The WordPress SEO Plugin Switch That Taught Me to Check Local SEO First

Picked my first SEO plugin based purely on which one I'd seen mentioned most often across forums and comparison articles. Didn't check whether it actually matched what my specific site needed, just installed it and moved on to other things.
Six months in, realized the free version I'd been using the whole time didn't include any local SEO functionality, and I run a small local business that genuinely needed it. Everything meaningful on that front was locked behind a paid tier I hadn't budgeted for and hadn't known to expect.
Switching plugins turned into considerably more work than I'd anticipated. Meta titles, schema markup, redirects, none of it transferred automatically the way I'd assumed it would going in. Ended up manually redoing a meaningful chunk of the setup, checking every page individually to make sure nothing important had been lost in the switch.
The plugin I eventually landed on included local SEO free as part of its base tier, which would have saved me the entire migration headache if I'd simply checked that specific requirement from the start instead of going with whatever had the most name recognition.
Lesson was straightforward in hindsight: check what your specific site actually needs, local SEO, e-commerce schema, whatever applies to you, before comparing plugins by feature list length alone.
If you're choosing a plugin now, this comparison covers what's actually worth checking: SEO Plugins for WordPress.
https://digiadgalla.com/best-seo-plugins-for-wordpress/