WordPress is hands down the most popular CMS  available to the public that we’ve ever seen, with a whopping 34% of websites on the internet created on WordPress.

At Distil Digital, we choose WordPress not just for its popularity, but its usability and functionality, and perhaps those features are part of the reason why it became so popular in the first place. For marketers, there are so many great benefits to using WordPress.

We’ve listed 10 standout features that make WordPress the best CMS for SEO:

1.User Experience

WordPress sites give visitors a positive impression right from the start, due to its attractive themes and user-friendly plugins. This leads to lower bounce rates which scores your website brownie points with Google.

2.Attractive Permalinks

Gone are the days of messy URLs, with WordPress you’re able to edit your permalink which means you can strategically place a keyword in the permalink to help your rankings on Google.

3.Manageable Metadata

Metadata helps search engines and search engine crawlers check for relevancy of your website and context of its webpages, and when your metadata contains relevant keywords, your chances of ranking for those keywords are increased.

By simply using a WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO, you’ll be able to add metadata to all your posts quickly and easily.

4.Easy Image Optimisation

Images are not just necessary in your posts, but they are also a benefit for SEO in WordPress. You can “create alternative text” for your images, this allows you to use keywords as image descriptions which can be found by search engine crawlers. With WordPress, you can use a plugin to automatically create alt text for your images and resize your images as you please.

5.Fast Load Time

Poor Site Speed will decrease your chances of ranking well on Google’s SERPs. By using WordPress plugins like ShortPixel Image Optimizer and WPOptimize can help dramatically improve Site Speed.

6.Mobile Friendly

The ever increasing popularity of mobile use makes it paramount for marketers to jump on the mobile bandwagon, which means websites will need to be optimised for mobile. The great thing about WordPress is that most of the themes available are already optimised to be mobile-friendly.

7.Social Media Integration

Social media is a great way to grow your brand and because of this, the success of social media campaigns can positively influence your SEO rankings. WordPress makes social media integration simple by allowing you to customise social media buttons, add a social media feed to your site as well as automate social media campaigns.

8.SEO Friendly Plugins

Some really great SEO plugins for WordPress that can help you rank are Yoast SEO, Google XML Site Maps and Google Analytics by Monster Insights. 

Yoast SEO

With Yoast SEO, you get SEO title and meta description templating, and it allows you to optimise your content with a focus keyword. It also helps you to create great content for your audience to enjoy and for search engine crawlers to crawl. Premium users also have the privilege of full support when they need it.

Google XML Site Map

WordPress makes it easy to create XML Site Maps, which helps search engine crawlers understand your website’s structure and also lets search engines know that you’ve got new content.

Google Analytics

When you use Google Analytics reports, you can view the reports without ever leaving the WordPress dashboard. With Google Analytics reports, you also have the ability to view detailed stats and the amount of clicks you received on banner ads, affiliate links or outbound links.

9.Easy Software Integration

WordPress allows for seamless integration with other software tools such as ConvertKit which helps with email campaigns, landing pages, and forms; G Suite for all your documents, spreadsheets, and emails; and Sucuri, a highly recommended security software.

Take advantage of WordPress’ software integration capabilities to improve engagement with your website and ultimately rank!

10.SEO Friendly Themes

Having a great webpage design is a key component that search engine crawlers are looking for, luckily all you have to do is pick from the many SEO-friendly themes on WordPress, it does the work for you.
When it comes to Google’s SERPs, WordPress absolutely destroys all other CMS competition, so when you choose WordPress for your website, you’ve already given your website a headstart, that’s why we’ve chosen WordPress, and it’s exactly why you should too.