New to the world of SEO? For the beginner, search engine optimisation can seem like a fast paced, ever changing online environment that is best left to the experts. And while the algorithm and search engines that drive SEO efforts can and do update their best practices from time to time, you don’t have to be an in-house digital agency expert or marketer to take advantage of some of the best SEO plugins online.
For the new marketer, small business owner, or solopreneur who is running their own WordPress website, congratulations! Taking the dive into online marketing and website development is one first big step in the right direction to growing your brand awareness and bringing in new leads and customers online. Even though most web development team and experienced marketers prefer to design and action SEO efforts from website publication day one, there is no harm in setting up for and running a great SEO plugin on your WordPress website even after you’ve been online for some time.
If you’ve searched the WordPress plugin marketplace for SEO plugins and are lost among a sea of choice–not to worry. Edge Marketing is a team of experts who know the ins and outs of digital marketing, search engine optimisation, and website development and can help you navigate the pros and cons of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress in 2023.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of installing an SEO plugin on your WordPress site, how SEO data can give you a marketing edge, and our team’s top five recommendations for the best SEO plugins in 2023.
Why Use SEO Plugins on Your WordPress Website
If you’re new to the world of search engine optimisation, website development, or even just starting out with your first eCommerce website and brand, you may have limited experience working with SEO plugins.
An effective, automated way to collect important information about your target audience, website visitors, and customers, SEO (search engine optimisation) is the act of optimising your online presence (including website, social media profiles, and eCommerce product pages) for popular search engines like Google to show your business to relevant leads.
SEO plugins (like those that can be downloaded and installed on WordPress for websites hosted on the platform) are designed to complement WordPress’ system, collect, organise, and analyse your WordPress visitor data, and deliver meaningful results that you can use to further optimise your site or marketing efforts.
Among the top benefits to be gained through using a go-to WordPress SEO plugin, you can expect to gain:
1. Website Speed / User Experience
Most customers expect a fantastic website experience from new brands or businesses before they will consider converting to a paying customer. With expectations of individual website page loading times now close to 2 seconds (!), SEO plugins can help you test for and optimise all website elements that could affect this time. Think compressing large image and video files and downloading fonts to deliver an on-brand, fast experience.
2. Website Visitor / Target Market Behaviour
We could go on for days about the importance of collecting real-time user data about your website visitors, leads, and converting customers, but the long and the short of it is: great SEO plugins will track, categorise, and analyse important data about how your customers and website visitors find your site, business, and brand and how they engage with your website, offers, and services.
From the most recent website they visited before finding your website to key demographic information, you can get to deeply know and understand your customers and tailor your site, products, and marketing to their tastes.
3. Keyword / Language Definition
Among the information collected about website visitors, good SEO plugins can track which keywords users typed into popular search engines (like Google) to find your business, products, or brands.
While this information may seem irrelevant to the SEO newbie, the keywords your users use regularly to find a solution to their problem is incredibly important (and meaningful) data. How so? While your business may describe your products, service, and offerings one way, knowing what language your target audience uses to find a solution to their problem is key to your marketing messages and website landing in front of them. Even if your product perfectly meets their needs, Google and its users will have trouble finding you if they don’t understand your brand or use similar terms to describe key products.
4. Emerging Trends
From following changing user keywords to product purchases and more, collecting SEO data can show you emerging trends in customer interests, popular products, and a changing industry marketplace. For this reason, we always recommend staying on top of your SEO data and strategy with a regular monthly audit so that you don’t miss out on changing consumer preferences and emerging trends.
Chances are you can see how valuable the above information would be in defining and refining your key marketing assets to connect and engage with potential customers. Want to know which SEO plugins are our top rated for 2023? Read on.
2023’s Best WordPress SEO Plugins
If you don’t need any more convincing about the importance of choosing and installing a WordPress SEO plugin ASAP, here are our top suggestions for 2023’s best WordPress SEO plugin.
1. Yoast SEO Plugin
Regularly ranked the number one SEO WordPress plugin, Yoast offers both a freemium and premium paid subscription model for both new and experienced marketers alike. Helping to optimise your website’s readability (read: making sure that your website text is accessible and easy to understand) Yoast’s basic features can help improve your overall SEO score and user experience. Follow the easy green light system to see where you need to improve specific sections of each page to boost its overall SEO score.
2. SEOPress
Whether you’re interested in the free version of SEOPress or a premium subscription, this is a great SEO plugin–particularly for those interested in leveraging the additional power of Google Analytics. Deep dive into your website visitor’s data, gain key insights into your target audience’s online behaviour and preferences, and start to redefine your website and marketing strategy based on real-time insights. Because SEOPress is a top rated plugin, you can migrate existing data if you have already been using another plugin and this one better suits your needs.
3. All In One SEO (AIOSEO)
For ultra efficient marketers who only want to use one digital tool to create, track, and measure the effectiveness of their entire SEO strategy, AIOSEO is for you. From basic localised SEO features and functions to high-level schemes and sitemaps, All In One SEO can be used by marketers at every level–a particularly important feature if you work in an agency setting or want to use the same digital platform as you, your business, and SEO strategy grow.
4. SEMRush
Need a hand with copywriting and written content? SEMRush is well known for their fantastic SEO strategy support features–but their free SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant is a must have if you want to expand on your written SEO strategy and need a helping hand. From readability scores to keyword research and integration, this platform can help you maintain a consistent brand voice from page to page and help you avoid plagiarising your (or another’s) online work. (A big no-no for your SEO score.)
5. ShortPixel
Prioritising images on your website? No problem–but it is worth pointing out that images can take a long time to load and heavily affect your page load time. (Another key factor that influences your overall SEO score.) Instead of overhauling your entire website or product image plan, you can keep all of the same visuals but compress the files to be SEO-friendly. ShortPixel offers several WordPress plugins that can optimise your photos for mobile phones, tablets, and desktops.
Think they all sound good? Us too–that’s why these are our top five recommendations for WordPress SEO plugins in 2023. Read on to learn more about deciding which plugin you should install for your website and brand.
How to Choose a WordPress SEO Plugin
With the above just our top recommended SEO plugins for WordPress, how can you decide which will best suit your website’s needs? Among the many deciding factors, we suggest considering:
Budget
If you’re just starting out, you may need to factor in budget when deciding which SEO plugin to use. For a budget friendly option, we recommend Yoast SEO. One of WordPress’ original SEO tools, you can choose to pay for an annual subscription–or, better yet, a free version for limited-budget marketers to try and test out. Once you can see for yourself which data comes in and how it can help better inform your marketing strategy, you can upgrade to a premium model knowing the most important data is being collected on your WordPress website.
SEO Plugin Features
Each of the 5 recommendations above offer excellent SEO features for collecting, tracking, and analysing key data about your website and brand. That said, each will be an industry go-to for select types of data or prioritise key details or others. For example, ShortPixel is an excellent solution for compressing website images to a file size that loads quickly and optimise your website site speed. If you have an image heavy site, this could be the tool for you. Using stock standard font types and using fewer images? AIOSEO is a great (as it says) all-in-one tool.
Business and Marketing Strategy Stage
If you’ve been in business for some time and are looking to level up your digital marketing strategy, you may have the resources, funds, and existing target audience data to pay for a premium-level, all encompassing SEO solution.
Just getting started? If you’re just starting out with SEO, feel free to try out a free SEO plugin to learn the basics of optimising your website. Once you’re familiar with some of the key practices and updates required of your site and website pages, you can begin to understand which features will be most important for your marketing strategy and choose a tool based on these priority features and needs.
Learn SEO Best Practices with Edge Marketing
If you’re ready to take SEO matters into your own hands, we suggest following along with the Edge Marketing team. Dedicated to levelling up the skills of solo-preneurs and first time marketers as well as working alongside bigger businesses ready to outsource their digital marketing work, Edge Marketing is one of Australia’s best digital agencies and we’re here to help you raise the bar for your brand.
Wondering where to begin with SEO best practices? Our team publishes weekly blogs examining the ins, outs, and highlights of the digital marketing stratosphere to help our community better understand digital marketing, search engine optimisation, WordPress, and how to build a fantastic website for your brand.
To learn more about how you can hack your own SEO efforts, optimise a new eCommerce site, or engage your audience with a killer social media marketing strategy, follow along or reach out to the Edge Marketing team today.
