Laying Down the Foundation: 5 Basic WordPress SEO Plugins You Can Use to Boost Your Business

There’s no denying that WordPress is one of the most popular tools for website creation and content management. This is mainly because of how easy it is to build a website from scratch using WordPress. Even complete beginners can create a simple blog using WordPress, given its easy navigation and user interface.

If you’re going to use WordPress to create a website for your business, you also need to learn how to optimize your website in order to advertise and market your company. The main key here is learning how to increase your website’s ranking using latest SEO techniques. However, this process is quite technical and requires quite a bit of time and resources to really learn properly.

Does this mean that you should completely leave your website’s SEO to a professional? Well, if you have the budget, you should go ahead and hire a great web design company that offers SEO services. However, if you’re only starting out and you have a limited budget, professional SEO services might just be a little bit out of your reach at the moment.

Luckily for you, there are basic WordPress SEO plugins that you can learn to use by yourself. These plugins will help you increase your website’s SEO ranking without too much hassle and you can use these tools to make your business more visible on search engine results.

1.      WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most downloaded plugin in WordPress because it offers a comprehensive solution for all your SEO needs. However, while it may be comprehensive in terms of services and features, it is made in such a way that it’s very easy to use even for beginners.

Among other tasks, you can use WordPress SEO by Yoast to add titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords for all your site’s pages. What’s more, this plugin will help guide you towards choosing keywords that you might be missing in your content and are relevant to your industry niche.

2.      SEMRush

If you’re wondering what keywords your competitors are using to boost their own searches, SEMRush is the WordPress plugin for you. This is a tool that’s loved by many a digital marketing company because it allows them to search the ranking for organic keywords and strong backlinks for these keywords. It even allows you to have insights into your competitors’ marketing strategies so that you can further refine your own!

SEMRush is a paid plugin, but when you consider the amount of valuable data that you can get from using it, you will agree that the price is a bargain!

3.      Keyword Tool.io

Another free WordPress plugin, Keyword Tool helps you generate possible keyword ideas simply by typing in a single keyword. It works in conjunction with Google’s auto-suggest feature, so you will be able to determine what keywords are the most searched and in what combination. You might even get keyword combination ideas that you’ve never thought of but are actually frequently searched on Google.

Google autocomplete works by suggesting keywords that are often used for a search, which means that the top results produced by this plugin are also the most frequently searched keywords typed into a Google search.

4.      Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a simple plugin, but one that’s immensely valuable if you don’t know how your domain name is faring online. Using this tool, you can see how popular a certain domain name is when it comes to searches and whether anyone is linking to that particular domain. You can even see what anchor texts that they are using! Using this tool, you will be able to see if your outreach and linking campaigns are effective and whether your website is growing organically through outbound links from other websites.

5.      SEOquake

SEOquake is another tool that’s hugely popular with SEO professionals because it’s basically a tool that allows them to completely analyze the SEO performance of a page. Using this tool, you can get data such as page ranking, when the page was last updated, and how old a page has been around.

Using the SEOquake toolbar, you can view the metrics to judge your website’s SEO performance and compare them to competitors to see whether you need to tweak your strategies. This plugin even offers a feature that allows you to download all the results into a CSV format so that you can analyze them using Excel.