By Kaya Ismail | Jun 4, 2018
CHANNEL: Digital Marketing
With 30 percent of the internet being powered by WordPress, it comes as no surprise to see WordPress users coming from all walks of life. From individuals and small businesses to some of the biggest brands in the world like CNN and the National Football League (NFL).
As such, marketers are constantly looking to leverage WordPress plugins to out-do the competition, streamline their workflows and reach new audiences — whether that’s for a small startup or a multinational brand.
To put the ultimate list of WordPress marketing plugins together, we’ve leaned on recommendations from Neil Patel, Hubspot and Smart Insights.
Jetpack is an all-in-one WordPress plugin that offers a variety of advanced features including analytics, mobile themes, widgets, content tools and more.
Marketers have the option to use all of Jetpack’s features or either select the features which are appropriate to their requirements. Many marketers use Jetpack to get an immediate overview of their web traffic statistics, while others opt to use it to help them publish new posts across social media.
Related Article: Ghost vs. WordPress: A Purist Blogger’s Dilemma
WordPress may be SEO friendly, but Yoast SEO provides marketers with the necessary guidance to ensure each blog post and page is fully optimized. The plugin is easy-to-use and provides a comprehensive solution.
To give you an example, its page analysis functionality can prevent marketers from making common mistakes like missing alt text descriptions, which helps to increase search visibility, and lengthy titles. These little common oversights can affect your search engine rankings, and this plugin helps you to iron out these errors.
According to Search Engine Land, “XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster.” This works in your favor when trying to get your posts to the top-end of the search results.
The Google XML Sitemap plugin requires no technical knowledge to begin with and provides a simple step-by-step process in helping you build a sitemap that can be used not just with Google, but with other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.
It is one of the most popular plugins with over 1+ million installs and has a 4.9 out of 5-star rating.
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For some, writing comes quite naturally. To others, it can be a struggle to articulate their words onto either paper or a computer screen. The Just Writing plugin aids the latter through its distraction-free writing mode that’s provided by the plugin.
The removal of distractions increases your chances of writing and creating better content, whilst improving your productivity. The plugin also provides a number of additional features including the features below.
Having broken links and missing images can work against your site’s search rankings. With the Broken Link Checker plugin, it scans your posts, pages, comments and other content to seek out any broken links. If any broken links have been identified, you will be immediately notified so you can make a quick fix.
The plugin constantly monitors every link on your site and provides you with the option of being notified via email or on the WordPress dashboard. You can even edit any broken link via the plugin’s own dashboard, saving you time from having to manually seek out the page or post with the faulty link.
If you are using WordPress to operate an e-commerce brand, then WooCommerce is perhaps the only e-commerce plugin you will need. The plugin can assist you with handling payments through a variety of payment options, create online store themes and can help you assess your stock levels.
WooCommerce provides a great deal of flexibility and has an array of free and premium extensions. It is one of the most popular eCommerce solutions powering 30% of all online stores.
The WP Review plugin helps you to create product reviews as either a star rating, percentage or any custom scale (performance, quality, ease-of-use, etc.). Reviews can also be created for any other content, whether it is a blog post or page.
The plugin enables the review score to appear on the search engine results page. The higher the rating, the better the chance of a user clicking through to the product page or content.
WordPress’ editor lacks a table feature. And tables are a great way of presenting information neatly to your user. The TablePress plugin is extremely easy to use and its spreadsheet-like interface allows you to design and manage tables without HTML. In addition, tables can be embedded into posts, pages or a text widget.
As one of the popular content management systems, WordPress does a lot of things right. But when it comes to scheduling and managing content, it is not so user-friendly. The Editorial Calendar provides an overview of your content, showing you when each blog post is scheduled to be published.
The plugin user-friendly interface enables you to edit posts in the calendar, drag and drop each post to different dates and manage multiple authors. Even if you run your blog as a single user, this plugin can benefit you in terms of efficiency, productivity, organization and management.
Security is a major concern for most WordPress site owners. Poor security protocols can damage your reputation and can also harm your customers via loss of confidential information.
iThemes Security (previously known as Better WP Security) is the most popular security plugin for WordPress. The plugin has a comprehensive platform that includes scheduled malware scans, a two-factor authentication, online file validation and user action logging.
Ensuring your content is easy to read is essential, since consumers are now doing more product research in their own time through various channels. The FD Word Statistics plus helps to improve the readability of each post/page you write using well-known readability analysis methods. The plugin utilizes both Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog to provide an overall score of your writing.
The title of your post alone can determine whether you will achieve a high click-through rate. The Title Experiments plugin enables you to conduct a quick A/B test between two titles to help you determine which is the best fit for your post so you can attract more views and engagement. Remember, the headline is the first thing your readers see, so make it punchy.
Slow performing websites can deter your visitors. As customer experience becomes a key factor for running digital platforms, ensuring your WordPress performs consistently is crucial. The W3 Total Cache plugin uses caching to achieve optimum web performance, thus improving user experience and boosts the speed of your WordPress site. It is a very popular tool with more than a million active installations and users.
For simple yet effective social media engagement, then look no further than Click To Tweet. This plugin enables you to create “Click To Tweet” boxes anywhere in your post, making it easier for your readers to share your content on social media.
Depending on both your content and your audience, you can add one or multiple “Click To Tweet” boxes in your post.
It is every content marketer’s worst nightmare to have a glaring typo being pointed out by their reader. The Proofread Bot is a useful plugin to detect both spelling and grammar mistakes as well as any stylistic issues. And as an added bonus, this tool can prevent you from accidentally committing plagiarism by running your content through Bing to cross check.
If you want to gain a better understanding of the behavior of your website visitors, then look no further than LeadIn. This plugin tracks visitors’ behavior so you can design and adjust your website accordingly. Its marketing automation features also helps to convert your visitors into leads, which are then automatically added to your contact list.
Having your comments section filled with spammy comments is extremely annoying, to put it politely. Akismet can eliminate these unwanted comments by automatically reviewing and filtering your comments to find any malicious links and signs of spam. Users are able to keep an eye on any comments that have been caught out, and which have been cleared to be approved.
Similar to LeadIn, OptinMonster can help marketers build their email lists. The difference between the two plugins is that OptinMonster gives you the option to create many types of forms, including:
And as an added bonus, all forms are mobile friendly and responsive, thus helping you gain more subscribers via smartphone and tablet users.
Developed using Google Analytics API, this plugin helps you track the performance of your blog or website through your WordPress dashboard. The plugin provides extensive analytic data reporting including search result pages, page bounce rate, and error pages.
Pretty Link is often overlooked by marketers, but it does have some beneficial features. This plugin shrinks lengthy URL links to make it more presentable on your WordPress site. So rather than using tinyurl.com or bit.ly, you can shrink URLs and track the number of clinks per link both directly via this plugin.
Marketers, as you may know, have an endless number of tasks. TaskFreak can help to manage your tasks for either yourself or your group, whilst ensuring no task is left unturned. The plugin gives you the option to create projects and add and assign tasks to individual users. The feature for users to discuss tasks via the plugin’s dashboard helps to improve collaboration and enables users to provide status updates and send attachments.
In addition, TaskFreak is mobile friendly and compatible with all WordPress themes. TaskFreak may not be known to all marketers, but it is extremely useful from a task management perspective.
Despite its name, this plugin does more than just create well designed and functional landing pages for lead generation purposes. It can be used to monitor conversion rates and run split tests. Also, the visual editor allows you to view changes as they are made.
Besides writing informative and engaging content to help boost your search engine rankings, you also need to have top quality images. And just like your content, your images need to be optimized for search engines. The SEO Friendly Images plugin automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images, thus saving you a great deal of time in the process.
Social media marketing can enable your content to reach out to your target market or wider audience. This plugin makes it easier for your readers to share content on to more than 20 popular social media channels. And it can even be customized to suit your needs.
Boosting reader/customer engagement is crucial and should be a standard goal for any marketer. Many marketers use social media and blog comments for engagement, but another form of engagement comes from direct contact. And this is where the Contact Form 7 plugin comes in.
Contact Form 7 allows to add multiple contact forms to your website. The contact forms can be easily customized to suit your audience needs and design criteria.
Tags cms, content management systems, dxm, marketing automation
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