WordPress SEO Plugins and Tools

August 21, 2022

WordPress SEO Plugin: people often asked what are the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools we recommend. In fact, search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites on the Internet. Optimizing your website for search engines can help you rank higher in search results and grow your business significantly.

What you need to know about WordPress SEO plugins and tools

When you read WordPress SEO tips or search for “best free WordPress SEO plugins,” you’ll find articles offering dozens of tools. It can be quite overwhelming for beginners and non-technical users. The truth is, you don’t need dozens of SEO tools to rank higher in search engine results.

Although most blog posts (including ours) share the most popular SEO plugins, it is extremely important that you understand the use cases for each tool.

We’ll mention SEMRush, Ahrefs, and a few other powerful tools, but you don’t need all of them when you’re just starting out because they have a similar feature set.

We will share the tools we use in our business and the best features of each tool. With that said, let’s take a look at our expert pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.

All in One SEO for WordPress

These include All in One SEO (formerly All in One SEO Pack), Yoast SEO, SEOPress, and Rank Math. We’ll mention SEMRush, Ahrefs, and a few other powerful tools, but you don’t need all of them when you’re just starting out because they have a similar feature set. We will share the tools we use in our business and the best features of each tool.

There’s also built-in social media integration for adding Open Graph metadata. This means that you can choose which image or thumbnail you want to display when your pages are shared on social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. AIOSEO also comes with integrated WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites.

For more SEO-savvy users, it includes full RSS feed control, Robots.txt editor, Local SEO, Breadcrumbs, Google News sitemaps, and Video SEO.

For business owners, it comes with SEO user features, so you can manage access to important SEO features without relinquishing control of your website. Update: AIOSEO recently added a game-changing link helper for internal links. It helps identify link opportunities, gives you real-time link suggestions, and can bulk add internal links with just a few clicks.

It’s easy to set up and eliminates the need to install multiple plugins to get things done on your WordPress site. It works great for all kinds of businesses, e-commerce, blogs, news, and other websites.

SEMRush

SEMRush is the best general SEO tool on the market. Used by professional SEO experts, marketers, bloggers, and businesses large and small, it provides a complete set of tools to increase your traffic.

It also allows you to do competitive research and see what keywords your competitors rank for and how you can beat them. The SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant tool helps you improve your website content to exceed the top 10 results for your priority keyword. It integrates with WordPress which will help you write more SEO-friendly content.

You can also generate SEO templates and get search engine optimization suggestions for your content, as well as advanced SEO recommendations. SEMRush seamlessly integrates with All in One SEO (AIOSEO) to help you find additional keyword phrases for your specific keyword phrase. You can see related keyword phrases and their search volume directly from WordPress. You can then add them to your content with a single click.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners and administrators monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results. You can use this data to find keywords that you can rank higher simply by optimizing your content. You can also use this keyword data to generate new blog post ideas.

Yoast SEO

You can also use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your posts. Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap for all of your website content, making it easy for search engines to crawl your website. It also helps you easily import your SEO data if you have used another SEO plugin.

Other features include readability analysis, Google and social previews, and faster load times for a better user experience.

Benefits included:

Yoast SEO can optimize your posts for a particularly specific keyword phrase. Powerful linking tools to create a strong internal linking structure.

Avoid dead links and 404 errors present on your website.

Manage keyword density.

You can create an optimized meta description for your website.

Help you correctly implement the focus keyword.

Keep website permalinks clean and tidy by giving you the option to edit permalinks.

Disadvantages and limitations :

Don’t consider keyword intent when working on keyword density.

Understand readability and content strategy based on certain parameters.

The Google Keyword Planner tool

The Google Keyword Planner tool helps you generate your own keyword ideas from within Google. No one on the planet has more information about what people are searching for than the search giant Google. This free tool is offered free to Google advertisers and anyone can use it. Its main purpose is to show advertisers the keywords they can bid on for their ad campaigns.

Ahrefs

It allows you to perform keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink research, SEO audits, monitor keyword rankings, and more.

Although there is a lot of overlap in features, what Ahrefs does really well is backlink analysis. We can use this to see which sites are linked to multiple competitors, but not to us. It helps us get more backlinks and build more associations.

They also help us identify content that many of our competitors rank for and we don’t, so we can create content around those topics for more visibility. Finally, Ahrefs helps us better identify duplicate content and keyword cannibalization, helping us merge and update the right content to improve our rankings.

SEO Press

It includes all the features you would expect from an SEO plugin, such as meta title, description, open graph support, image, and content XML sitemaps, redirects, etc.

Rank Math is another SEO-friendly WordPress plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. It comes with a setup wizard and allows you to import data from other SEO plugins during setup. You can use it to easily add Open Graph meta titles, descriptions, and metadata to your blog posts. The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect to Google Search Console, and control access to plugin features based on user roles.

Schema Pro

Schema Pro allows you to add rich snippets to your website, setting it apart from search results. Rich snippets allow you to make your website stand out in search results by displaying ratings below a review, prices below a product, image or video next to the description, etc.

The best WordPress SEO plugins, like All in One SEO (AIOSEO), already add structured rich snippet data to your website. However, if you need more schema types or want to extend the functionality of your existing WordPress SEO plugin, then Schema Pro is the answer.

These keyword suggestions are pulled from Google’s auto-suggest feature. It also shows you keyword suggestions from Bing, YouTube, Amazon, etc. you can also get search volume, cost per click, and other data for each keyword when you upgrade to their paid plan.

Redirection

Redirect helps you set up SEO-optimized redirects in WordPress. This is an easy-to-break link checker that helps you easily fix 404 errors in WordPress by setting up redirects.

If you’ve been running a blog for a while, you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them. Once you find a broken link, you may need to fix it by directing users to the correct link or removing the wrong link.

It is available as a browser plugin for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers. Provides SEO-related information for any website. This data includes page status, age, last update, Alexa rank, and many other metrics. It is one of the most downloaded browser plugins by SEO professionals.

Other than that, SEOQuake Toolbar can show you the same data search results when you type any keyword. This information can be extremely useful if you are evaluating the competition for different keywords.

Bonus Plugins for WordPress Website Owners

These tools give you an extra edge when optimizing your website for SEO. They are not presented as SEO tools, but they are essential for all websites and play an important role in the search performance of your website.

Site speed is an important factor in search rankings. This is why you need to monitor your website speed and performance to make sure it doesn’t affect your SEO.

The easiest way to increase the speed of your website is to enable caching. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market, allowing you to configure caching without going into the technical details.

Does WordPress need an SEO plugin?

Do you need to use SEO plugins with WordPress.com? The short answer to this question is no. You already have access to many powerful built-in tools and features to help you optimize your pages and content for search engines. So you don’t really need to use SEO plugins with WordPress.com.

Monsterlnsights

Many newbies rely on their best guess to make their marketing decisions. No need when you can easily get the information you need to improve your website’s SEO strategy.

Other powerful growth tools:

ptinMonster – Convert abandoned visitors into subscribers and email customers.

SeedProd – Create custom, SEO-friendly landing pages with a drag-and-drop WordPress page builder (no coding needed).

Q&A

What is the best free WordPress SEO plugin?

Yoast (Opens in a new tab) is probably the most popular and established SEO plugin for WordPress, and is available in both a feature-rich free version and an advanced paid version.

Is the Yoast SEO plugin free?

We offer a free version of the plugin, which will definitely get your SEO started. But I also advise you to check out our Premium plugin to make sure you don’t miss out on the features that will get you to the top of the leaderboard.

Do SEO plugins work?

An SEO plugin allows you to easily optimize metadata They are very important in telling search engines what the page is about. If your website automatically generates these meta elements for you, they are probably not well optimized for search engines.

Is Yoast’s premium worth it?

Is Yoast SEO Premium worth it? No, this is not the case. The multi-focus keywords feature is pretty useless, redirects can be set up using free redirect plugins, and nothing in Yoast Premium directly improves your SEO. Not worth $99/year

What plugin is used for SEO?

There are many other options, but my favorite is Yoast SEO. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin for a reason. This can be seen from the almost 2,000 reviews, with an overall rating of 4 out of 5 stars.

How many hours does SEO take?

It can take as little as two hours for a single blog post to rank; two weeks for a competitive landing page to rank; six months for a number of pages to rank, or more than a year for a new site to see SEO traction. The generic answer “4-6 months” is exactly that, generic.