Launching a small business website is a great way to create new leads and land customers. Once a website is launched, the next step is promoting it using search engine optimization (or SEO).
In this article, we talk about why WordPress is the best platform for SEO.
Clio Website has been helping clients launch websites since 2007. We specialize in WordPress development and offer SEO services. Contact us to get started today or jump straight to the WordPress SEO benefits section.
Table of Contents
What is SEO
According to moz.com SEO is:
“… the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid … search engine results.”
So what does this mean for you and your business? SEO is a great way to increase the digital presence and exposure of a website. It can generate new leads for your business and generate more sales.
SEO is a complex topic and includes many approaches and techniques. It consists of both organic concepts (website usability, user experience, website performance, etc) and paid advertising (like Google Ads). Use both techniques for maximum exposure and performance.
Choosing the right strategy for a small business is important so marketing dollars aren’t wasted. If you want to learn more about SEO and the services that we offer, check out our Calgary SEO article.
What is WordPress
WordPress started off as a blogging platform back in the early 2000s. Since then, it has grown to power over 40% of all websites on the internet. WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that offers various capabilities like blogging and e-commerce.
There are two ways to start a new WordPress project. Download and install the open-source version of WordPress (from wordpress.org), or create an account on wordpress.com and purchase a hosted WordPress website.
This technology is very powerful and flexible. It can be used as a web development platform or as a simple blog. A word of caution: developing websites can get complicated and overwhelming. Hire a Calgary WordPress developer if you need support.
Why WordPress is the best platform for SEO
Clio has been building websites since 2006 and helping clients rank on the first page of Google for years. These are the reasons why we feel that WordPress is the best platform for SEO:
- Availability of free tools and plugins
- Creating and maintaining sitemaps is easy
- Automating labor-intensive SEO tasks
- Easy to create and update content
- Automated image compression
- Proper HTML structure out of the box
- Responsive and mobile-friendly out of the box
- Programmatic (pSEO) benefits
Availability of free tools and plugins
WordPress has a lot of free tools and plugins that can be added to improve SEO. Using plugins can supercharge your efforts and is definitely one of the main reasons why WordPress is the best platform for SEO.
Our favorite plugins for SEO are Rank Math and Yoast. Both of these plugins are great and offer functionality like specifying unique page titles, meta descriptions, and social cards. They also enable powerful sitemaps out of the box, which helps Google and other search engines understand your website structure and pages better.
We recommend Rank Math because it has a few extra features that are included for free, which Yoast doesn’t offer. You can purchase Rank Math using this affiliate link.
Creating and maintaining sitemaps is easy
Sitemaps are a great way to help search engine bots discover and crawl your website. WordPress creates sitemaps by default, and it also updates them once your pages change or you add new ones.
SEO plugins like Rank Math, offer even more functionality and do a better job maintaining sitemaps. This is a huge advantage of WordPress because this task can be automated, and you won’t have to modify your sitemap as you create and remove pages from your website. These sitemaps can easily be added to Google Search Console for additional crawling benefits.
Automating labor-intensive SEO tasks
One of our favorite SEO strategies is creating JSON schemas to improve how search engines interpret your web pages. This can be a labor-intensive task but it can help websites rank and land rich snippets on Google.
SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast, create schemas by default for certain pages and sections. All clients need to do is focus on creating content, and the SEO plugins take care of the rest. On a traditional non-WordPress website, a developer would need to create schemas manually for each page / section.
Easy to create and update content
WordPress makes it very easy to create and update content which is another huge SEO benefit. Clients can create and update content on their own, without a need for a developer. Since search engines love new and fresh content, which is a major benefit of not just WordPress, but any CMS system over a traditional static website.
Automated image compression
Image compression plays a huge role in customer experience which can impact bounce rates and hurt SEO efforts if not done correctly. If images take a long time to load, website users will quickly hit the back button.
Properly tuned and compressed images can help with user retention and increase website load speed, both of which are important for SEO. WordPress plugins such as Short Pixel can take the guesswork out of this task and automate image compression, ensuring that websites load quickly.
To learn more about image compression, visit or buy Short Pixel using our affiliate link.
Proper HTML structure out of the box
WordPress creates HTML pages that are easily understood and crawled by search engines, out of the box. Clients don’t have to worry whether or not, their developer used sound coding practices in order to create their website.
Even though WordPress is mostly developed using PHP, pages are rendered into HTML. This means that the bots can easily crawl and understand pages, unlike some JavaScript frameworks that are used to develop websites.
Responsive and mobile-friendly out of the box
Mobile visits amount to almost 50% of all traffic. Websites must perform well on mobile in order to rank on Google.
The good news is that WordPress is responsive and mobile-friendly out of the box which search engines love and often reward.
Programmatic (pSEO) Benefits
Programmatic SEO is all about creating content at scale. It allows content creators to use programming languages and code in order to create pages and fill them with relevant content without creating the content manually.
For example, a lot of big brands use this method to create location or service pages. Zapier uses programmatic SEO in order to create integration pages, such as “how to integrate WordPress and Evernote”.
WordPress is a great platform for pSEO. It allows users to define and create custom post types, design and implement post templates, and fill those posts with content using Google Sheets based on a set of criteria and parameters. It’s also possible to integrate ChatGPT and other AI tools to create high-quality content at scale. Once the content is created using programmatic SEO it can easily be imported into WordPress using APIs or by importing the posts using plugins.
WordPress SEO Drawbacks
While WordPress is great for SEO and marketing, it does have some drawbacks.
The most common SEO issues include slow site speed, poor hyperlink structure, and a need for better hosting. In this section, we will cover these issues in a bit more detail, and tell you how to resolve them.
WordPress Website Speed
WordPress often gets a bad reputation when it comes to site load speed. Since Google has announced that speed will become a ranking factor, business owners have been scrambling to improve their website speed. At Clio, we design websites that are tuned for speed and performance. We also offer website tuning services to improve the speed of existing WordPress websites.
Some of the most common issues that can cause slow website speed is poor / cheap hosting, inefficient and large images, slow themes, and inefficient plugins.
Selecting an efficient WordPress theme, and a good quality hosting provider can drastically help and increase website speed.
Poor Hyperlink Structure
By default, WordPress permalinks (hyperlink in the address bar), looks like this:
https://sitedomain.com/?p=1278
This hyperlink structure makes it hard for search engines to understand what the page is about. The good news is that it’s easy to change this in the WordPress permalinks settings screen to display the page name in the address bar instead, such as this:
https://sitedomain.com/best-webpage-ever
Requires Higher Tier Hosting
Cheap hosting can hurt website SEO performance. Buying a better hosting plan will increase website load times, and can also help with your website reputation.
This issue isn’t unique to WordPress, but since WordPress needs a bit more processing power than a static website, investing in a good hosting plan is even more important. Despite this, we still feel that WordPress is the best CMS for SEO.
How Clio can help with Search Engine Optimization
Clio Websites is a full-service website design and marketing company in Calgary. We have vast experience in responsive website design, website maintenance, WordPress development and speed optimization, and online marketing. Clio offers free consultations and free website evaluations and we receive glowing reviews from our clients.
We are always here to give you a helping hand.
Our team is always happy to answer any questions regarding why WordPress is the best platform for SEO, so please contact us.
4 Responses
Awesome as always. Didn’t expect anything less.
Thank you Marko!
Great blog post!
Thank you!