A step-by-step guide to installing the Yoast SEO plugin so you can start improving the SEO for your local small business website.
If you have a website for your local small business, you’ve probably heard of search engine optimization, or SEO. It’s the process of improving your site so it ranks higher when potential customers are searching for your products and services.
What to do when your local business site doesn’t rank well
First, don’t beat yourself up. Sure, you might be discouraged, perhaps confused or unsure how to improve SEO so it does rank better.
The good news is that if your site runs on WordPress, there’s a great free plugin called Yoast SEO that will help you start improving SEO on your website.
Here’s how to install it.
How to install the Yoast SEO plugin for your website
Find the plugin
Log into your WordPress dashboard and look for Plugins on the left sidebar and click Plugins > Add New.
Once you’re on the Add Plugins page, you can either click the Popular tab or search for “Yoast”.
Install the plugin
Look for “Yoast SEO” by Team Yoast and click the Install Now button. This will install the plugin onto your website, but it won’t activate it yet.
After you install the plugin, you’ll need to click the Activate button. This will actually turn the plugin on so that it will start working.
Run the configuration wizard
In most cases, when you activate Yoast SEO for the first time, it will run a configuration wizard which will ask you a series of questions such as:
- Is your website live and ready to be made public?
- Does your website represent an online shop, small offline business, blog, etc.?
- Does your website represent your company or you personally?
- What are your social media profiles?
- What types of content do you want to be searchable on search engines?
- Does your site have multiple authors?
It takes only a few minutes to run the wizard. Once you have completed it, the Yoast SEO plugin will be installed to help you improve the SEO for your local small business.
The first step in your SEO journey
“Yay! Now I can relax and watch my search engine ranking soar, right?”
Someone who just installed Yoast SEO
Sorry, that was just the first step. The next step is optimizing your site by using the Yoast SEO plugin to analyze your content. But you’ll discover that optimizing isn’t as hard as it looks once you have the plugin installed.
Got questions about installing plugins for WordPress?
Contact me if you have questions.