How to Rank New WordPress Content Faster (In 6 Easy Steps)

Do you want to rank your new WordPress content faster and get more organic traffic?

If you‘re not taking steps to optimize your content for search engines from day one, you could be missing out on a lot of potential traffic and rankings. Search engines like Google can sometimes take weeks or months to index and rank new pages, especially on newer websites without much authority.

But by following WordPress SEO best practices, you can speed up the process significantly and start getting your content in front of searchers much sooner. According to a study by Ahrefs, the average page that ranks in the top 10 results on Google is 2+ years old. However, they also found that some pages can rank in the top 10 within 6 months or less.

So how can you be one of those fast-ranking outliers? In this guide, we‘ll share 6 easy steps you can take to rank your new WordPress content faster and outpace your competitors. These tips are fully up-to-date for 2023 and can work for any type of website.

But first, let‘s look at why ranking new content quickly is so important.

Why You Need to Rank New Content Quickly

Ranking new content faster offers several key benefits:

More traffic sooner – The longer your content takes to rank, the more potential traffic you‘re missing out on. Older content has a big head start and will keep getting the lion‘s share of traffic until you catch up.
Compound growth – Ranking content quickly can lead to a virtuous cycle of compounding growth. The traffic you get from early rankings can lead to more backlinks, engagement, and positive signals that help solidify your rankings and make it easier to rank future content as well.
Competitive advantage – Most websites don‘t take proactive steps to rank their content faster. By optimizing new posts and pages for search from the start, you can gain a significant edge over competitors who are more passive.
Faster ROI – For bloggers and businesses investing time and money into content creation, ranking faster means you start seeing positive ROI on that investment much sooner.

Despite these benefits, the reality is that most new pages don‘t rank quickly. A 2020 study by Ahrefs found that only 5.7% of pages ranked in the top 10 within a year for at least 1 keyword. The majority of pages don‘t rank at all in the first 12 months:

But you don‘t have to be one of those pages languishing on page 2 or beyond! Here are 6 steps you can take to beat the odds and rank your new WordPress content faster.

Step 1. Install an SEO Plugin

One of the most important things you can do to rank new content faster is to establish a strong technical SEO foundation with an SEO plugin. An SEO plugin will handle many important optimization tasks like generating sitemaps, connecting to Google Search Console, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, and providing on-page SEO advice.

Our recommended SEO plugin is All in One SEO (AIOSEO):

AIOSEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. The free version covers all the SEO basics, while the Pro version offers more advanced functionality for sitemaps, schema markup, link building suggestions, local SEO, and WooCommerce.

Once you install and activate the plugin, it will launch a setup wizard to walk you through the key configuration settings:

Be sure to pay close attention to the Search Appearance settings, where you can set default titles and meta descriptions that automatically optimize your content if you don‘t set them manually.

The Sitemap settings are also key, as they control the XML sitemaps that AIOSEO will generate and submit to search engines (more on this in the next step).

For more guidance, follow the full AIOSEO setup tutorial from the plugin documentation.

Step 2. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console

The next step to rank content faster is to ensure Google is crawling and indexing your site properly. The best way to do that is to submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console.

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your site, making it easier for search engines to find and crawl your content. You can generate a sitemap manually, but the AIOSEO plugin creates one automatically and keeps it updated as you publish new posts and pages.

To find your sitemap URL with AIOSEO, go to All in One SEO » Sitemaps and click on the Sitemap button:

This will reveal the full URL of your sitemap (e.g. https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Copy that URL, then open up Google Search Console.

If you haven‘t already, you‘ll need to add and verify your site in Search Console. In your Search Console dashboard, go to Index » Sitemaps and paste in your sitemap URL:

Click Submit to add your sitemap to Google Search Console. This will prompt Google to crawl your sitemap more frequently and look for new content. You can check back later to see when your sitemap was last read and how many pages are indexed.

Along with your main sitemap, it‘s also a good idea to submit a separate RSS sitemap. An RSS feed makes it even easier for search engines to find your newly published content.

To enable the RSS sitemap feature in AIOSEO, go to All in One SEO » Sitemaps » RSS Sitemap and make sure Enable Sitemap is toggled on:

Then go back to Google Search Console, and submit your RSS feed URL as well (e.g. https://yoursite.com/sitemap.rss).

Step 3: Do Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important steps for quickly ranking any new piece of content. Targeting the right keywords, especially low-competition long-tail keywords, makes it much easier to rank for relevant searches.

Here are a few tips for finding keywords to go after with new content:

Use keyword research tools – Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest can give you data on keyword search volume, difficulty, click-through rate, and more. Look for keywords with decent volume but low competition.
Check the SERPs – Plug your potential keyword into Google and analyze the current top-ranking pages. Look for weaker pages that you could overtake, like those with lower domain authority, poor formatting, thin content, or outdated information.
Target long-tail keywords – Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that are easier to rank for than broad one- or two-word terms. They also tend to have higher conversion rates since the searcher intent is more clear. Try to incorporate long-tail variations naturally throughout your content.
Use LSI keywords – LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are related terms that help clarify the context of your content to search engines. Incorporating them can help your content rank for a broader range of relevant searches. Find LSI keywords with tools like LSIGraph.

Here‘s an example of thorough keyword research for this post. Using Semrush, I found that "how to rank new content faster" has a keyword difficulty score of 60, which is quite competitive:

However, I also found some promising long-tail variations like "how to rank wordpress website on google" (KD 33), "wordpress seo ranking factors" (KD 39), and "how to get blog post on first page of google" (KD 18).

By incorporating those terms throughout this post naturally, I can rank faster and capture traffic from a wider variety of related searches with less competition.

Step 4: Optimize Your New Content

Once you‘ve done your keyword research, it‘s time to optimize your draft content before publishing it. Here are some of the most important on-page SEO factors to consider.

Title and meta description – Include your primary keyword in your SEO title tag and meta description, ideally towards the beginning. Keep your title under ~60 characters and description under 160 characters. Make them engaging to boost click-through rates.
URL slug – Your URL should be short and descriptive, and include your main keyword if possible.
Headings – Use a hierarchy of H1-H6 heading tags to organize your content logically. Include keywords in headings where relevant, but avoid stuffing.
Images – Add images to make your content more engaging and memorable. Optimize images by compressing them, using descriptive file names and alt text with keywords, and specifying width and height dimensions.
Content quality – Above all, focus on making your content as useful, unique, and comprehensive as possible. Aim to be the best resource on the web for your target keyword. Cover the topic in-depth, answer common questions, and include relevant data, examples, and insights.
Internal and external linking – Include 2-4 internal links to other relevant pages on your site using descriptive anchor text. And link out to 2-4 authoritative external sources to cite data and build trust.

Here‘s what the on-page optimization for this post looks like in AIOSEO:

I‘ve optimized the title, meta description, and focus keyphrases to target my main keyword and promising long-tail variations. The content analysis gives the post an 80/100 SEO score and provides additional suggestions like adding an FAQ section to rank for even more long-tail keywords.

Step 5: Build Links and Promote Your Content

Getting backlinks from other reputable websites is one of Google‘s top 3 ranking factors. So if you want your new content to rank faster, link building needs to be a priority.

Here are a few link building strategies to try:

Guest posting – Reach out to blogs in your niche and offer to write a guest post for them. Include a natural, relevant link back to your new content in the post.
Broken link building – Find relevant pages with broken outbound links, then reach out and suggest your content as a replacement for the dead link.
Skyscraper technique – Find popular content with lots of backlinks, then create an even better, more up-to-date version and ask people linking to the original to link to you instead.
Help A Reporter Out (HARO) – Sign up for HARO as a source and respond to journalist requests with relevant insights that link back to your content.
Digital PR – If you have original data or insights, pitch it to journalists and publications for coverage and links.

Don‘t just wait for links to come naturally – be proactive! Aim to build at least 5-10 quality links to each piece of pillar content you want to rank quickly.

It‘s also important to promote your new content through other channels like social media, email newsletters, forums, and communities like Reddit and Facebook groups. This can drive engaged traffic and attract links organically.

For example, here‘s a peek at my content promotion checklist for this post:

Share on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn with optimized Open Graph images and descriptions
Send to email list with 10,000+ subscribers
Syndicate on Medium and LinkedIn Articles
Post in relevant Facebook Groups and subreddits
Reply to Quora questions about ranking content with a link
Build links via HARO and guest posting on SEO blogs

The more places you can get your content in front of interested people, the better your chances of earning natural backlinks and engagement signals.

Step 6: Track Your Rankings and Traffic

The final step for ranking content faster is to track your progress and adjust your approach over time. I recommend monitoring 3 key areas:

Keyword rankings – Use a tool like Google Search Console, Semrush, or Ahrefs to track your rankings for your target keywords over time. Look for upward movement, and try to diagnose the reason for any dips.
Organic traffic – In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels and look at your traffic from Organic Search. Is it increasing steadily month-over-month after publishing your new content?
Backlinks – Monitor your backlink profile with a tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush. Look at the number of referring domains and the quality and relevance of the links. Disavow any spammy or low-quality links that could hurt your rankings.

Here‘s a look at this site‘s keyword rankings for a relatively new post, tracking the positive movement over time in Semrush:

Notice how it took about 2-3 weeks after publishing for Google to rank the post on the first page for some of the long-tail variations we optimized for.

In Google Analytics, you can also see the impact on organic traffic. For this site, organic traffic more than doubled in the 6 months after consistently publishing new optimized content:

The key is to keep monitoring your SEO metrics regularly and have patience. Ranking content faster is very achievable by following the tips above, but don‘t expect it to happen overnight. Even with perfect optimization, it usually takes at least a few weeks to a few months to rank on the first page.

Keep creating great content optimized for search, earn quality links consistently, and you should see your new posts and pages climbing the rankings faster and faster over time.

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