit the URL of your post. By default, WordPress will add the title of your post to the URL (which isn’t a bad way to go), but if you want to alter it this is where you can.

Pro Tip: There are “standard practice” tips for URL optimization that don’t necessarily affect your rankings, but solidify what your post is about to users and search engines. These standard practice tips include keeping your URL short, including a keyword if possible, and having the URL make obvious what the post is about. Here is a great write up from Rand on URL optimization.

5. If you click on the gear icon tab within the Yoast SEO section, you'll notice options for things like meta robots and the canonical URL. In most cases, these settings will already be set on a global scale; however, you can override your global settings for specific posts here.

6. If you click on the "Share" icon, you can override the default metadata (titles, images, etc.) that Facebook and Twitter will pull for your post. In general, you can leave these blank. However, if you have a good reason to override them (testing different images, optimizing for various target audiences, etc.) this is where you can.

7. We’ve covered a lot of important on-page elements so far, but one we haven’t covered is the <h1> tag. This tag is crucial for telling search engines what your page is about. In most cases, your title will automatically be an <h1> tag.

Pro Tip: I see a lot of sites who have multiple <h1> tags on a page, as well as many sites who have duplicate <h1> tags across the site. Often times, the logo or phone number can be wrapped in an <h1> tag. Make sure to double check that you have one <h1> tag for every page, and make sure that these tags are all unique.

8.A dding alt tags to images is fairly simple with Wordpress. There are various ways to do this, but it all comes down to whether you’re using the visual editor or the text editor.

Visual: Click on the image you want to add alt text to, and click on the “Edit” icon. Add your alt text in the “Alternative Text” field. Make sure to click on “Update” after.

Text: Simply add the alt=“” snippet of code inside the image tag. It should look something like this:

<img src="http://ift.tt/1Nhlbtk" alt="keyword goes here">

In general, alt tags should describe the photo. So, if I was writing a blog post about central vacuum systems and I had an image of a man using a central vacuum system, the ideal alt tag would be “Man Using Central Vacuum System” or “Man Cleaning With Central Vacuum System.”

9. It’s important to take a look at your internal links within your post. Are they topically relevant? Try to include at least 3–4 links that point to your internal pages and don’t be scared to throw in good external links as well.

10. Does your post have a clear CTA? Oftentimes this can be a “Read more posts like this” callout or a “Sign up for our newsletter” button; however, it could also look like a “buy now” CTA for sites that write about products.

11. After following the above steps, take a second glance at everything before hitting “publish.” If you publish your post and realize that something doesn’t look right later on, just head back to the editor, make your changes, and click “update.”

Extras

Optimization checklist

As promised, please download and distribute this checklist as you please. My hope is that after going through it multiple times, posting and optimizing your blog posts on WordPress will come as second nature to you (or your team).

I want the checklist!

3 more essential WordPress plugins for marketers

1. Broken Link Checker – Essential plugin that monitors all of your internal links and regularly reports on where they are. Easily one of the most simple yet helpful plugins out there.
2. W3 Total Cache – This plugin helps increase the speed of your site by leveraging caching, and minifying code. Highly recommended!
3. Gravity Forms – While there are some decent options for contact form plugins on WordPress, Gravity Forms beats them all because of the customization options, continued plugin support, and add-ons..

If you’re interested, I wrote an all-around guide to using Yoast SEO on the Distilled blog earlier this year. Also, please visit the good people at Yoast, as their blog is full of great advice and tutorials.

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