Yoast Local SEO Video Transcript
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me. This morning I just want to answer the question of what is Yoast Local SEO? We get a lot of questions about that. It is a very common app for helping you with your, specifically your local SEO in the context of retail stores. But I just want to give you a quick overview of what Yoast actually looks like.
Yoast is a plugin for WordPress to help you improve your SEO. Now it’s a really nice, easy to use app that guides you through improving your WordPress website for SEO. Let me show you a little bit. You actually download Yoast from the plugins section of WordPress, so I went into WordPress and let’s just say I didn’t have it installed, I’d go to add new and I’d search for Yoast. But we can see with my website here that Yoast SEO is already installed. So it shows up over here on the left under the SEO tab, so I’m just going to click over here to the SEO tab.
Now, the first thing that you’ll want to do when you download Yoast for the first time is open the configuration wizard. I’ve already done it, but just to show you what this looks like, it actually walks you through a very comprehensive wizard to help get set up. You can see here there’s 12 steps to help get your website all set up for quality SEO. So it’s going to ask you questions about your business and all those sorts of things to help get your your site all set up.
I’m going to close the wizard for now because I’ve already gone through that process and set that up for my website. But if I can go in here, you’ll see a few things. On the dashboard. You’ll see that it obviously notifies me I’ve been through and done the wizard. Then I can see here if there were any problems that were affecting the SEO of my WordPress site, it would alert me to those right there. So even just for this reason, it’s worth it to have it, so that you can know if there’s anything detrimental going on with your WordPress site.
Now, right here, there’s notifications that come up. So this is obviously trying to sell me on joining the premium program for Yoast, which gives more advanced support and more, obviously, features that I can use. But that’s where I can see notifications about things I can do to improve or things that are still left to be done.
As far as features, you’ll find those under the tabs here at the top, and you can choose to turn on or off any of these features that you may need. A lot of times you may want to submit an XML site map. There’s a feature to turn on or off a site map for your site, for example. And then there’s webmaster tools, which you’ll want to connect Yoast to your Google search console. And this is where you can do that, or connect to other webmaster tools. Bing for example is webmaster tools, you can get connected there. So this is already connected for me to what I need in terms of search, so I’ve already got that all set.
Next you’ll be able to have control over a few things here. Now a lot of these are taken over in the wizard, but if you do want to connect social accounts, search console, other tools, and then of course there’s premium, you can connect all of those things here on the left hand side as well.
There’s a lot to explore here and I’ll click through. There’s search. I can affect how I want to appear in search appearance. Here is if I want to actually submit URLs or indexing, a request for indexing right through the Yoast tool. Looks like I can do that here, or see items that were last crawled, at least. This is all the integration with Google search console.
Once this is all done and set up, I actually don’t come in here all that often to make changes. Where I actually go is the pretty neat tool, here is Yoast actually will then give you a score on each of your posts or your pages. So you can see here I have two pieces of green light content on my site. And I’ll click over to this article so you can see this. What Yoast will actually do is insert a widget into your posts. So I scroll down on my post to, underneath it here. Sorry, it’s just the internet was going a little slow there. I’ll scroll back up so it doesn’t skip around on you. Here’s my post. Yoast inserts two [inaudible 00:04:38] readability and SEO. And you can see that I’ve got the green Yoast checkmark. If things aren’t up to par, I won’t. But if I scroll down here, you can see that this widget gets inserted for the Yoast SEO score. And I can go in here and do everything from edit, edit how my meta description appears, what the URL is, anything I want to edit with the title, just closed that.
I put in my focus keyword so that Yoast understands what I’m trying to achieve and then reads my texts to tell me problems, improvements, and quality of results for the FCL on the page. Now, if I skip over here to readability, that’s also important for SEO is that user experience on reading and consuming your content. So Yoast also gives a readability score, and offers suggestions for improvements. Well often if I want to see where any of these areas are, I just click this highlight button. So my instance of passive voice. And it’ll show me that sentence that’s using, sentence or sentences that are using passive voice. Now this works the same way, where you get a readability and SEO score across pages as well, or your posts.
Just want to answer that simple question today, what is Yoast Local SEO? This is a brief overview of what it is. It’s a WordPress plugin to help you optimize your search engine presence with your WordPress site. So thanks very much for joining me.