If you run a small or local business, there is a good chance that your site is built in WordPress.
In fact, statistics from BuiltWith.com would indicate that WordPress powers about 50 percent of the entire internet. The exact numbers vary, with other statistics showing WordPress powering 22 percent of new active sites or 58.9 percent of sites where CMS is known.
Whatever way you look at it, that’s a lot of WordPress websites.
WordPress is not just used for the likes of food blogs and local businesses, though — brands and huge websites use the platform.
Further stats from BuiltWith.com indicate that 40 percent of the top 100,000 websites use WordPress, and this number jumps to 50 percent when we look at the top million sites. Businesses like TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, and even the official Star Wars Blog use WordPress.
Why WordPress?
There is good reason for this. WordPress is a truly flexible platform. Myriad plugins allow for easy extension of functionality, and a world of themes allows for easy visual customization to suit the style of your business.
Most importantly, WordPress is easy to use. Several years ago, I was a big proponent of Joomla and Drupal, and we used those CMSs for most website design/development projects at Bowler Hat. However, we saw a lot of resistance to these platforms from our clients. People just could not get along with the way these systems worked, and this led to websites being ignored.
WordPress, however, presented a far shorter learning curve and much less customer support (lightbulb moment). Usability is crucial here. If you are not comfortable within your website CMS, then you simply won’t use it. A site that is left untouched can soon become a weakness rather than the strong digital salesperson it should be.
Better yet, WordPress is a solid SEO platform right off the shelf. It just does so much right. And with WordPress powering so much of the Web, you could say the onus is on Google to ensure their search engine can crawl and index content in WordPress sites.
The rest of this post will look at the suitability of WordPress as an SEO platform for local businesses, common problems you might encounter and what you can do to really fine-tune and supercharge results for your local business with WordPress as your CMS.
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