Do you use a page builder for your WordPress website? There are many renowned visual builders, such as Divi, Elementor, SeedProd, Oxygen, WP Bakery, and Beaver Builder. These are fantastic alternatives to the Gutenberg block editor if you want to design your pages more granularly, and many come with live editing and drag-and-drop functionality.
In this article, we’re talking about Divi, which is one of the most popular themes and page builders that people use for WordPress. Made by Elegant Themes, Divi makes WordPress a lot easier to use with its advanced visual builder that is used by both professionals and beginners alike. The visual editor can make changes to your website in real time so you know exactly what your changes are doing. You also get drag-and-drop editing that is simple to use, and there are thousands of layouts to use as a base. It’s a fantastic tool for web creators who are interested in creating SEO-friendly designs without too much investment.
As well as being a page builder, Divi is also a fast and lightweight theme. This makes it a good choice for website creators who are interested in SEO-friendly website design. Unfortunately, though, Divi’s in-built SEO features are limited. This is why Divi users make use of third-party SEO plugins that are designed for the job. These are more powerful and user-friendly when it comes to producing SEO content.
In this post, we’ll be talking about how to improve your Divi SEO workflow by introducing you to our solutions SEOPress Free and SEOPress PRO, integrate with Divi and all other WordPress page builders.
Why do you need an extra plugin to improve your Divi SEO workflow?
Although Divi does have its own in-built SEO features, the tool’s functionality is limited when you consider all the ways in which you can boost a website’s SEO ranking. To access Divi’s SEO settings, you just need to open your WordPress dashboard and head to Divi > Theme Options > SEO. These are some of the basic Divi SEO settings you can use:
- Enable custom titles and meta descriptions for your homepage or single posts
- Enable meta keywords in your header, which has been an outdated SEO practice for a long time.
- Enable canonical URLs
- Set title autogeneration
- Define a character to separate the blog name and page title
Although many of these features will help your site rank higher in search engines, they are not enough to fully optimize your website for SEO. This is why Divi integrates with several SEO plugins.
What is SEOPress?
SEOPress Free is an all-in-one SEO plugin that integrates with Divi as well as all other themes and page builders. Using the free version of SEOPress, you can:
- Edit your SEO metadata in the Divi editor, including
- title,
- meta description,
- social tags,
- schemas, and
- meta robots.
- Analyze your content and get suggestions to improve SEO content.
- Preview your page in Google search results and social networks.
- Create XML sitemaps
SEOPress PRO is a paid version of the plugin that is even more powerful, allowing you to implement SEO features such as:
- Create unlimited redirections to prevent loss of traffic
- Scan and fix broken links
- Add breadcrumbs to any theme
- Sync Google Search Console data with your WordPress website
- Add Google structured data types to mark your content with schemas and get better visibility in search results
SEOPress PRO is the premium extension of SEOPress Free. You’ll need to upgrade to the PRO version to get all of the extra features that will help you optimize your website’s content for Google and other search engines.
Divi can interfere with SEOPress PRO’s settings, so you’ll be prompted to disable Divi’s built-in SEO settings.
Why SEOPress PRO is a great match for Divi users
One of the draws to Divi is that it’s a visual framework. SEOPress PRO continues this by complementing the visual features with a plugin interface that is accessed within the page builder.
This means that users don’t have to switch back and forth, making it easy to edit the visual aspects of the website and the SEO content. This editor helps it fit within Divi’s dynamic visual editor and workflow, making it a seamless addition with a small learning curve.
If you’re interested in seeing how SEOPress PRO integrates with Divi, check out this YouTube video below for an overview.
Now that you’ve got a good idea of how SEOPress PRO can help optimize your Divi SEO workflow, let’s take a look at some of the steps you should take to improve your website’s SEO.
Steps to Setting Up a Divi SEO Workflow
Listed below are the 8 most important steps that any WordPress user can take to optimize their website for search engines. Some of these can be achieved with SEOPress and Divi, while other steps entail a more robust SEO strategy.
Step 1: Identify your SEO Objectives
Every WordPress user will have their own unique SEO goals. There are a few fundamental SEO metrics that are commonly used to measure SEO performance. For example, you’ll likely want to see an increase in organic traffic, and you’ll want to rank for certain keywords relevant to your site or business.
But these are metrics, not objectives. You should also create SMART goals that are easily measurable and achievable. To establish these goals, ask yourself questions such as:
- How much traffic am I getting now?
- How will traffic be over the next six months?
- What action do I want users to take on my site? E.g., sign up for a newsletter, read blog posts, or try a product demo.
To help you track your progress and get statistical data right from the WordPress dashboard.
SEOPress PRO integrates with Google Analytics (et Matomo). This will allow you to measure a huge range of crucial eCommerce metrics such as purchases, additions to shopping carts, and removals from shopping carts. You can also track important events such as downloads and external link clicks. All of this data can be tied back to your SEO activity, allowing you to gain clear and meaningful insight into its success.
Step 2: Research Your Target Keywords
Keywords are crucial for your website’s performance because they are search terms used by real people on search engines. If you use keywords that people are searching for, your target audience is more likely to find your website. If this is a new area for you and you need guidance, check out SEOPress’s article on how to find keywords for your website.
Keywords often take the form of queries, so as an example, if you own a restaurant in London and want people to find out about it, you’ll need to use queries such as ‘What’s the best restaurant in London?’ or ‘Best new restaurant in London’.
But you don’t want to come up with keywords blindly. You need the help of an SEO tool. The easiest way to get keyword suggestions is to use SEOPress PRO’s Google suggestions feature in the “Content Analysis” box. This tool lets you input target keywords for your content, and it will also give you suggestions of other keywords to include based on Google searches. By typing in the keywords you want to rank for, the tool will come up with a range of similar suggestions that are likely to drive organic traffic to your site.
This data will provide the pillar on which to structure your entire website, including content, navigation, and any PPC ad campaigns too.
Step 3: Optimize Your Content
Using the Content Analysis tab in WordPress, SEOPress PRO will be able to tell you how your content ranks for your target keyword and advise steps you can implement to improve your on-page SEO.
This will include optimizing:
- Headings
- Keyword density
- Meta titles
- Keywords in the permalink
- Meta descriptions
- Word count
You should also optimize your content to use some of the keyword suggestions provided in the content analysis tab. This will ensure that your page or blog post has a good level of topic coverage based on what people are searching for.
Step 4: Craft Your Title, Description, and URLs
SEOPress Free comes with a universal SEO metabox. This allows you to update your page meta title, description, and URL while you’re editing the page with Divi, which means there’s no need to switch between Divi and your WordPress backend.
The plugin includes 50 dynamic variables for you to work with, such as “post title”, “site title” and “article author”. Alternatively, you could set a global title and meta description for each type of content you publish on your website. The SEO metabox includes a Google Snippet preview which lets you see what your page will look like in search results. Using this information, you can put yourself in the shoes of a potential site visitor and update the information accordingly.
Step 5: Set Up Social Media Profiles
SEOPress Free lets you optimize how your content is shared on social media. It does this in three different ways:
- Social sharing preview that uses SEO Metabox data to preview your content on popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also adjust the metadata as needed.
- Open Graph meta tag, which is automatically generated by SEOPress Free. These are snippets of code that control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media and are generated by major social media platforms.
- Twitter cards which use Twitter’s own meta tags. These are generated by SEOPress Free and can be edited however you like.
Step 6: Link Building and Citations
Link building is important for SEO as it lets Google and other search engines know that your website is being cited as a trusted source, by other trusted sources. The more backlinks you have, the more likely that your domain authority will increase.
You can build links organically – for example, if you own a food blog, you may have a network of other food bloggers that will link to your recipes. Alternatively, there are many services that exist to help you build links and citations.
SEOPress Insights is another WordPress plugin that lets you track backlinks. Backlinks are a really useful tool for SEO, and while having good quality backlinks can boost your search engine rankings, others can negatively impact it.
SEOPress Insights allows you to monitor and analyze these backlinks, categorizing them in order of their impact. The dashboard shows important data about your backlinks, including the trust score of the linking website and a citation flow that measures the level of “power” this site has online.
Step 7: Track Your Progress with SEOPress PRO
Your site’s SEO is a work in progress, and can always be improved. You will need to constantly analyze your website’s performance so you can maintain a high ranking.
SEOPress PRO integrates with Google Search Console, which allows you to see your clicks, impressions, CTR, and positions quickly in your WP Dashboard. This optimizes the efficiency and productivity of your site, as the search console all the data you need, without having to keep flicking back and forth between platforms.
Another great tool is SEOPress Insights’ Keyword Rank Tracker, which lets you see the performance of up to 50 keywords daily. You can observe their progress over time and track your high-priority keywords with Slack notifications or email alerts. It provides quality and meaningful keyword data, which provides actionable steps you can take to improve your keyword rankings.
Improve Your Divi SEO Workflow with SEOPress PRO and SEOPress Insights
Divi is an excellent page builder and theme for WordPress users, and it’s no wonder that hundreds of WordPress users rely on it to build stunning websites. However, there’s a difference between a beautiful website and a website that ranks. Divi can help with your SEO goals as it makes it easy to create a site that’s lightweight and has clear navigation. However, its in-built SEO features are limited, and to an extent, even outdated.
You don’t need to abandon Divi if you want to take your SEO strategy seriously, but you should turn to a third-party SEO plugin that has more powerful features to help your website rank. SEOPress PRO is a fantastic example of a plugin that makes it easy for you to edit your metadata, analyze and optimize your content, preview your pages as search result snippets, scan and fix broken links, create video and news XML sitemaps, add schemas to get rich snippets and more.
SEOPress Insights is another essential plugin that can help you meet your goals, as it helps you to track your website’s performance, which Divi cannot do by default.
Try SEOPress PRO and SEOPress Insights today!
Next week, we’re sharing top tips on getting your website indexed by Google. Don’t miss it!
