Your website is your digital storefront in the wild and chaotic world of the World Wide Web. In this sprawling virtual city, you might have the most charming boutique with the most affordable prices, but if you are tucked in some back alley, you are destined to remain undiscovered and unprofitable!
SEO is what will pull you out of anonymity and plonk you right on the high street! It will lead people looking for you to your doorstep. For a small business where every client matters, SEO becomes an all-important bridge that connects your virtual store with the world. With each click, each keyword, and each optimisation, you pave the way for discovery.
SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media, and every small or medium business owner is well aware of the need to invest in SEO. But unless you are a conglomerate with deep pockets, it is hard to squeeze cashflows to hire an SEO agency for small business.
1. Yoast SEO
One of the most popular SEO plugins, Yoast allows users to add focus keyword phrases, SEO titles, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, and more to every post and page. Users can use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to articles. When it comes to SEO, Yoast’s famous readability analysis can help with intelligent keyword addition in the body content.
Other key features of Yoast are:
Advanced XML sitemaps
Schema markup
Social sharing and slack sharing
Internal linking suggestions
Mobile-friendly view
Readability analysis
Language support
2. All in One SEO
A great alternative to Yoast, the All in One SEO Pack Plugin is built for beginners and automates many tasks, such as generating meta tags and optimising titles for Google and other search engines. It is multilingual and completely PHP7-compatible.
Some advanced features allow users to customise more freely.
Here are some other features that AIOSEO offers:
XML Sitemap generation
Open Graph and social media integration
txt and .htaccess file editors
Google Analytics integration
Performance optimisation
3. Rank Math
Rank Math is a feature rich SEO Plugin that provides a unified, easy-to-manage tool to help websites optimise their content for discoverability.
The plugin is well known for its user-friendly setup and its ‘all-in-one-place’ analytics approach. It integrates Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google AdSense data into the WordPress dashboard to give a detailed view to users. Information, such as what keywords you are ranking for, how many search impressions your website is getting, what errors Google sees on your site, etc., is available at a glance.
Rank Math gives you complete flexibility to manage the on-page SEO of your posts, pages, products, or other taxonomies. You can also control the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive meta tags of all posts or pages.
Apart from that, Rank Math comes with:
Inbuilt 404 monitor
Redirections
Rich snippets support in 6 formats
Local SEO
Breadcrumbs support
Social media support with Open Graph and Twitter Card
XML Sitemaps
Internal link building recommendations
Automatic addition of alt or title tags to images
4. Squirrly SEO
Perfect for SEO beginners, Squirrly keeps it simple and clean without compromising on functionality. The user experience of Squirrly is more intuitive and designed to integrate with the content production process with real-time, AI-powered guidance.
It provides enhanced competitor analysis with actionable insights on how to overtake your rivals, while at the same time giving organisations the ability to track their own website visitors and analyse web pages based on various factors such as indexability, online content, website traffic, etc.
Squirrly is popular with small business owners for its marketing-first features such as rank tracking, CTR rates, and marketing analytics.
Its key features are:
Rank tracking
XML sitemap generation
Social media sharing
Content research and inspiration
Analytics and insights
Keyword research
SEO audits
5. SEOPress
As a freemium solution, SEOPress offers its users a fully functional SEO plugin with no ads. A white-labelled Plugin, it provides a whole portfolio of features to help website owners and administrators improve their site’s search rankings, visibility, and overall performance. It’s fast and simple and gives users complete control over the titles and meta descriptions of all posts, pages, etc., along with the analytics from integrated Google Analytics.
Here is a list of its main features:
Local business SEO
Breadcrumbs optimisation
WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads optimisations
XML sitemaps
Google structured data types
Backlinks integration
Google Page Speed v5 integration
Redirections and 404 monitoring
Dashboard integration with Google Analytics
Choose Your Plugin Wisely and Rank high
Any of the 5 SEO plugins mentioned above would be great for your site; so how do you choose?
Here are some tips:
Consider your specific needs
Be clear about your expertise level and comfort factor when running your SEO
Figure out how well the plugin integrates with your website theme and other plugins on your site
Consider security and privacy aspects
Consider the above tips and pick the Plugin that ticks all your boxes and gets your website in order. If you feel that you need more help understanding SEO or want to run it more professionally, then we are just a call away.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/tech-auto/technology/5-free-seo-wordpress-plugins-worth-trying-355317/