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

[UberTiger]

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]

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?

 

[UberTiger]

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.

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?