What is SEO?

Search is one of the main ways in which people discover content online. Having good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on each page within your site helps relevant pages rank higher in search engines and can lead to an increase in traffic to your website.

The SEO Overview report provides helpful information that includes an at-a-glance look at how your site is performing in the following areas: technical, content, user experience, and mobile.

Technical

How well the technical elements of a site enable it to be accessed, crawled, and indexed by search engine bots.

Content

The quality of a site’s visitor-facing content with respect to how it engages users, and whether meta content is optimized for search engines and users.

User experience

How effectively embedded information like links and visuals is used to enhance the user experience.

Mobile

How responsive or adaptable a site is to being used and displayed on a mobile device.


Also included is your overall SEO score, a measure of how well a site’s user-facing and technical aspects contribute to search engine optimization, and how your score has performed over time.

SEO overview

Fix these issues to improve your score

This table provides you with the SEO issues that bring down your score the most. Not all the issues that are displayed in the (issues and recommendations) report will be able to be fixed by someone with general site editing abilities. Some issues may be rooted deeper in the WordPress CMS environment and can only be addressed by the CER Digital team. It is important to look at what the issues are and decide what you can fix yourself.

Fix SEO issues

SEO score progress

A visual representation of how SEO on your site has performed over time.

SEO score progress

My Sites

This is where you can view SEO scores for your site. If you are an editor for multiple sites, you will be shown multiple SEO site reports.

You have the option to view all scores for a site(s) at once or you can select a category to view just that score.

My sites

Issues and Recommendations

Good SEO is about optimizing the content and technical aspects of your site for both search engines and users. This report will show you all the issues and provide recommendations on ways to fix them for the four main areas (Technical, Content, User Experience, Mobile).

Issues and recommendations

Examples of issues that every site editor has the ability to fix on their own:

  • Meta descriptions: Do you have a meta description added for each page? (Note: Every WordPress site uses Yoast SEO. This is where meta descriptions should be added.)

    What is a meta description?
    • A meta description generally informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about.
  • Mobile and desktop speed: Review affected pages for media assets (photos, video, audio) that have large file sizes and would cause a page to load slowly.
  • Low word count: Do these pages have enough content on them that search engines can pick up on?
  • Media files not updated in the last year: Are there old images that are no longer used on your site but still in your Media library that can be removed?
  • Pages with broken links: Fix any broken links on your site since they will only frustrate your users, especially if they show up in search results.