Category: Uncategorized

Make Your Business AI-Ready in 5 Steps

Implementing AI into your business strategy can be transformative, but there are some best practices to make sure you are set up for success. Here’s a comprehensive checklist to make sure your business is ready to make the most out of AI.

1. Develop a Style Guide

A clear brand voice ensures that any AI you partner with represents your business authentically and consistently across all points of engagement. Create a detailed style guide that outlines your brand’s tone, personality, goals, and core values before you dive into creating content with AI. Specify how formal or casual the tone should be, and any ‘do’s and don’ts’ for messaging.

  • Identify key attributes of your brand personality
    (e.g., friendly, professional, humorous).
  • List specific words and phrases that resonate with your brand identity.
  • Create sample messages for AI to reference across different platforms
    (e.g., email, social media, website).

2. Think of AI as a partner, not just a tool

Viewing AI as a strategic partner helps you see its potential to contribute to your brand’s goals rather than just perform basic tasks.  Treat AI as part of your team, and use it to enhance human creativity and efficiency. Identify areas where AI can supplement your team’s efforts, whether it’s by generating ideas, analyzing trends, or personalizing customer interactions.

  • Identify high-impact areas where AI can collaborate with human efforts, such as creating personalized email content or analyzing customer feedback.
  • Train your AI as you would other team members. Remember to “upskill” your AI when you have new knowledge, processes or brand information they need to know.

3. Regularly audit the knowledge that feeds your AI

AI-driven interactions are only as accurate and relevant as the data they’re based on. Clean, well-organized data enables AI to make informed decisions that reflect your brand and meet your goals.

  • Regularly update and maintain your data sources, ensuring that outdated or incorrect information is removed. List specific words and phrases that resonate with your brand identity.
  • Review your customer data for accuracy and relevancy. Update any outdated information.
  • Pay attention to the latest trends and make sure you are telling the right story on your website and other sources that feed your AI knowledge base.

4. Experiment and learn with your AI

AI thrives on learning and adaptation. Experimentation along with your AI allows you to discover what resonates with your audience and quickly adapt. Start by testing AI in small, manageable areas, like generating social media posts or customer follow-up emails. Track performance metrics to see what engages customers best, and adjust based on feedback.

  • Select one or two specific tasks to automate initially, like scheduling social posts 
  • Set performance goals for each test (e.g., response time, customer engagement, click-through rates).
  • Use insights from each test to fine-tune AI applications and expand to other areas once you’re confident in the results.

5. Align AI with Business Goals

Centralizing AI-driven content and data helps maintain consistency across all channels and gives you a single source of truth for measuring performance. Your Business App is your command center, and acts as a system of record for all things content and data.

  • Make it a habit to regularly review centralized data to adjust your strategy based on customer engagement
  • Regularly align your business goals with your AI and make sure it is telling the story you want it to!

With these 5 steps in mind, you are ready to kickstart and maintain a solid partnership with AI.

5 Reasons To Use an Online Scheduling Tool

Whether you’re sceduling client bookings for a salon or scheduling a meeting with a colleague in a different time zone, manual appointment scheduling is time-consuming. It’s also a process that’s prone to human error. Double-bookings can be common, which can lead to a negative online review and impact search engine optimization (SEO) performance.

In this guide, we explore five reasons to use an automated booking software, allowing you to reduce the risk of scheduling errors while improving customer experience, employee productivity, and cash flow.

1. Generate bookings and leads 24/7

Did you know 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday is the most popular time to book an appointment?With most staff typically working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., responding to a backlog of appointment requests submitted over the weekend can take time and frustrate customers. 

A survey by GetApp found 94 percent of customers are more likely to choose a new service provider if that provider offered an online booking option.

Automated scheduling software provides the benefit of allowing customers to:

  • Book at a time convenient for them
  • Select a particular person they want to receive the service from, and view their real-time availability
  • Reschedule without needing to call

These features can help prevent you from being bombarded with back and forth messages or phone calls about booking an appointment. Plus, it can help prevent the loss of prospects who were keen to book outside work hours but lost interest because that business didn’t have online scheduling functionality.

This is supported by research from salon software as a service company Phorest, which shows nearly 50 percent of all bookings in the spa and beauty salon industry happen online when businesses are closed.

2. Impress new clients

Informing new clients and prospects about what to expect ahead of their first appointment can create a good impression and help boost productivity.

You may send the standard “thank you for booking” confirmation email, but when additional information about a customer is required, smart scheduling software allows you to:

  • Add questions to meeting requests
  • Collect key attendee details
  • Process payments

This can help save you the headache and staffing time required for menial tasks like confirmation calls and chasing up invoices.

3. Deal with fewer phone calls

Given the popularity of platforms like Airbnb, Uber, and OpenTable, customers are increasingly expecting frictionless and digitized booking experiences for services they wish to access.

Consider the following data points from various surveys:

  • 59 percent of the general population are frustrated with waiting times and the inconvenient office hours related to scheduling appointments by phone (GetApp, 2021)
  • 75 percent of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) avoid phone calls because they are “too time-consuming” (BankMyCell, 2020)
  • 81 percent of Millennials feel anxious before making a call (BankMyCell, 2020)

These statistics are a clear indication that local businesses should be evolving their tech stack and aligning their customer journey to evolving preferences. Even better, less time spent on the phone dealing with appointment queries is better for businesses as owners and employees can spend time undertaking more valuable tasks.

4. Save costs and reduce “no-show” risk

Software consulting giant Accenture’s research found that the United States healthcare system would have saved $3.2 billion in 2019 alone if more people booked appointments online.

It takes under a minute to schedule medical appointments online, compared to 8.1 minutes on the phone, with staff transferring calls 63 percent of the time, resulting in more booking-related paperwork and less time on patient care.

“Just as consumers use online tools to book restaurant reservations or request a cab, patients want the same experience in self-booking a doctor’s appointment,” Accenture’s report noted. 

Furthermore, appointment reminder functionality typically built into scheduling software more than halves the risk of a no-show, according to a separate analysis of customer behavior by 10to8.com.

5. Increased employee productivity

In a Udemy 2018 report, 60 percent of employees said that poorly scheduled and unorganized meetings distract them from working efficiently and productively. 

That’s why meetings and how they are scheduled should not be taken for granted, especially for rapidly-growing SMBs with hybrid work environments and employees who reside across different states and countries. 

Automated meeting scheduling can eliminate behaviours such as: 

  • Employees asking each other “when are you free?” to initiate a meeting
  • The need to check calendars throughout the day
  • Attaching video conferencing links to meeting events manually
  • Manually working out time zone differences to hold meetings with colleagues across different jurisdictions

A suitable scheduling tool should handle most meeting-related logistics, including adding video conferencing links, finding a time to meet, and meeting preparation tasks. 

Setting Up Google Search Console in the Executive Report

We are happy to bring SEO reporting to your Executive Report through Google Search Console! In this article, you will learn why SEO is relevant to your business, what Google Search Console is, and why it’s important to connect your Google Search Console Account to your Executive Report.

SEO Overview

You work hard to be found by your customers online. Right now, you can see your performance pay off in several individual areas, whether it be managing your reviews, listings, social media, or advertising, which is of utmost importance. With Google Search Console reporting, you can also see how all these efforts come together to improve your overall Search Engine Optimization performance. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. For a business to appear in top organic search results, you need to have a strong SEO strategy. Many components make up your website’s SEO – the number of reviews you have and your star rating, how many listings are correct and consistent across the web, how active you are on social, website speed and security, mobile responsiveness, and more.

What is Google Search Console in the Executive Report?

Google Search Console is a tool that Google provides at no charge to website owners, to measure a website’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.

Among its many features, one is the ability to see detailed analytics about organic ‘SERP’ (Search engine rank position) of a website, what search queries (keywords) are being typed into Google, and what pages are appearing the most via organic search.  Our integration brings these features into the Business App Executive Report.

Visit the Google Search Console website for more info.

With the Google Search Console section in your Executive Report, you get metrics on your website’s SEO performance. This provides proof that all the work and resources you are putting towards being found by your customers is resulting in your business’s website appearing more often right where your customers are searching: On Google. 

By connecting Google Search Console to Business App, you can see detailed automatic proof-of-performance analytics on searches happening on Google:

  • how many queries their website appears on page one of Google
  • how many clicks their website is getting
  • how many impressions their website is getting
  • which queries are getting the most clicks, and their avg. position in search results
  • which website pages are getting the most clicks and impressions

With this powerful no-cost feature, you can see how all the hard work you do on your business’s marketing (website content, blog, listings, reviews, social media, etc) is resulting in real-world improvements in your SEO – and helping you get more customers!

Connect now, or read on to learn more.

Understanding the importance of Google Search Results

Google search results have three primary forms of results. The first is paid media, such as Google Ads. The advertiser is paying to be at or very near the top of Google search results. The searcher knows what results are paid ads, as seen in the screenshot below.

The second section in Google Search Engine results is the local pack. This comes from owned and earned media. It showcases local businesses close to your search location. SEO always plays into the local pack ranking factors.


The third and final result are organic search results. This is where 40% of website traffic comes from, so it’s extremely important your business’s website is ranking on the first page of search results so that customers can find you.

Why connect Google Search Console?

With the addition of Search Console to the Executive Report, you have a powerful tool for SEO reporting that will help you see how all the hard work you do for your business is paying off in higher search ranking.

Our reporting also provides a unique KPI that is not available from within Google Search Console itself: “Queries on 1st page of Google Search”. This number is calculated daily, and reveals if your business is making progress in the outcome you truly want: to show up on page one of Google search, and get more website visits from more potential customers.  This metric tracks exactly that, with no extra noise.

Best of all, this reporting is automated. Connect it once to deliver automatic, ongoing proof-of-performance reporting.

1. Setup Google Search Console

Ensure you have a Google Search Console connected to their website using the URL-prefix property, and fully verified. If you don’t yet have a Google Search Console account, you can set one up in a few quick steps here or reach out to your account rep.

Note: it takes 24-48 hours after a new property is connected to Google Search Console for data to start to appear on Google’s side.

2. Connect Search Console to Business App

  • In Business App > Connections, you’ll find a card to connect Google Search Console.
  • Click ( + ) to add an account. Only one connection per account is permitted at this time.
  • Log into your Google account that has permission to access this Search Console account.
  • All accounts that can be connected will appear in this list. Choose the account you want to connect.
  • Once connected, it will take up to just a few minutes for existing data to appear in the Executive Report. 30 days of history is pulled in when an account is first connected.

Note: If the account you want to connect does not appear here, make sure it is a ‘URL-prefix property’, and not a ‘domain property’; make sure it is fully verified; and make sure the Google account you are connecting with has sufficient permissions to view this search console account.

3. Customize the queries tracked in the Exec Report

You can completely customize the keywords that are tracked and reported on in the Executive Report, via Search Console.

  • When Search Console is first connected, Business App will automatically pull in the top 10 search queries for this business, by clicks for reporting 
  • You can customize these keywords, remove, or add, up to 20 keywords to be reported on in the Executive Report.
  • Go to Business App > Connections > and click the kabob > click “Edit Queries”

FAQ

I’ve connected Search Console to Business App, but I don’t see any data in the Executive Report?

  • It can take up to 5 minutes to pull in data to display in the Executive Report. The app automatically pulls in 90 days worth of data, and you should usually be able to see data in the most recent weekly Executive Report.
  • If there is nothing appearing, this will happen when there are no queries that have received clicks in the last 30 days. With no clicked queries, there are no performance metrics to report on, and therefore the cards do not appear. As you work at improving the SEO of your website, and it starts to receive organic clicks, data will appear in the report.

How to set up an online store

Selling your products and services online rather than in-store means that you need a website with the capability to handle an online store. But while setting up an online store might seem complicated and time-consuming, it’s actually not as difficult as it seems!

Where possible, many businesses are moving some–or all–of their products and services online. Have you been investigating transitioning some of your business’ sales and operations to ecommerce?

To get started, all you need is a website that’s powered by WordPress—we’ll show you how to do the rest using WooCommerce, a free and open source plugin that allows you to easily set up a functioning web store, complete with payment and shipping options, in minutes.

What you’ll need to get started

  • A website powered by WordPress
  • Products or services to sell
  • 30-60 minutes to set up and add products to your online store

Set up and install WooCommerce

Step 1: Find and install the WooCommerce plugin

First, you’ll need to install WooCommerce on your WordPress website. You can download it for free from the WordPress repository, or you can install it directly from your WordPress dashboard. 

Log in to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for “woocommerce”, and click Install Now on the WooCommerce plugin (Note that the correct plugin’s author will be listed as Automattic). Wait a moment for the plugin to install, and then click Activate. 

The plugin will now be active on your WordPress site.

Step 2: Follow the Setup Wizard

After installing WooCommerce, you’ll have access to the WooCommerce Setup Wizard to configure your store’s key settings like location information, payment and shipping methods, and types of products that you’ll be selling. Note that everything you choose in the setup wizard can be changed later on in your WooCommerce settings.

You’ll first enter information about your store’s address, the currency you accept, and whether you’ll be selling digital or physical products (or both).

Step 3: Choose your payment processing methods

Next, you’ll choose which payments you’ll accept using your online store. By default, you can use Stripe and/or PayPal, but you can also choose to accept offline payments like checks and cash.

Select the options you’d like to use, and WooCommerce will set them up for you. Extensions that allow you to use more payment processing methods are available, if necessary.

Step 4: Choose a shipping method

You can also configure how customers will be charged for shipping. You can set one rate for your specific business area, as well as other rates for customers outside of your business’ area. 

Step 5: Choose optional add-ons

Once you’ve configured the basic settings for your online WooCommerce store, you can review optional add-ons. None of these add-ons are necessary to run your store, but some, such as Storefront, can simplify certain aspects of setting up your store.

Step 6: Finish setup

Before completing the setup process, you can choose to enable Jetpack, which is another WordPress plugin with additional features that can help in setting up and running your store. This plugin is not required, however WooCommerce recommends that if you’re in the U.S., you’ll want to enable Jetpack given recent legal changes.

Once you’ve completed the steps above, your store will now be ready for use, and you can begin adding your products to it.

Managing your WooCommerce store

After installing WooCommerce, two new tabs will be available on your dashboard’s side menu: WooCommerce–which contains your store settings, and Products, containing your product settings.

Follow the link at the end of the Setup Wizard or go to Products > Add New to begin adding products to your store. 

WooCommerce has extensive documentation and tutorials on how to set up, manage, and operate your store. Here are some handy links for how to add products, sell and ship them, manage orders, and more:

Add and manage products

Adding and Managing Products

Adding Product Images and Galleries

Managing Product Categories, Tags and Attributes

Product CSV Importer and Exporter

Payment options

Managing payment options (Stripe, Paypal, payment on delivery, etc.)

Setting up Taxes in WooCommerce

Which Payment Option is Right for Me?

Shipping options

Managing shipping options (Flat rate, local pickup, free shipping, etc.)

Setting up Shipping Zones

Product Shipping Classes

Order management

Managing Orders

Email FAQ

The Complete WordPress SEO Plugin Mastery

SEO is the key to conquering the internet, and as the digital climate becomes increasingly saturated, it is becoming more important than ever to make sure that you are making every effort to get seen on the web. One of the easiest ways to give your sites a little extra boost is by implementing the right WordPress plugins.

The Problem:

Wait… I thought that finding the right SEO plugin was my problem?

You’re close. Everyone wants the one plugin that is going to single handedly cuddle their site up against that ever-desirable Google search bar. Although this result is possible, the reality is that the SEO market is becoming an increasingly competitive and saturated one. This context makes it more important than ever to have a better structured and optimized website with a search engine friendly hierarchy so that you can set yourself apart, and be ranked above your competition. Much to your dismay, that may involve a bit of a plugin stack.  

The Essential SEO Plugin Stack

Whether you’re building sites for clients, or your own business, mastering SEO will be the key to growing and sustaining a strong online presence.  Fortunately, we know how to get you there.

There are 7 critical pieces to the SEO puzzle. To start, you NEED an overall on-site SEO plugin to cover the basics, such as: meta tags, sitemaps, robots, etc. Then, there are an additional 6 complementary sections for plugins that will offer that competitive edge that you’re looking for:

  1. On-site SEO
  2. Mobile Optimization
  3. Broken Links
  4. Speed
  5. Security
  6. Image Optimization
  7. Rich Snippet

It is true that it’s a bit of a catch 22 when it comes to plugins and website speed, being that the shear volume of plugins being used will have an impact on the website speed. However, by using the right stack to build your SEO, the benefits will outweigh the harms.

Let’s dive in.

1. On-site SEO Plugins

An on-site SEO plugin will be the foundation of your infrastructure. For your convenience, we narrowed it down to only 2 contenders, Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.

These 2 plugins have both been around for a decade already, and are still at the top of the food chain.

Yoast SEO

Price: Free with Paid Premium Option

Elevator Pitch:

Through walk-throughs and advanced settings, Yoast is the one stop shop for beginners and experts alike. Featuring sitemaps, title and meta descriptions, and the ability to connect Google Search Console, this plugin does everything to please users and search engine spiders alike.

With built in content and SEO analysis, Yoast can also insure that your content is always killer (in Google’s eyes as well as prospect’s eyes). By upgrading to premium, you also gain access to a local SEO extension which adds a local schema markup to your web pages.  Other premium features include video and news extensions.

Key Features:

  • Most used SEO plugin on market with 5M+ active installs
  • Thousands of daily downloads
  • Effectively combines content and SEO
  • Uses JSON_LD for local
  • 5 star-rating across nearly 20,000 reviews on WordPress.org

All in One SEO Pack

Price: Free with Paid Premium Option

Elevator Pitch:

All in One SEO Pack is the original SEO plugin that works out-of-the-box for beginners with  advanced features for developers. XML sitemaps, and overridable meta descriptions/keywords allow users to to optimize their SEO efforts.

This plugin is also highly durable being that it is translated into 57 languages and works well with a variety of other plugins. All in One provides local SEO recommendations and keyword ranking for users as well.

Key Features:

  • The ONLY free plugin to provide SEO Integration for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce
  • Over 3M active installs
  • 4.5 star-rating across 500+ reviews on WordPress.org

The On-site SEO Winner

Yoast SEO. Industry experts and Vendastians all agree that Yoast is essentially the modern-day standard when it comes to WordPress SEO plugins. The free version will accommodate users of all levels of expertise and ensure all of your bases are covered.

2. Mobile Website Optimization Plugins

This SEO factor earned itself a priority seat due to the fact that Google is now favoring outlets that are running on AMP code. Google announced just last month, January 2018, that it would begin prioritizing pages with fast mobile loading speed in their search algorithm. What this means is that mobile optimization will now be a high ranking factor in every sites overall SEO performance on Google.

This makes it more critical than ever to have your sites optimized for mobile. Considering that the majority of browsing these days is conducted from mobile devices, it just makes sense.  

AMP for WordPress

Price: Free!

Elevator Pitch:

Ever get frustrated when you’re trying to look something up on your phone and it takes 3 full days to load? We all lead pretty busy lives, and just don’t have time for that nonsense.  

By using AMP for WordPress, you can insure that your prospects never give up hope as a result of a slow mobile site. By creating AMP content, which Google is now factoring into SEO rankings, this plugin caters to the needs of major AMP consumers such as Google Search.

Key Features:

  • Built by WordPress, not a third party, so compatibility is not a concern
  • Many 1 star reviews, and a 3.5 star overall rating on WordPress.org
  • 200,000+ active installs (best in class)

AMP for WP

Price: Also free!

Elevator Pitch:

These guys also spared no creativity in terms of naming themselves, but I guess that there’s no harm in getting to the point either…

AMP for WP is pretty straight-forward, and simply adds AMP functionality to your WordPress site to improve mobile site speed through search engines (like Google!).

Key Features:

  • 100,000+ active installations
  • 4.5 star user rating on WordPress.org (best in class)
  • Yoast (and other SEO) plugin integration

The Mobile Optimization Winner

AMP for WP (the latter—these 2 are damn confusing). The reality is that both of these plugins are going to meet your mobile optimization needs, but it just feels like AMP for WordPress (the loser) has not put as much effort into customer satisfaction. Installs are declining and 1 star ratings on WordPress.org almost pair those of the 5 stars; which might be cause for some concern, ex:

Not what you want to see…

3. Broken Link Plugins

Links are kind of like family photos—sometimes they just go bad. Pages can be deleted, a site that you link to may vanish, or someone might move a post or page without updating others.  These actions can all cause broken links.

And there is NOTHING worse than hitting a “404 Page not found” when you’re trying to find a new photographer for your family pictures.  

By managing broken links on your site, you can mitigate user frustrations, questions of credibility, lost conversions, and damage to your SEO ranking. Yes, broken links factor quite heavily into your SEO ranking.

Broken Link Checker

Price: Free!

Elevator Pitch:

Broken Link Checker scans your posts, pages, comments, blogs, and custom fields to detect links that don’t work, images that may be missing, and link redirects. This parsing can take some time as it verifies each and every link tied to your site. Once completed, it will present you with a list of broken links so that you can manage redirects and prevent prospects and customers from losing interest or losing track of you.

Key Features:

  • Has not been updated in 6 months…customer service?
  • 500,000+ active installs (by far best in class)
  • 4 star rating across nearly 400 reviews on WordPress.org
  • Offered in 30 languages

The Broken Link Winner

Only one candidate, and only one winner. Use this plugin, it will save your customers and prospects a lot of headache, and it will help optimize your overall SEO.

4. Speed Plugins

Page speed is a huge factor in search rankings because it a huge factor in user experience. Google recommends pages load in less than a half second, and that’s not always easy to achieve.

To tie into the above AMP category, this element has actually never been more important with Google recently announcing that page speed is now a ranking factor for mobile searching (where most searches occur).

I have offered up 2 site caching alternatives that will have a substantial impact on site load times, particularly with high volumes of traffic.

WP Fastest Cache

Price: Free, the best price.

Elevator Pitch:

With most of the functionality automated, and active page statistics, the WP Fastest Cache plugin is very user friendly. It creates a static html file so that high quantities of traffic do not produce slow render times on your site, and offers numerous options for managing cached files. It also comes with minify html and css options so that users can decrease the size of pages and css files.

Key Features:

  • Does not yet support WordPress Multisite
  • 5 star rating and over 500,000 active installations
  • Offered in 17 languages

W3 Total Cache

Price: Free, always.

Elevator Pitch:

W3 Total Cache improves SEO and user experience by reducing dowload times and increasing performance. W3 comes with a host of caching options, minification features, as well as various security features. It also offers improved server performance to help weather those high traffic periods.  

Key Features:

  • Only 9 out of 108 issues resolved in the past 2 months
  • 4.5 star rating and over 1 million active installs (best in class)
  • Used by many large companies such as AT&T

The Speed Winner

This is actually a really tough one. I am going to crown W3 Total Cache as the victor for now due to the sheer volume of active users and the number of industry experts that swear by it. However, WP Fastest Cache is an excellent caching plugin, and is growing in popularity and downloads, so it would also make for a great alternative should you choose it.

5. Security Plugins

Security is a factor that owns varying degrees of concern. If you are a financial institution or a related field of business, security will likely hold a much greater precedence in your site infrastructure.  

The primary impact of a security plugin for other business demographics is in regards to an SSL certificate (https). This certificate helps your site maintain rank on search providers and is rumoured to become a requirement for google sites in the near future. An SSL certificate can also directly translate to growth in rank, while also encrypting user data – an essential component on many websites.

Besides, who wants to be hacked by some sneaky black hat spammer?

Wordfence Security

Price: Free with Premium Option

Elevator Pitch:

Wordfence Security was built for the specific application of WordPress sites. It includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner, as well as a Threat Defence Feed that insures that Wordfence is always up to date with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures, and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your site safe.

Key Features:

  • 2M+ active installs (best in class)
  • 5 star rating across over 3000 reviews on WordPress.org
  • User friendly feeds to monitor performance

The Security Winner

We decided to keep it simple on this one being that Wordfence Security is all around best in class. This plugin is a favorite by industry experts worldwide, so it will surely meet your firewall and malware needs in the free version—with the option to pay for premium as you grow.

6. Image Optimization

The images that you utilize on your site build can have a huge impact on user experience as well as click and conversion rates. However, it is critical that you don’t forget to use an image optimization plugin to reduce image sizes (often up to 50%), and therefore page sizes, to boost your SEO rankings by greatly increasing page speed and user-friendliness.

There are hundreds of compressors, but really only a couple in the runnings.

Smush Image Compression and Optimization

Price: Free with Pro Option

Elevator Pitch:

Smush, seems like a fitting name right? This plugin does the bulk of the heavy lifting for you, so you really don’t need to stress about a steep learning curve. Smush automatically cuts the size of all of the images on your site to provide speed and quality. It also now allows for image resizing and is compatible with numerous other plugins on the market.

Key Features:

  • 5 star rating and over 1 million active installs (best in class)
  • Huge benefits for mobile speeds
  • Highest performance reserved for paying customers only

Short Pixel

Price: Free with Paid Premium

Elevator Pitch:

Short Pixel is on this list as a result of its cheaper premium option in comparison to the other image optimizers on the market. This plugin will accomplish relatively the same as Smush, but nearly all of these image optimization plugins are drastically limited in the free versions.  

Therefore, if you find yourself growing, and in need of something more than what these free versions can offer, Short Pixel has one off the most affordable paid rates on the market, and will still reach upwards of 60% optimization.

Key Features:

  • They have resolved every single issue that has been reported to WordPress.org in the past 2 months (can somebody say customer service?)
  • 4.5 star rating across nearly 300 reviews
  • Also offers huge benefits for mobile site speeds
  • One click bulk optimization (major time saver)

The Image Optimization Winner

Being that I recognized each of these plugins for different benefits, they are both winners in their own light. Smush is a near unanimous favorite for basic free image optimization, and ShortPixel is a great alternative if you are ready to take that first step into the realm of “paid plugins,” but don’t necessarily want to invest the capital that Smush or many others require.

7. Rich Snippet Plugins

What is a Rich Snippet?

Rich snippets are the fields that spice up your search result listing. You know those sites that have pictures and external ratings linked into their descriptions? There is less sorcery involved than you may have thought.

What’s special about this plugin is that you don’t have to write any code what-so-ever (and if your coding is anything like mine, this is a major blessing). Rich Snippet plugins present fields that you fill in, and the plugin automatically generates the code and tags for you.

Many website developers might not consider rich snippets an important tool in terms of SEO, but I’ll tell you why this interaction is important. Although rich snippets do not directly help you rank, they do provide increased visual appeal to your SERP result as you approach that first page of google. This visual appeal will likely increase your click through rate (CTR) which will then cause you to rank higher in terms of SEO.

It’s as simple as that.

All In One Schema Rich Snippets

Price: Free

Elevator Pitch:

Want to add review, event, product, recipe, video, article, or other schemas to your site snippet?  All In One Schema Rich Snippets makes it possible in a highly user-friendly format so that you can make your site more interactive and improve your click through rates.

Key Features:

  • 70,000+ active installs (by far best in class)
  • 4.5 star rating across 100+ reviews on WordPress.org
  • Helps Facebook display proper information when users share your links on Facebook

The Rich Snippet Winner

I know, I did it again…to date, All in One Schema Rich Snippets has more or less monopolized the market, and is your best choice if you want to master all of the categories of SEO on your WordPress build.

Conclusion

Seven is the number of plugins you are going to need to have a world class SEO optimized site:

  1. Yoast SEO
  2. AMP for WP
  3. Broken Link Checker
  4. W3 Total Cache
  5. Wordfence Security
  6. Smush or ShortPixel
  7. All In One Schema Rich Snippets

And one is the page number of Google results that you will likely find yourself on the keywords that matter most if you leverage this plugin combination.