A major update to our Local SEO plugin

Joost de Valk

Local SEO pluginToday we’re releasing a major update to our Local SEO plugin, bringing it to version 1.2. This new version has functionality that quite a few of you requested, most important of them is a new store locator option.

Store locator

When you’re a brand that’s sold in several stores throughout a country, continent or even the entire world: you’ll want to tell people where they can buy your product. If you’re the owner of a chain of stores, you’ll want people to be able to easily find where the nearest store is. We’ve made that ridiculously easy.

When you have created multiple locations in your site using our Local SEO plugin, you’ll see a new button:

store locator button

Click on it and you’ll get very fancy store locator functionality. I can write for ages about it, but it’s probably easier if you just try it on our new demo site. That demo site has two stores close to our office and our office in it, typing in a postal code like “6605 PD” or a city like “Nijmegen” will show you how it works. We’ve updated the data to be a bit more international, it now contains Apple store locations in the US, UK and Canada, so type in a city or address in one of those countries to get the best results.

Duplicating locations

Other feedback we got is that people would like to copy data from other locations to be able to more easily set up new locations by copying the data from another location. Well, now you can: just create your new location and in the Local SEO settings you’ll see this:

copy location data

It really is as easy as you’d expect it to be.

Different URLs per location

When you have multiple locations, some of these might actually have their own URL. Up till now, the plugin didn’t allow for that, now it does. With that addition in combination with the store locator, this plugin basically becomes an entire shopping directory solution in its own right…

More changes

Some of the other changes:

  • We’ve added import functionality for the SimpleMap plugin.
  • Support for the new business.business Facebook OpenGraph type.
  • Added a field for a business cellphone number.
  • When you insert a map you now get a nice image of the different map types to help you in choosing the right map type.
  • We’ve improved the way the icons for the different shortcodes are shown in the backend by adding a textual label to them.

Go update! (or go buy it!)

So, if you’re already a user, go update! If you’re not a user yet, go look at our demo site or go buy the plugin now. We’d love to know what you think of the new features in the comments!

Check out our Local SEO Plugin

This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!