As with any other website, attracting search engine traffic can be crucial for the success of a WordPress site. Luckily, there are many apps, programs, and plugins out there that can help you optimize your search engine visibility to the max. You have probably heard of some of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast, SEO Press, or AllInOne SEO Pack.
However, the SEO Booster plugin has different functions. Even though the ultimate aim is to rank higher in search engine results, this plugin will show you the good, the bad and the ugly of what's going on with your WordPress SEO.
How to install and activate the SEO Booster plugin?
You can use SEO Booster for free or opt for the Premium version if you want to use some of the more advanced modules.
After you install and activate it, you will find a box where you can enter your license key if you subscribed to the Premium (Pro) version. If you want to continue using it for free, simply click on the option ‘Continue with the free version' below the license key box.
As you first enter SEO Booster's dashboard, you will have the opportunity to go through a guide that will show you the most important sections of the plugin.
SEO Booster Dashboard
The first thing you will access is the Dashboard page. Here, the SEO Booster plugin monitors traffic from different sources, such as keywords (hundreds of keywords), backlinks visitors, 404 errors, and so on. By visiting the dashboard, you will get a quick overview of this information and data, while you can go into deeper detail if you'd like to use some other features.
Keywords Module
If you are looking to boost the keyword magic on your WordPress site, there's no better way to do it than with SEO Booster's Keywords module!
In this section, you can find the exact keywords your visitors search for when they end up on your website. If you get a lot of organic traffic, keyword data from Google will be, as you surely know, scarce. Due to data privacy laws, Google and Yandex have stopped sharing detailed information on keyword strings that get users to your site, but there are still hundreds of different search engines that collect and share this data.
To encompass these sources of information and give you an extensive view of what your visitors are searching for, SEO Booster analyzes traffic from over 400 sources and shows them to you in a user-friendly keywords module dashboard.
The keywords dashboard will show you all pages of your website that receive search engine traffic, regardless of whether the actual keyword is provided or not (i.e., with Google). If you want to see only those keywords that are actually provided, you can use filter settings to extract only exact keywords.
You can also go ahead and hide the internal searches. These could be handy when you need an overview of what visitors are looking for on your site. However, if you are searching for keywords that you could rank for to better your SEO and the amount of traffic, it adds the additional level of clarity.
If you go ahead and install the pro version, you will also find the option to export the keywords as a .csv file. If you have the team that should be in on your keywords list or if you need the list in another program, this is the route to go.
Lost Traffic
Having a high-ranking page that attracts a lot of search engine traffic is awesome, but wouldn't you also like to know about the ones that don't?
In the Lost Traffic section, you can find and analyze pages that used to get search engine traffic, but no longer do. If you don't see any of your pages listed here, that's great! It means that you currently don't have the need to revamp the pages, as they are still receiving the needed traffic.
However, if you find a page that once got high search engine traffic and stopped doing so, you can re-optimize it to let it shine in its full glory again. This way, you can also see if there are any keywords that are no longer serving their purpose, so you can reorganize your SEO efforts.
Backlinks
Next to keyword (search engine) traffic, SEO Booster will also show you all visitors that come to your website via another location on the web.
With SEO Booster, thanks to these “referral” strings that can show where your visitor came from, you can easily check which websites are linking to your site. Each visitor that lands on your page by following a link from another website is monitored and listed in the Backlinks section. This list is an effortless way of getting to know your backlinks.
Backlink Checker
It sounds like a breeze, right? It is. However, an important thing to keep in mind is that these referral strings can be faked, so what seems like a regular link could be a non-existent one.
If you use the Pro version of SEO Booster, you can take advantage of its backlink verification. Instead of paying someone to do this manually, SEO Booster PRO will check each URL that redirects to your page to see if they are real. It will attempt this multiple times – won't give up until it has an answer.
If the link is real, it will save it in the list using either anchor text or an image, as seen in the screenshot above. For the fake link, it will notify you and try again. If after multiple attempts it can't find the link, it will remove the fake links from your dashboard.
Overall, if you are working on your backlink strategy to improve your SEO, this feature comes rather handy. Getting a backlink isn't easy, so checking if the link is real is almost mandatory for all the hard work to pay off.
Filter out backlinks from specific URLs or domains
Some domains contain more spam backlinks than others, and spam is difficult to handle and hide from Search Engines.
It is not good to generalize, but sometimes it is needed. If you notice that a specific domain is sending a lot of spam your way, make sure to stop them in their tracks, and in advance. Just add the specific URL or domain in the “filter box” which you can find in the settings page, and get rid of this kind of spam in no time and for good.
404 Errors
Having a 404 error on your website or some of your pages is a real SEO and UX killer. Therefore, it's important to be aware of any possible glitches or bugs on your site and improve them as soon as possible. The opportunity for you to see which pages are showing 404 error as soon as someone lands on them could be the insight you need.
You can turn on 404 errors monitoring in the Settings and get notified any time something goes wrong. In SEO Booster's 404 Errors section, you will find a list of all the missing content or wrong links currently present on your website. Once you know which pages are misbehaving, you should set up a redirect for them, for example, as soon as possible, to prevent losing credibility with your customers.
Log – What's Going On?
This section of the SEO Booster is highly useful, even beyond the scope of search engine optimization. Here, you will find news of all the major events and actions on your website, whether they are related to traffic, maintenance, updates, etc. If you want to have a complete bird-view of what's going on with your website, this is the place to go.
Just like with most other things in this plugin, this section is customizable, and you can choose to go into as much detail as you want. To change your logging preferences, simply go to the Settings section and turn on Debug Logging.
Additional Settings
Apart from these useful features that have you covered (mostly) when it comes to your SEO, there are additional settings that your site can benefit from:
Filtering out keywords
If you want to exclude particular keywords that appear on your website to connect your visitors to your pages, you can provide a list of the keywords that you want to filter out.
You can also opt-out of tracking internal searches as part of your SEO keyword analysis.
Automatic tagging
This feature is one of the most useful ones in the SEO Booster, as it allows you to optimize your internal linking structure, and to bring order to your content. If you opt for automatic tagging, the plugin can automatically assign keywords as tags to the related post or page.
Considering that these are actually keywords that people use to find your website, adding them to your post as keywords will help with your SEO. By doing so, you can increase your keyword ranking for those keywords that are already successful even more. This also works on Custom Post Types, so you don't have to think twice about that.
Two more features that can be very useful with automatic tagging are “tag length” and “related posts.” Considering that you don't want keywords that are too short or too long, the ability to add the minimum and maximum length to the tag is quite useful. Speaking of the other useful feature, you can have the plugin search for related posts, to which it will automatically assign the new tag, so you don't have to.
Autolink
Speaking of automating things, you can also use keywords as links thanks to the SEO Booster's Autolink option.
You can use this feature for both internal and external links, saving you hours of unnecessary work. If you have a post that is tied to a particular keyword, setting this up will enable SEO Booster to turn the specific keyword into a link leading to that post. So, instead of handling internal links manually per post, once you set this up, SEO Booster will do that for you.
Internal linking can help incredibly with the amount of time visitors spend on your site. The longer they stay on your site, by following the provided links and following up on internal links to lead more, the better your ranking with Google.
This option is not limited to internal links, as mentioned before. If you have an affiliate link promoting something outside of your site, you can set up the products name as a keyword, and it will turn it to a link to the other website. Don't worry; this plugin will avoid putting links into existing links and headings when adding them with the automatic option.
Of course, this sums up to a lot of keywords and a lot of links. To ease up the process, SEO Booster allows you to import keywords from Yoast SEO. This will save you hours of manual work!
Weekly Email Reports
SEO Booster allows you to subscribe to customized weekly email reports where you receive new info about your website's keyword traffic and incoming links.
PRO Features
Apart from several PRO features already mentioned, there are a couple of other notable features that can help you out with your SEO.
Automatic PageSpeed Insights
All of the features mentioned above and SEO tactics that you could use could be of no use if your page speed is terrible. Mind you; your visitors will not wait longer than three seconds for your page to load. If you ask them to – off they go to another site!
Here is where this PRO feature comes handy. Silently, in the background, it will continually complete an audit of your website's speed per page. All you have to do is go to the “Automatic PageSpeed Insights” tab to check it up. The colors will let you see in a glance which pages need work. What's more, you can click on suggestions to see what you could do to fix it, and then take action to speed up the pages that need work!
Crawled Pages
Another PRO Feature that can help you out with SEO is Crawled Pages. Do you want to know which crawlers visited your pages?
Of course, you do. Thanks to this useful feature, you can effortlessly check which crawlers got to which pages, and when!
Pricing
The first version of the SEO Booster WordPress plugin was first released back in 2008, but only in the Pro version. It wasn't until 2017 that the developers have offered a free version of the plugin as well. Today, it has more than 3,000 active installations and a 4.6 rating in WordPress' plugin library.
CleverPlugins SEO Booster Pro comes in three different pricing plans – monthly, annual, and lifetime. The price also changes depending on how many websites you want to cover.
All in all
If you are looking for an effective helping hand figuring out your SEO, look no further. While other SEO plugins can help you with additional information and suggestions on how to improve your SEO, SEO Booster goes one step ahead. Each of its features covers an important SEO aspect that you shouldn't ignore.
Keywords, backlinks, and other SEO aspects that you should handle become optimized and automated with this exceptional plugin. Documentation and help scattered around the plugin let you know what you should be doing, how, and why. After all, getting a grip on all the aspects of your website's SEO cannot be mastered in a night.
With the SEO Booster WordPress plugin, you will definitely get much more than you were hoping for. So, if you need help getting started, or you don't see much of the results from your current efforts, install this plugin. Not only you will get the help you need, but ultimately, more visitors and hopefully, more customers!