Best SEO Plugins for WordPress | How to Improve a Travel Site

You’ve launched your tourism website, and now what? How do you market your content so that it reaches your target audience? Well, when it comes to running a successful travel WordPress website, SEO is essential for getting your content in front of a wider market.

Whether you’re sharing travel guides, hotel reviews, or destination tips, your WordPress site needs to be optimised to rank higher in search results. That’s where SEO plugins come in handy. With the right WordPress plugin, you can improve your keyword research, on-page SEO, site speed, schema markup, and more.

With the best SEO plugins for WordPress supporting your site, you can bask in the limelight of increased visibility, organic traffic, user engagement, leads, and, ultimately, sales. Sounds like just what you need for your travel website? Then, keep reading.

Why Your Travel Website Needs an SEO Plugin on WordPress

SEO plugins are essential tools for improving your travel website’s search engine rankings. They help optimise your content for specific keywords, ensure that your website is well-structured, and fix any underlying issues that could harm your SEO efforts.

Without these SEO plugins, you may miss out on critical optimisation opportunities, which can negatively impact your traffic and overall performance. As experts, we know that mastering travel SEO is no easy feat, but it is essential to your website’s success.

So, whether you’re just starting or running a well-established travel site, a WordPress SEO plugin can help you:

• Optimise your blog posts and pages for better visibility on search engines.
• Generate XML sitemaps for improved crawling and indexing.
• Ensure your meta descriptions and titles are optimised for search engines.
• Speed up your site by managing caching and image optimisation.

15 Best WordPress SEO Plugins For Your Travel Site

Now that you know the potential benefits, let’s dive into the best SEO plugins for WordPress, their features, and why you should use them to improve your travel website’s performance.

1. Yoast SEO — Best WordPress SEO Plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular SEO plugins and the most used by website owners, with over 27,000 downloads. While it’s often used for creating quality SEO content, Yoast SEO also helps with technical aspects like effortlessly creating XML sitemaps.

You can find Yoast SEO as a free plugin on WordPress, but there is also a paid version. While you can get by with the free version, the premium plan takes it a step further, giving you access to AI features that generate meta descriptions and titles for pages. You can also use the AI feature to write SEO-rich blogs and social media posts for your travel website.

Other stand-out features of Yoast SEO include content analysis, which provides real-time feedback on your posts, keyword usage analysis, readability, and meta tags. You’ll also take control of your website’s breadcrumbs, adding easy navigation for both users and search engines. Finally, you can add canonical URLs to direct search engines to relevant content.

2. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

All in One SEO (AIOSEO for short) is another comprehensive SEO toolkit and WordPress plugin that can help skyrocket your travel site’s visibility and reach. It’s often used as an alternative to Yoast SEO by those who want more customisation that caters to their content strategy.

The SEO pack offers extraordinary features, like Schema Markups, that help you get a better click-through rate (CTR) by using rich snippets and improving your local SEO rankings. This SEO plugin also has a link assistant, which makes internal link suggestions to other pages.

One of our favourite features offered by this WordPress SEO plugin is the integration with Google Keyword Rank Tracking, allowing you to easily track your site’s ranking on Google. As we mentioned, AIOSEO is great for advanced users, offering technical features like smart XML sitemaps, a Robots.txt Editor, full site redirects, and social media integrations.

3. Rank Math

Rank Math is an all-in-one SEO plugin rapidly gaining popularity thanks to its ease of use and wide range of powerful features. This WordPress SEO plugin can scale up your travel site’s visibility and organic traffic with built-in features that you’d normally have to pay for.

The SEO plugin has an easy-to-follow setup wizard, a clean user interface, and a personal AI assistant to help craft compelling content. We appreciate that Rank Math also supports over 16 types of Schema Markup, which is perfect for creating rich snippets.

Its integration with Google Search Console is also worth raving about. This allows you to track your travel website’s performance in search results. Use Rank Math’s built-in 404 monitor to find and resolve 404 errors for an improved user experience.

There are simply too many features to mention, but what we know for sure is that Rank Math’s detailed analysis and suggestions are highly beneficial for any travel site.

4. SEOPress

SEOPress is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. It can help you boost traffic to your travel website, improve social sharing, and customise HTML and XML sitemaps. This SEO WordPress plugin is great for content analysis, redirections, and creating custom breadcrumbs.

You’ll also appreciate its ability to clean source code, making it clear and understandable. SEOPress is a great alternative to Yoast SEO and AIOSEO, offering similar features but with less bloat. It’s perfect if you want a lightweight yet powerful SEO plugin for WordPress.

Other features we love about SEOPress include mobile and desktop Google Preview, which is crucial to ranking on the search engine. We also appreciate the integration with Google Analytics and social media platforms. Don’t sleep on the plugin’s image SEO feature, which automatically sets the titles, descriptions, captions, and alt (alternative) text on your images.

5. The SEO Framework

As a travel business owner, you may have a hands-off approach to SEO; if that’s true, then you need a WordPress plugin like this one. The SEO Framework is lightweight, fast, and automated, so you can simply set it up and then focus on working on your travel business.

This SEO WordPress plugin comes with preconfigured settings that make it easier to automatically optimise your content using artificial intelligence. We also love that, unlike other SEO plugins, this one has no ads; it’s free and unbranded.

Some great features you’ll get by using The SEO Framework include optimising metadata, enabling breadcrumbs for Google search via structured data, and integrating social media with your travel site. We cannot skip mentioning that this WordPress SEO plugin uses a hand-picked colour scheme suitable for those with any recognised colour-vision deficiency.

The SEO Framework also implements keyword navigation and screen-reader support.

6. WP Meta SEO

WP Meta SEO is all about bulk optimisation, making it ideal for travel bloggers who want to optimise large amounts of content quickly. It’s one of the best WordPress SEO plugins, with features that allow you to optimise content, meta tags, and edit images all in one go.

WordPress plugins often have additional elements (add-ons) that you can use to further improve website performance, and WP Meta SEO is no different. This SEO WordPress plugin allows you to add features like Google Search Console, add local business information, automate schedule crawl content for broken links, and redirect URLs.

WP Meta SEO is ideal for advanced users, travel bloggers, or marketers with large amounts of content. It allows you to use image optimization to improve site load times and search rankings, bulk edit meta tags faster, and track performance with integrated Google Analytics.

7. Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins on the market. Designed for non-SEO experts, this popular SEO plugin offers real-time optimisation suggestions as you write. The built-in keyword research helps you find ideal keywords for your travel content.

There are many features we won’t mention here, but we cannot omit the Focus Pages feature, which communicates to search engines which pages you want to rank for. This allows you to implement a specific content marketing strategy that suits your business.

Squirrly SEO also offers an audit feature that allows you to perform in-depth SEO audits to find areas of improvement on your travel site. The SEO plugin for WordPress has an AI keyword research tool that shows similar keywords, which may have high search volumes.

What makes Squirrly SEO a contender for the best SEO plugin are the real-time on-page optimisation tips. Many business owners aren’t well-versed in SEO, so having a tool that highlights aspects of SEO that you can add to your content as you write is simply brilliant.

8. Schema Pro

At first glance, Schema Pro may not seem like an SEO WordPress plugin you need to improve your travel website’s performance, but that would be a mistake. Use Schema Pro to add schema markup to your site, helping search engines better understand your content.

But what is “schema markup”? Otherwise known as structured data, schema markup is the language that search engines use to read and understand your website’s content. This is a game changer in SEO, especially when you’re targeting the top spots on the rich results.

You can implement Schema Pro on your travel website in three easy steps. First, choose a schema type — this could be for recipes, books, blogs, etc. Then, select the post or page on which you want to implement the schema. Finally, map the content, adding relevant attributes like page title, feature image, author name, date, and much more.

Schema Pro may not assist with creating SEO content, but what it does is essential to running a successful travel website. You don’t want to lose traffic (and potential customers) because of strangely presented website data.

9. WPSSO Core

Now that you know the importance of structured data, let’s explore another WordPress SEO plugin you can use. WPSSO Core is the go-to plugin for managing meta tags and structured data, ensuring your travel content looks great on social media platforms and search engines.

This SEO plugin provides structured data for all the essentials, including Meta (Facebook and Instagram) integrations, WhatsApp and Messaging Apps integrations, and much more.

WPSSO Core has a free version, but you can upgrade to premium and activate additional plugins, such as Elementor Website Builder, WooCommerce, and Gravity Forms.

What we absolutely love about this SEO tool is that it handles both social sharing and search engine optimization (SEO), making it a multi-functional plugin. It can be used in tandem with other WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and the All in One SEO Pack.

10. Broken Link Checker

Courtesy of AIOSEO, Broken Link Checker ensures that you don’t have any dead links on your travel site, which can hurt your SEO and user experience. By reporting the health and functionality of both internal and external links, this WordPress SEO plugin ensures the best user experience. Nothing is as irritating as stumbling on a 404 page, but you can avoid this.

Combine the Broken Link Checker with other SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, AIOSEO, or Rank Math to streamline your SEO process quickly. This plugin provides granular control over link monitoring, allowing you to choose specific posts and pages to observe.

It’s one of the many SEO plugins that check links, allowing you to detect valid links, broken links, and redirects. But it stands out because of its URL exclusions. For example, if you’re migrating from one domain to another, you can exclude certain URLs from being checked.

11. LiteSpeed Cache

We’ve briefly touched on how accelerating site speed is a crucial aspect of an SEO plugin. One way to do this is by storing copies of your files in a cache. This makes loading those graphics or images faster to load, especially for frequent website visitors.

But LiteSpeed Cache is more than just a caching plugin; it also helps optimise images and reduce load times, which are critical for SEO. Another feature that makes this SEO tool stand out among other WordPress plugins is its CDN Integration. This SEO tool easily integrates with content delivery networks (CDNs) for faster local and global performance.

SEO tools like this are quite handy if you want to successfully build a tourism marketing strategy that works. Travel businesses are location-based, so having a tool like LiteSpeed will not only help you rank high but provide a great user experience for all of your audience.

A great bonus is that it’s also one of the SEO plugins for WordPress that’s compatible with WooCommerce, Google XML Sitemaps, Contact Form 7, and even Yoast SEO.

12. YARPP – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Have you ever heard of “bounce rate”? This is a percentage of website visitors who leave without spending a lot of time or interacting with any of its components. These are actions such as not clicking on any links or visiting a second page on the same website.

As awful as that sounds, many travel websites suffer from high bounce rates. That’s why YARPP is a superb SEO plugin. It enhances overall user engagement by showing related posts, thus keeping visitors on your website longer and subsequently reducing bounce rates.

Some key features of this WordPress plugin include the ability to customise algorithms for titles, meta tags, and categories. This makes it a helpful tool when implementing a travel content marketing strategy that incorporates SEO techniques such as topic clustering.

13. Slim SEO

Slim SEO offers essential SEO features in a lightweight package, perfect for those who want a no-fuss solution. With minimal configuration and high-quality code, this just might be the best SEO plugin for your travel business to achieve top search engine rankings.

You’ll have access to auto-generated and optimised meta titles, several schema types, image alt text, and other critical features that will help your WordPress site rank high. Slim SEO also covers all the basics, from breadcrumbs to redirection and structured data.

A cool feature that makes Slim SEO outstanding is the RSS Feed feature. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary), prevents visitors from copying content from your travel site. It also adds a backlink to the copied content, thus improving your credibility.

14. Internal Link Juicer

We’ve briefly discussed how broken links can badly affect your SEO game. Now, let’s unpack how streamlining internal linking between your posts and pages improves a website’s SEO. Using SEO WordPress plugins like Internal Link Juicer automates internal linking, thus contributing to improved user experience and longer lengths of time spent on the website.

This tool not only helps WordPress websites like yours automate linking between relevant pages, but it also allows you to configure linking behaviour and customise link output. That’s why Internal Link Juicer is the perfect tool for an SEO strategy targeting a specific keyword.

You’ll get quite a lot from the free version, but the premium option offers more technical features like auto-importing the data of a focus keyword from sites like Rank Math. The plugin’s professional statistics will help you tweak your keyword optimization as needed.

15. XML Sitemap Generator for Google

SEO is vast and diverse, requiring creative and technical strategies. But one aspect of WordPress SEO that you can’t overlook is the implementation of XML sitemaps. This tool helps search engines better index your travel site by automatically generating sitemaps.

If you’re still confused, XML sitemaps are lists that host a website’s important pages so that engines like Google can easily find and crawl them. If your website doesn’t get crawled, it simply won’t show up on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

This tool goes further by creating images, videos, HTML, and even RSS sitemaps. If your website has many pages and you’re not sure which ones are being crawled or indexed, use this generator in collaboration with tools like Google Search Console to fix the issue.

SEO Plugins for WordPress: Must-Have Features

A winning SEO WordPress plugin must have certain features to deliver a successful campaign. If you’re lucky, you should find an all-in-one SEO plugin that fulfils your needs or select a bouquet of tools that will help you implement all of the must-add features below.

Automated On-Page SEO

On-page SEO plugins are essential for optimising the content that appears on your travel site. So, use tools like Yoast SEO and Rank Math to guide you in crafting keyword-rich titles, meta descriptions, and headers to improve your content’s visibility in the search results. An internal linking plugin can automate this process for your website without you lifting a finger.

Broken Links Detector

Broken links can harm your website’s user experience and SEO, making tools like Broken Link Checker invaluable. These plugins automatically scan your site for dead links and provide alerts, allowing you to fix issues before they negatively impact your SEO rankings.

Track Keyword Rankings

Monitoring your keyword performance is vital for understanding how well your travel content is ranking in the search engines. Plugins like Rank Math offer built-in keyword tracking features that allow you to keep an eye on your targeted keywords over time.

Having this insight helps you adjust your SEO strategy over time, ensuring that you maintain or improve your search rankings. You can also use these as part of your SEO audits, looking for keywords that have high traffic yield potential but are not yet targeted in your strategy.

Meta Description + Meta Title Optimization

Meta descriptions and titles are just as critical for improving your website’s click-through rate in search engine results. SEO plugins like Yoast SEO make it easy to create and manage these elements by providing real-time previews of how your pages will appear in the search.

Schema Markup / Structured Data Usage

Schema markup (a.k.a. structured data) enhances how your travel content appears in the search results, making it more engaging with rich snippets like star ratings, event details, and product information.

Plugins like Schema Pro and WPSSO Core make it easy to add structured data to your site without requiring coding skills. By implementing schema, you help search engines better understand your content and display it in more attractive, informative ways, improving your site’s click-through rates.

Best SEO WordPress Plugins Wrapped Up

Choosing the right SEO plugin for your travel site is crucial for your success in search rankings. From comprehensive tools like Yoast SEO and Rank Math to specialised plugins like Schema Pro and Broken Link Checker, there’s an SEO plugin out there for every need.

If you’re a beginner getting started or an experienced marketer looking for expert features, book a call with one of our strategists to discuss the right WordPress SEO plugins for you.