7 Local SEO Plugins to Rank Your WordPress Site

WordPress has become the Google of CMS providers — it’s so popular, over 58% of websites built on a CMS are on WordPress.

It’s so popular because it’s so accessible. Why? Because theres tens of thousands of plugins and templates that make it easy to build a functional and good-looking website.

With the rise of local SEO, it’s more important than ever for businesses with a WordPress website to pick the best plugins.

There are many, many plugins you can use to optimize your site, but that can make it difficult to know which ones to pick.

Local SEO Plugins to Fit Your Strategy

Before you review the list, it’s important that you have a strategy in place. To properly budget your time, you need to stick to plugins that fit with what you’re doing so you can get the most out of them.

With that said, let’s look at the 7 best local SEO plugins for WordPress:

#1 Yoast WordPress SEO

Yoast WordPress SEO is one of the most downloaded WordPress ever, thanks to its extensive features that cover all the essentials for optimizing your website. It includes features for adding meta titles and descriptions to pages, editing XML sitemaps, and more.

It also comes with the Local SEO for WordPress add-on. That gives you the ability to tell Google more about your website and your business, which in turn helps your visibility in local searches. It also lets you add and edit Google Maps and Google My Business information on your website.

The Local SEO plugin is not free, but it’s worth the cost. It’s one of the best and most effective tools you will find.

#2 Google Places Review

Online reviews can have a huge impact on your business. That is why they are one of the core principles behind any local SEO strategy. According to research done by the Spiegel Research Center, you can get a 270% increase in website conversions just by displaying reviews.

If you have a WordPress website, the best plugin to display your Google reviews is Google Places Reviews. It has a very easy to use widget to display real reviews left on your Google My Business listing. You can choose from different themes to customize the look.

It will also show detailed business information for the My Business listing the reviews were left on. If you have multiple locations you can show reviews specific to each location.

#3 WP Google Maps

There are many plugins for adding or embedding Google Maps onto your WordPress pages, but WP Google Maps is one of the most intuitive to use. You create the settings you want for it, and it gives you the shortcode to add to the page. Just choose where and how you want it.

You can create custom maps with multiple location markers, which is great for a business that has multiple locations in the same area. It also comes with Google’s Streetview functionality enabled. You can show storefront images for people to help visualize the directions.

All of those features come with the free version (Lite) of the plugin, but there is also a more advanced paid version (Pro). It gives you greater, more technical features and functionality. This is a great plugin for adding maps, directions and street views on your local landing pages.

#4 Structured Data Schema

Structured schema data is a highly necessary technical part of your website. It helps organize the content in a way that makes it easier for search engines like Google to understand the focus of your business. That includes your industry, products, and services.

For local SEO, you can use it on all your articles, blogs and information pages with Organizations and Local Business schemas. By classifying them for Google searches, you ensure that the pages are more likely to appear and rank higher for those keywords.

That’s where the WP SEO Structured Data Schema plugin comes in. It makes it extremely easy to add the schema markup to your pages. Include your local landing pages to classify the geographic focus for local searches.

#5 Business Profile

Business Profile is a great local SEO plugin for businesses that have multiple locations. It lets you add your location and contact information in a quick block to any page using a customizable widget or shortcode.

You can choose to include your business name, address, phone number, email address, Google Maps link, and hours of operation. It also comes with a schema markup that makes it easier for Google search to display that business information.

For a business with more than one location, it also includes a custom post template to manage location information pages. It makes creating local landing pages for each location a breeze.

#6 WPSSO PLM

The WPSSO PLM plugin deals with the Open Graph and Scheme data on your site by synchronizing your location data between Google, Facebook, and Pinterest. That helps make your information exact and consistent across those three major platforms.

It also helps boost the effect of your Scheme markups. This creates great synergy with the WP SEO Structured Data Schema plugin mentioned above. Specifically, it helps boost your data for business type, location image ID, phone number, opening hours, and so on.

#7 Local SEO and Business Listings

One of the first and basic parts of any SEO or local SEO strategy is cleaning up your citations. If you have a WordPress website, then the Local SEO and Business Listings plugin is a must-have. It can make that work a whole lot easier.

It has the ability to create and update your business listings across several of the top business listing sources, including Yelp, Yellowpages, Bing Places, and more. It has a tool that scans those sources to see what locations or listings you are missing or need to clean up.

You can also use it for keyword and competitor research, and all of it comes with a very helpful guide to make using it even easier.

Make Sure You Get The Most Out of Your Plugins

There are many great plugins to help optimize your WordPress site for local SEO. They can help you build location pages, optimize your website’s scheme markup, push your business listing information to the big citation sources, and more.

However, although it’s important to have the right local SEO plugins installed on your site, it’s equally important to make sure you follow SEO best practices. We mentioned at the start that you need to have a good plan in place to know what you need.

If you’re about to get started with a local SEO campaign for the first time, you can use this local SEO checklist so you can be sure you’re starting with a solid foundation. It will make putting together your strategy and then executing it much easier.

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