How Changing a Theme but Not Content Affects SEO in WordPress Website

For a long time, many bloggers believed that having a unique and beautiful design on their site would make them rank higher in search engine results. This used to be the case, but as Google continued making changes to their search algorithm, this no longer necessarily works.

You might be wondering how the theme of your site could affect your SEO — and you’d be right to. After all, Google looks at the theme of your site to determine the overall UX and whether or not your content is suitable for users.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how changing your WordPress theme, but not your content, could affect your organic rankings in the search engine results:

The Basics Of SEO

Before we get started, it’s important to understand a few fundamental things about SEO. If you’re new to the world of SEO, don’t worry — it’s not as complicated as it seems. First of all, there are a few universal guidelines that apply to all websites:

• Make sure your content is relevant and uses SEO-friendly keywords.
• Ensure your content is organized and has a clear theme.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
• Avoid using SEO jargon.
• Link to other websites that are relevant to your niche.
• Ensure you’re using analytics software to track the performance of your content.
• Make sure to review your site once a week to see how it’s performing and if you need to make any changes.
• Don’t worry too much about getting ranked number one in the search engine results — focus on publishing quality content that will keep your audience coming back for more.

Now that you have the basics under your belt, it’s time to move onto the next step.

The Differences Between a Fresh New Site and An Old Site

Many people think that just because their site is a year old or more it must be an old site that can’t possibly perform well in the search engine results. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

If your site has been around for a while and you’ve never done anything about it, it could be in desperate need of an upgrade. On the other hand, a fresh new site that happens to be lacking in content could also perform worse than expected simply because it’s not yet been optimized for search engines.

If you want to know more about the differences between a fresh new site and an old site, check out this blog post by HubSpot. They break down all the differences and a clear explanation as to why some sites perform better than expected and others don’t.

One Theme Won’t Do — Customization Is Key

When bloggers found out that having a unique and beautiful design on their site would give them a leg up in the search engine results, they started using templates that could be easily customized by anyone with basic web design knowledge. This is when everything started to go wrong.

Even when they used quality templates, many sites would use the same handful of layout and design choices. While this might seem like a great way to save time, it also means your site’s design will be extremely similar to every other site in your niche.

With today’s changing search algorithms, every site is performing differently and that’s what makes it more difficult to optimize. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop for all of your website design needs, Code Canyon offers great value with their comprehensive WordPress theme library. Whether you need a completely new design or just want to switch out a few details, their expert team of designers can help.

As previously stated, having a unique and beautiful design can help your site stand out. However, this comes with a cost. If you want to see the exact opposite, take a look at this blog post by Linchpin SEO. They compare the SEO performance of eight different WordPress themes and the results are pretty surprising.

Manual On-site Optimization Is No Longer Necessary

Back in the day, getting your site to rank highly in search engine results required a lot of manual on-site optimization. You’d have to look at each individual page and try to figure out what you were doing wrong and then fix it.

This was both extremely time-consuming and not guaranteed to work. With today’s artificial intelligence-powered search engines and personalized search results, it’s no longer necessary to go through each page of your site and try to figure out what is wrong. The search engine bots will take care of all this for you. All you have to do is create high-quality content that is both relevant and uses the appropriate keywords.

Keyword Research Is More Important Than Ever

Once you have your content, it’s time to tackle the next step — keywords. This is where a lot of people mess up and it’s one of the primary reason why so many sites get penalized by Google.

If you’re wondering where to start your keyword research, there are a few tools that can help you find the right keywords without too much effort. Two such tools are Google Keyword Planner and the Bing Keyword Tool. With these tools, you just have to enter your website’s URL and they will give you an overview of all the keywords that are most relevant to your niche. From there, it’s up to you to sort the keywords into groups and choose the ones that you’ll be using in your content.

Building A Better-quality Blog

WordPress is a free blogging platform and it’s one of the most popular CMSs around. If you’re looking for a ready-made solution to create and maintain a blog, it’s a great choice. But that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. If you want to create a better-quality blog, you have a few options.

You could look at the following to see what’s changed in WordPress since its inception: