Best wordpress themes for SEO and best practice to get small local businesses ranking high on google

UberTiger · 30 Nov 2014 at 19:42

I'm remaking one of my websites that I made in Squarespace 5 a few years ago.

I want to remake it using a responsive theme but I really want to focus on SEO as very little business has been generated from the site even though it's been live for a few years and it still doesn't place well in organic listings.

Granted, I know know I made some awful mistakes when I first made it with regards to SEO, so it's more my fault than the platform I was using.

I have noticed there are a few limitations with the Squarespace system though, and I don't have full control over where all the files go on the server and there were some other little niggles so I'm thinking about switching to self hosting and wordpress.

Can anyone recommend any good reading or particularly well known themes supposed to be great for SEO?

I came across something call the Genesis framework, anyone encountered it and got any thoughts?

I also stumbled across something called Yoast, any good?

The company is a single family member, very small business, a healthcare professional. There's quite a few people doing the same thing in her town, plus the surrounding towns.

I've not got tons of money to dump into adwords although I am experimenting with it at the moment and reading up on it. I need to figure out a wholistic approach to start generating business for this person, through organic search, paid adwords and anything else anyone might suggest.

UberTiger · 30 Nov 2014 at 19:55

I'm also considering changing the domain name, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

The name is very long at 4 words, which would make for a mouthful domain name. I was able to get the 4 letter initial .co.uk domain though, which is really nice for links and promo material.

I'm wondering if it's detrimental to SEO though as many of the competitors seem to have the profession in the name.

For example, I have:
abcd.com

But should I relaunch the site as LondonChiropody.com or something similar with the location name and profession?

Many of the organic listings seem to have the profession and location in the url even if it's from a nearby town and not the town I'm searching for.

Should I then redirect everything at the old site to the new site?

Would changing url completely help more because it has the profession in or hinder more as all the content would be moved to a brand new url?

joemc · 8 Dec 2014 at 12:27

If you're looking to put money in to adwords having a name like LondonChiropody.com isn't really worth it.

When it comes to AdWords as long as the information is relevant, if you do a google search for Quality Score that should help you understand it. Infact, I have it in my bookmarks anyway: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/140351?hl=en-GB

That's what we use to work towards, the higher the quality of your ad the lower you pay.

I would probably get all of the domains anyway and just set them as a re-direct. Who knows what Google have in store for the future!

Hope that helps.

touch · 8 Dec 2014 at 13:05

UberTiger said:
I also stumbled across something called Yoast, any good?

I use Yoast SEO plugin, it's excellent.
It's not a whole theme, just a plugin that will work with any theme.
It lets you set page titles, meta descriptions and all of the other seo-related mate-data.

joemc said:
I would probably get all of the domains anyway and just set them as a re-direct. Who knows what Google have in store for the future!

This. You dont need to choose between a descriptive url for search engines (if that actually makes a difference? -im not sure) and a short url for printed promotional material.

You can forward the short url onto the website with the long url and even use a wordpress redirect plugin for individual pages, so you could have a url on a brochure like:
www.abcd.com/promo/
which would forward to:
www.LondonChiropody.com/christmas-promotions/

Scougar · 14 Dec 2014 at 03:32

Don't know anything about wordpress... but for SEO..

1) Canonical URL's.
2) Site map.
3) Robots.txt (Get that in order)

Also.. be very careful with what you do. If you do something silly, like say accidentally block google bots, then they will cease crawling you for quite some time and you will drop down the rankings.

oh ... and take a look at your 301's and 302's....

shady · 21 Dec 2014 at 01:03

You mentioned Genesis, and I use it all the time. It's exceptionally well-coded for SEO and has very good customisable options in it which allow you to set various values for the whole site and for individual pages. If you add Yoast's plugin 'WordPress SEO', this will remove the genesis SEO features as it replaces them. WordPress SEO gives more control over SEO settings.

More importantly though is to make sure you write good, relevant content on your website, as that's what search engines will be looking for.

apadhiar123 · 31 Dec 2014 at 18:27

Hi I have yoast plug in put in to my families business website but I want to make the most out of it any ideas on how to do that? I'm pretty new to websites

UberTiger · 16 Feb 2015 at 21:51

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm looking into this again now that I've got a bit more time and I'm going to completely redo the website. When I first created this thread I played with the URL's and content a bit and it's shifted the website from page 4 to bouncing between the end of page 2 and the start of page 3 on Google when you search for 'name of town profession'.

Hmm...looks like Bing is still page 5 though.

I've noticed that editing the URL has actually created 2 listings for the site in the Google search results though, which is good.

www.domain.co.uk

followed immediately by

www.domain.co.uk/book-name-of-town-profession

Previously it was just

www.domain.co.uk/book

I'm not sure if the URL change made much difference or the slight adjustment to the content on the page. Or perhaps the sitemap submission to google helped.

shady said:
You mentioned Genesis, and I use it all the time. It's exceptionally well-coded for SEO and has very good customisable options in it which allow you to set various values for the whole site and for individual pages. If you add Yoast's plugin 'WordPress SEO', this will remove the genesis SEO features as it replaces them. WordPress SEO gives more control over SEO settings.

More importantly though is to make sure you write good, relevant content on your website, as that's what search engines will be looking for.

Seeing as you've used both, would you recommend I just get a Genesis framework theme or find a bare bones WP theme and use Yoast?