Most wounds are self-inflicted, at least in local SEO. A weak website makes it much harder to get visible in organic results and in Google Maps resultsand to stay there. But you won’t make the site big and strong if simple tasks are a PITA, or if you invest too much time, energy, and money in features that no longer work, or if your site is hacked And you can’t get it from the infirmary fast. Too many plugins or the wrong plugins can cause all of these problems and more.

My advice is simple: install as few plugins as possible. In general, if you overpack, you’ll have a much harder time building and improving sites in the long term, more plugins will conflict or stop working, and a vulnerable plugin will lead to a hack sooner or later. All of these things directly impact your ability to do local SEO that is effective and makes more money.

Of course, there are hundreds or thousands of excellent WordPress plugins. You’ll probably need at least a few of these to keep your website stable, manageable, and presentable. So I don’t knock them at all. When you go on a trip, half of your travel bag will be taken up by clothing and this is non-negotiable. So what you need to determine now is (1) what else you should bring and (2) how much extra space you should leave for browsing and souvenirs.

Which plugins are most useful for your local SEO? Here is my shortest shortlist:

1. Yeastor Rank mathor All-in-one SEO. All of this is an extremely convenient way to specify and customize a title tag on each page and create an XML sitemap. I don’t find the other features useful, but these two are sufficient. By the way, if you don’t use Yoast or a similar plugin, XML sitemap generator for Google is a simple and hassle-free standalone plugin that only takes care of your XML sitemap.

2. Max Mega Menu. This is the best way to get all the pages that matter to you – i.e. h Service pages And Spin-off sites – to the main menu. This is important because the internal links to these pages are crucial.

3. detour. When you rename a URL, retire a page, or delete or add a subdirectory, you need to be able to easily, quickly and reliably redirect one page to another via 301 redirect, otherwise you will lose all or existing backlinks on the page the highest ranking will be removed from the index, or both. Other plugins can do good redirects, but this one is my favorite because it’s simple and never seems to cause any problems.

4. Double page. Many of your pages will be similar to each other, in their layout if not their content. If you have to spend time creating each individual page When you build your pages from scratch, you are less likely to create new pages at all, or spend less time making them informative and well-optimized. With this plugin or any duplication or cloning plugin you can create the page you want once and use this as a starting point for subsequent pages.

5. Link Whisper. I am constantly working on your case become difficult on the internal linksand part of that is continually scanning your pages (and photos) for places where you can add links to relevant other pages (or Posts or videos). The problem is that the sitemaps in our minds tend to be fuzzy. It’s easy to forget that there is a page or post on this topic or what exactly the topic is. Link Whisper can suggest specific internal links for you to add.

Honorable mention goes to Site KitThis is often the least problematic way to install Google Search Console. And you have to install it so you can camp in it and understand what your local SEO is like Really do.

If a plugin isn’t on this super short list, it’s because (a) it’s useful in a broader sense, (b) I don’t find it useful, or (c) I just haven’t seen it yet.

What about plugins that I don’t recommend? At the top of the list are caching plugins. Also, I once had a serious problem with MonsterInsights and will leave it at that for now.

Local SEO is about doing basic things very well over a long period of time. Don’t let your choice of plugins complicate this. Pack light, go far.