Yoast Local SEO for WordPress Plugin Review

We love working with local businesses here at Top Draw. Online marketing can be very rewarding for local companies and we’re always interested in new tools for the job.

We’re big fans of Yoast, and have been using their flagship SEO for WordPress Plugin for a good while now, both on client sites and our own site, to make quick work of customizing meta tags, generating sitemaps, and so on. It’s awesome, and it’s free. Also, you gotta love their adorable cartoon mascots.

We were very excited to hear about the release of their new add-on to this plugin, Local SEO for WordPress. So we grabbed our copy right away and wanted to share our thoughts about it.

What it does

Simple. It marks up your contact page the way a professional SEO would, and the way search engines want to read it. The features include:

• KML File and Geo Sitemap generation
• Address output in Schema.org format
• Showing opening hours (with Schema.org output)
• Showing Google maps, including a routeplanner
• Support for multiple locations
• CSV upload for multiple locations

Putting it to use

It’s a breeze to implement, and there’s very little setup required. Install the plugin, activate your license, input your business’ information, and pop the shortcode into your contact page(s).

It will do all the markup for you, create a geositemap and KML file (especially useful with multiple locations), and even submit them to Google.

It just used our site’s existing styles, so it looked nice and shiny in action. You can see it here. The route planner is also pretty slick.

A couple tiny niggles

I had one small issue during setup, which was that the license key wasn’t working. A quick look at their support forum  was all I needed though, and I was up and running in minutes.

We also noticed that the link from our company name in the embedded map was linking to a funny url. Very minor issue, but I got a reply within 24 hrs. from Joost himself saying that they noticed the issue too and would be pushing out an update to fix it immediately.

The only other thing I wasn’t sure about was the absence of an email field. Mr. de Valk left a comment on this post and has told me he will be adding this feature in the next release!

Cost and value

This one’s not free – but it is very reasonably priced:

• Personal – Single Site – $69.00
• Professional – Up to 5 Sites – $129.00
• Agency – Unlimited – $249.00

For us, a couple hundred dollars for unlimited use on a plugin that saves us time is a no-brainer. I think for personal use on one site, 70 bucks is easily justified too. Paying anyone to do all the proper markup and implementation that this thing does would cost way more than that.

The professional price point makes sense for them to offer, but it seems like if you were going to use it on multiple sites you’d just go for the agency license and not have to worry about limitations.

No brain melting features, but all in all, a very handy plugin that does exactly what it promises without any bulk. Highly recommended for anyone with a local business, or web designers/SEOs with local clients.