Wordpress is a powerful open-source platform that is great for eCommerce and is known for its wide array of plugins. Some of these plugins are designed to help improve the SEO of your website and help you get found in the search engines, but are they enough?

It’s important to understand the complexities of Wordpress SEO so you can make the best possible decisions for your business. Many store owners think that they are fine simply by downloading and configuring a couple plugins, but the reality is that this is not the case. If you really want to get found in the search engines, you’re going to need quite a bit more than this.

Are Plugins Even Effective For SEO?
To understand whether or not these plugins are even effective, we first have to define what SEO is to begin with. The term SEO refers to a variety of different changes and optimizations you can make on your website, and off of it, to improve your positions in the search engines and potentially get more traffic.

These optimizations mostly center around a proper understanding of keywords. To identify which keywords you can even rank for to begin with, you must learn how to perform in-depth keyword research, which no plugin can do for you. So right off the bat, it’s clear that no matter what a certain plugin claims to be able to do for you in terms of SEO, it’s likely exaggerating to some degree.

One of the most important parts of successfully implementing SEO is proper keyword research. Once you understand which keywords you want to focus on, now is when you have to utilize them properly on your website. Wordpress makes it easy to place your keywords throughout your website, but this step requires an understanding of keyword density, user experience, keyword clusters, and formatting content for SEO. Again, no plugins really handle these kinds of issues. Some will provide meager advice on keyword stuffing and may remind you to use your focus keyword in your meta title, but other than that, you’re on your own.

Then there is the actual content writing yourself. No Wordpress SEO plugin can generate content for you out of thin air that your users will actually want to read and get value from. Plugins can’t remove toxic spam links or create backlinks for you either, which are also important aspects to SEO.

At best, these plugins pave the way for a functional website that is primed for an SEO campaign, but they can’t take the place of actual manual optimizations. All real SEO is done by hand, by trained SEO professionals that have experience with ranking websites. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

If you are serious about improving your Wordpress website and getting more traffic into your WooCommerce store or other kind of business, you need a team of eCommerce SEO professionals that know a thing or two about how to really implement these optimizations and get the kind of results you are looking for. In this case, you need Genius eCommerce to help you craft a powerful campaign. Get in touch with them today and move past the “plugin” mindset.