Developing a WordPress website can be a lot of work, especially if Search Engine Optimization is important to your business.
But, fortunately WordPress has tons of added functionality by using plugins. However, with so many plugins in the WordPress directory, it can be difficult to determine which are reputable. And even those plugins that are free, still cost us time to review, setup, and update over time.
V12 Marketing has tested countless plugins in WordPress, and we wanted to make some quick recommendations for some free ones that will provide instant value in terms of search engine performance. Or, if you’d like to check out our WordPress development services go here.
1. Google Site Kit 📊
This plugin, developed by Google, is completely free, and easy to setup. It allows us to integrate multiple Google digital marketing services with a website. Just install the plugin, and then simply connect it with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Google Optimize, and even Google AdSense. Each of these tools, (excluding AdSense) is usually recommended to be used.
Google Site Kit enables us to monitor real-time site traffic and Google performance all within the WordPress dashboard. This is helpful because it allows us to make quick efforts based on data that is easily accessible. It’s also convenient not having to juggle all the Javascript snippets.
2. Yoast SEO 🖥
Yoast makes managing technical SEO much easier for website owners. Yoast does offer paid subscriptions, but it isn’t necessary to get great functionality and value out of the service.
Yoast will let us know the quality of individual pages and posts in terms of SEO signals, but even more valuable, are the bulk meta updates. Items like page and post meta, can be updated in bulk, either individually or automatically, which can yield big results for SEO efforts.
3. Hummingbird 📱
Hummingbird, like Yoast, offers both free and paid plans. But for this case, we’ll be recommending the free version. Hummingbird offers WordPress website developers easy ways to speed up the site. By using their smart cache feature, users will be served pages faster.
Hummingbird has tons of functionality, but our favorite feature is the image optimization tool. This enables us to serve images faster, and leverage ‘lazy load’ which loads images more efficiently. Hummingbird can make a big difference for users visiting on mobile device. This translates to longer page visits, higher engagement, and more conversions, and thereby potentially showing Google this site being used, is high quality, and worth ranking higher.
That’s all for now! What do you think? Have you used these plugins before? Or, if you try them, we’d love to know how they worked for your website. You can also learn more about V12’s search engine optimization services right here.
Ready to get started? V12 Marketing can help your website make use these free plugins.
Just contact us and get a free consultation for your website project!
