We are often asked what the best WordPress SEO plugin or tools we recommend.
Search engines are the main source of traffic to most websites. Search engines are a great way to rank your website higher and grow your business.
This article will discuss the top WordPress SEO plugin and tools. Many of these tools have similar functions, so we’ll also highlight the ones that are best for certain use cases.
Things You Must Know About WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools
When reading SEO tips or searching for “best free WordPress SEO plugins”, you will come across articles that feature several dozen tools.
For non-techy users and beginners, this can be overwhelming.
To get higher search rankings, you don’t necessarily need to use a lot of SEO tools.
Although most blogs (including ours), will highlight the most popular SEO plugins available, it is important to fully understand the uses of each tool.
You don’t want to use more than one WordPress plugin on your site. We’ll mention All in One SEO and Yoast SEO as well as SEOPress and Rank Math. To avoid plugin conflicts, you must choose one.
We will mention Ahrefs and SEMRush as well as a few other powerful tools. However, you don’t necessarily need all of them when you first start out, since they have the same feature set. We’ll share the tools we use and which features are best.
Let’s now take a look at our top picks for the best WordPress SEO tools and plugins.
1. All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO)
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It is used by more than 2 million people and it helps improve your search rankings without any SEO jargon.
It has the easiest-to-use setup wizard, which automatically guides you in choosing the right SEO settings for your company. AIOSEO provides TruSEO on-page analysis and a checklist for optimizing your pages and posts.
Smart meta tags are available in the on-page SEO checklist. You can use dynamic data (current year, month and day, custom fields, and author info) in your SEO titles and descriptions. This allows you to modify SEO titles without having to update a post.
AIOSEO includes Rich snippet schema markup and smart XML sitemaps with advanced controls, SEO health check, as well as other useful features that will help you grow your search engine visibility.
You can also add Open Graph metadata to the integrated social media integration. This allows you to choose the thumbnail or image you wish to display when your pages are shared via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
AIOSEO also comes with built-in WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites. These include dynamic optimizations, individual product pages optimizations, product image SEO, and other useful features that will help you bring more organic traffic into your online store.
It is designed for SEO-savvy users who are more familiar with RSS feeds, Robots.txt editor, and local SEO.
It comes with the SEO user roles for business owners. This allows you to manage important SEO features without having to give up control of your site.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO), is the best WordPress SEO plugin for beginners. It removes the need for multiple plugins to accomplish certain tasks on your website. This works well for all kinds of businesses, including eCommerce, blogs, news, or other websites.
2. SEMRush
SEMRush is the best overall SEO tool on the market. It is used by SEO professionals, marketers, bloggers, as well as businesses of all sizes to help grow their traffic.
It can be used to identify organic keywords and search phrases that you can rank for. You can also use it to conduct competitive research to see what keywords your competitors rank for and how you could beat them.
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant tool helps you improve your website content to beat the top 10 results for your focus keyword. This integrates with WordPress and will allow you to write more SEO-friendly content.
3. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results.
It alerts you when Google is unable to crawl and index pages on your website. You also get helpful tips on how to fix those crawl errors.
Most importantly, it shows which keywords your website is ranking for, anchor texts, average position, impressions, and more. You can use this data to find keywords where you can easily rank higher by simply optimizing your content. You can also use this keyword data to come up with new blog post ideas.
Tip: You can use MonsterInsights to track your keyword rankings inside the WordPress admin area using Google Seach Console data.
MonsterInsights, another tool we’ll mention later, helps you bring the Search Console reports right inside your WordPress dashboard for easy access.
4. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your WordPress website for search engines.
It lets you easily add SEO titles and descriptions to all posts and pages on your website.
Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your website content which makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website. It also helps you easily import your SEO data if you have been using another SEO plugin.
5. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner tool helps you generate your own keyword ideas from Google itself.
The search giant has the most information about what people are looking for than anyone else. Google offers this free tool to advertisers. Anyone can use it. Its primary purpose is to display advertisers keywords that they can bid on in their advertising campaigns.
It helps advertisers select the best keywords by providing an estimate of search volume and the number of results.
This data can be used by content marketers and bloggers to identify keywords that have high search volumes, high advertiser interest, as well as keywords that can easily surpass all other websites.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool for marketers, bloggers, and businesses. It’s a popular alternative for SEMRush and has many similar features and tools.
It allows you to do keyword research, competition analysis, backlink research, monitor keyword rankings, and more.
You can also use it to analyze your content and target specific keywords.
Ahrefs excels at backlink analysis, despite the fact that there is a lot of overlap. It can be used to find out which websites are linking to us, and not to other competitors. This allows us to get more backlinks, and create more partnerships.
These tools also allow us to identify the content that our competitors rank for and we can then create content on these subjects to increase exposure.
Ahrefs is a tool that helps us to identify duplicate content and keyword cannibalization. This allows us to merge and improve the content we need to increase our rankings.
We pay for SEMRush and Ahrefs for the same reasons. They’re both useful for certain use-cases.
7. SEOPress
SEOPress is another simple yet powerful WordPress SEO plugin. It has all the features that you would expect in an SEO plugin, such as meta title, description, and open graph support.
It offers both a simple setup for beginners and more advanced controls for experienced users.
The plugin’s paid version is less expensive than other premium WordPress SEO plugins.
Notice: SEOPress is a WordPress SEO plug-in. You only need one WordPress plugin for your site.
8. Rank Math
Rank Math is a fast-growing user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. The setup wizard allows you to import data from different SEO plugins during setup.
It can be used to add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata easily to your blog posts. You can also create an XML sitemap and connect Google Search Console. The plugin allows you to control plugin access based on user role.
Notice: Rank Math is another AIOSEO option. You only need one WordPress SEO plugin for your site.
9. Schema Pro
Schema Pro allows you to add rich snippets to your website which makes it stand out in search results.
Rich Snippets can help you make your website stand out in search results. They allow you to show star ratings under a review, prices beneath a product, an image or video next to the description, etc.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO), a top WordPress SEO plugin, already adds structured rich snippets of data. Schema Pro can be used to add more schema types to your WordPress SEO plugin or to enhance its functionality.
Schema Pro allows you to use it with your existing WordPress SEO plugin.
10. KeywordTool.io
KeywordTool.io is one of the best free keyword research tools available right now. You can simply type in a keyword to generate keyword ideas. These keyword suggestions are pulled from Google’s autosuggest function. It will also show you keyword suggestions from YouTube, Amazon, Bing, YouTube, and other sources.
These keyword suggestions can be a treasure trove of information. Upgrade to their paid plan to get additional data such as search volume, cost per click, and other information for each keyword.
11. Redirection
Redirection helps you set up SEO-friendly redirects in WordPress. It is one of the handiest WordPress plugins that help you easily fix 404 errors in WordPress by setting up redirects.
Broken links can negatively impact your website’s SEO and cause a poor user experience. If you’ve been maintaining a blog for a while, you should periodically check your site for broken links and fix them.
Broken links can be easily found in WordPress using a variety of methods. You can fix broken links by either pointing to the correct URL or removing it from the site.
12. SEOquake
SEOQuake is a useful SEO tool for website owners. It’s available as a browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera web browsers.
It contains SEO-related information for every website. These data include page health, age and last update, Alexa rank, as well as many other parameters. SEO professionals have made it one of their most popular browser add-ons.
The SEOquake toolbar also shows you the same search results for keywords when you type them in. This information is extremely helpful if you want to gauge the competition for various keywords. You can also download search results in CSV format to create your own Excel sheets with search data.
13. WP Rocket
Search rankings are influenced by site speed. That’s why you need to monitor your website speed & performance to make sure it’s not affecting your SEO.
Caching is the best way to speed up your website. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market, which allows you to set up caching without diving into any technical stuff.
14. MonsterInsights
For their marketing decisions, many beginners rely on their best guesses. It doesn’t have to be that way when you can easily gain the insights you need for improving your website’s search engine optimization strategy.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows human-readable reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
It will tell you where your visitors are coming from, which content is most popular, what pages they visit, and much more. You can also track your eCommerce SEO by looking at which products are most popular and where you are losing customers.
Other Powerful Growth Tools:
We recommend these plugins in addition to the ones already mentioned.
- PushEngage – connect and engage with SEO visitors after they leave your website with web push notifications.
- OptinMonster – convert abandoning visitors into email subscribers & customers.
- Constant Contact – stay in touch with SEO visitors through email marketing.
- WPForms – get more leads from your SEO traffic with the #1 WordPress form builder.
- SeedProd – create SEO-friendly custom landing pages with drag & drop WordPress page builder (no coding needed).
We hope you found this article helpful in finding the best WordPress SEO tools and plugins.
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