Search engines are the primary source of traffic for the majority of websites on the internet. Optimizing your website for search engines with the best SEO practices help you rank higher in search results and significantly scale your business.
Facts: 93% of all internet experiences begin with a search engine, and 39% of e-commerce traffic across the world comes from search.
If you already own a WordPress website, then you are lucky! WordPress is largely considered an SEO-friendly platform. And with hundreds and thousands of WordPress SEO plugins to choose from, a few additions to your website is all that you need to rank higher in search engine results.
WordPress SEO plugins help you identify your blog posts and pages with higher potential. Besides, they function to fix broken links, reorganize your website structure and analyze different ranking factors.
In this article, we have prepared a detailed list of the 10 best WordPress plugins for your WordPress SEO. Some of these tools offer similar functionality, while others have some unique features. It’s up to you to determine what you need for your website and make arrangements likewise.
Before diving into the details, check out these 30+ Best WordPress Plugins for Blogs.
Importance of SEO For WordPress Websites
Here are some of the major benefits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your WordPress website:
Visibility and Rankings:
SEO is important for any type of business including content because it increases search engine rankings and boosts your blog’s visibility.
It’s a simple formula: The higher your WordPress blog ranks on the search engine result page (SERP), the more likely your audience will see it and visit it. If you put more effort into SEO, you can make your blog post appear on the first page of the search result, and more people will be able to see it.
Web Traffic
When you start a WordPress website and integrate an SEO plugin to it, one of your main goals is to optimize your site and increase web traffic. So, how can you achieve this?
Obviously, by increasing visibility and rankings!
Based on the particular keywords, SEO can generate good traffic and ultimately boost the blog’s revenue.
If you want more visitors to find your blog through search engines, then you need handy SEO practices that will help you rank among the top five positions, and ideally number one.
Authority of Website
Authority has become increasingly important to search engines because it is turning out to be crucial for web users and bloggers. Authority means that your blog is trustworthy, standard, relevant, and it has something to offer to the users.
Since 2019, Google has been making Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) its top-ranking factor for blog content. It has been focusing on its Quality Rater Guidelines on blog reputation and content purpose.
It’s simple. Now, Google only ranks relatable sources, i.e., those generating expert content and properly optimized for search intent. So, before you write SEO-friendly content, make sure your content gets aligned with E-A-T.
The more authority your blog has, the higher your ranking will be, and more visitors will come to trust your blog.
Better User Experience
Another reason SEO is fundamental is that it helps to create a better viewing experience for your audiences. All the time you put into creating great content and optimizing your site with on-page SEO improves the site usability. As a result, this creates a seamless and positive customer experience.
For example, when you use some SEO practices to make your blog responsive, it will make it usable for all your mobile visitors and people who visit your blog from a laptop or desktop.
Similarly, by boosting your page load speed, you will automatically reduce your bounce rate and encourage visitors to spend longer on your blog.
Fact: Nearly 50% of consumers expect a page to load within two seconds, and the longer it takes to load, the higher the bounce rate and the lower your conversions.
Best WordPress Plugins For Your WordPress SEO
With the right set of WordPress SEO plugins, you can implement the best optimization practices on your WordPress website and make it more popular on search engine results. Here are some of the popular WordPress plugins for your WordPress SEO:
RankMath
RankMath is an all-in-one SEO plugin for WordPress that makes it convenient for you to optimize your content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices. It is a fast-growing user-friendly plugin with many benefits.
RankMath has more modern-day SEO features. The best among them is that it has a 100-point page analysis test that goes deep into the needs of each page. Besides, it also allows you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free.
Other than that, it has a 1x-click advanced SEO analysis tool that helps you perform a wide audit in a flash. It also lets you manage meta tags for things like noindex, nofollow, and noarchive. And best of all— RankMath is free.
Compared to Yoast SEO (another WordPress SEO plugin), RankMath offers almost every feature offered by the paid version of Yoast free of cost.
As you can see from the figure above, RankMath uses less coding and fewer PHP requests than Yoast. Hence, it provides more speed than Yoast SEO. Another reason to choose RankMath over Yoast is that it lets you optimize for up to 5 keywords. With the free version of Yoast, you can optimize for only one focus keyword.
Want to learn the difference between RankMath and Yoast SEO? Check out the article on Yoast Vs RankMath, WordPress SEO Plugins Comparison.
- Easy-to-follow set up process
- Simple and clean user interface
- Broken link checker and 404 error monitor
- One-click SEO audit
- Automatic SEO image optimizer
- Google keyword suggestions
- XML sitemap
- Rich snippets
- Internal linking recommendations
Ahrefs SEO
Over the years, Ahrefs has earned its reputation as one of the best blogging tools for pinning your blog SEO strategies. It helps you to nail your optimization strategies by focusing on keyword research and competitor analysis.
Starting as just a backlink checker in the past, Ahrefs has become a powerful blogging tool. It serves as a content research and analysis platform, keyword rank tracker (with historical SERP movements), a competitor research tool, and an on-page SEO analyzer.
Likewise, it also helps you identify duplicate content and keyword cannibalization. It effectively helps you upgrade the right content to boost your website’s rankings.
Ahrefs introduced the WordPress plugin (Ahrefs SEO) to offer more actionable insights to your WordPress dashboard directly. It is a handy plugin that helps you perform content audits and monitor your backlinks to drive more organic traffic to your website.
Ahrefs SEO is lightning fast, as it puts a minimal load on your WordPress servers. It is also easy to configure as you can get started in less than 5 minutes.
- Includes a backlink analysis powered by its backlink index (the largest backlink index online)
- Google Analytics integration for better traffic and conversion data analysis
- Google Search Console integration for better target keyword recommendations
- Content audit tool to offer real-time recommendations
- Lightning fast
- Easy and convenient to set up and configure
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most installed WordPress plugins of all time. It is designed to help improve your blog’s on-page SEO. Yoast SEO analyzes your content text’s readability and offers suggestions to improve your grammar, sentence structure, and reading level.
This tool will also offer instructions for adding keywords, optimizing your meta descriptions and URLs, and adding internal and external links to your content.
After installing the plugin, you will see the mini-SEO dashboard at the bottom of every post on your blog. All you need to do is enter your focus keyphrase (target keyword you want the article to rank for in organic search). The tool will give you a detailed analysis of how to write a better headline and meta description.
Furthermore, the tool recommends the number of links your blog post should contain, the number of times your focus keyword phrase should appear, the length of your article, etc.
Yoast SEO spontaneously generates an XML sitemap for your website content that makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website. Besides, you can easily import your SEO data if you are using other SEO plugins line RankMath.
You can use the Yoast SEO plugin for free to access most of the cool features. However, you should upgrade to its premium version, which is available at $89 per year, to access other advanced features.
- Title and meta description templating
- Schema implementation
- Advanced XML sitemaps
- Full control over your website’s breadcrumbs
- SEO and readability analysis
- Page previews on different platforms (premium)
- Redirect management options (premium)
- More than one focus keyword (premium)
- No advertisements (premium)
Google Search Console
You can use Google Search Console to get more insights on how SEO friendly your blog is. It is a valuable tool offered by Google. It helps you understand how your blog performs on search engines in terms of click-through rates, search queries, crawl errors, HTML errors, and backlinks.
Google Search Console is a handy tool for you as it helps to:
1. Track the progress of your content marketing efforts
2. Track your website’s SEO performance
3. Gain information about your website’s mobile useability
4. Crawl your website so that Google can find and index your website
You can easily integrate Google Search Console, which helps you index your website to appear on search engines. Besides, you can get a clear idea of the health of your website in terms of SEO.
And you know what? You can easily integrate Google Analytics and Google Search Console so that you can see your Search Console data in your Google Analytics reports.
This handy tool highlights issues and opportunities for improvement related to your blog to boost your blog’s visibility in SERPs. And what more? Google Search Console is free to use— you just need a Google account.
This tool also lets you submit sitemaps and individual URLs of your blog for crawling. It gives you the chance to review your index coverage to make sure that Google has a fresh view of your blog.
Search Console plugin available on WordPress adds the verification code of Google Search Console to your website. It displays your Search Console analytics data in your WordPress dashboard. You can easily check on clicks, CRT, and impressions.
- Full report with all data
- Filter option by page, query, country, and device
- Complete report with all sitemap
- Full report with the errors on your website
- Easy installation
- Superfast
Google Analytics Plugin by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics Plugin by MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It helps bring your analytics data right to your WordPress dashboard so that you can get access to actionable insights on how to improve your website.
MonsterInsights plugin offers insights about your top-performing content, where your users are coming from, what they do on your website, and more. Besides, it allows you to track your WooCommerce SEO by showing which products are popular and where you are losing your customers.
With more than 2 million+ active installations, MonsterInsights is undoubtedly the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Unlike other plugins, it allows you to enable all advanced Google Analytics tracking features in a matter of a few clicks.
- Detailed insights about where your visitors are coming from
- Insights on how your users find your website, which keyword they look for, and who referred them
- Stats on your top-performing content that is creating more traffic and conversion
- Stats on total revenue, conversion rate, average order value, top referral sources, and more
- Search Console report
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is the other most popular WordPress SEO plugin in the market. It offers a comprehensive set of tools that help improve your WordPress website.
One of the main reasons for its popularity is the clean and easy-to-navigate dashboard. This SEO plugin allows you to easily add SEO titles and meta tags to your blog posts. You can also open graph meta tags, XML sitemaps, image sitemaps, and more using All in One SEO Pack.
With more than 2 million installations so far, All in One SEO Pack helps you to:
1. Edit robot.txt file via a user-friendly interface
2. Modify your .htaccess file without FTP
3. Block bad bots, including referral spam
4. Add site links search box markup
5. Auto-generate meta descriptions
You can get the essential features of All in One SEO Pack for free. However, you can easily upgrade to its Pro version that starts at $57 per year, to access other advanced features.
All in One SEO Pack gives you access to more add-ons. It works with WooCommerce to optimize your online store for SEO. Furthermore, it has support for AMP, which means that it integrates with the AMP WordPress plugin.
The biggest benefit of this SEO plugin is that you don’t need any experience to get started. If you can input the right data in the right field, you can easily use this plugin to boost your website’s SEO.
- XML sitemaps
- Google Analytics support
- Auto optimization of titles for all search engines
- Automatic generation of meta tags
- Avoid duplicate content that can negatively impact search engine rankings
- Google AMP support
- SEO integration for e-commerce sites
- Compatible with many other plugins
- Easy to use
Broken Link Checker
If you want to maintain the good health of your website’s SEO, you should always avoid broken links. Broken links can create a bad experience for your users. Moreover, Google algorithms will penalize your website for broken links.
Thankfully, there is a WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker that allows you to find broken links on your WordPress website and fix them. This free tool can easily fix your broken links, and you don’t even need to edit your blog posts.
For instance, if you used an image or some stats from another website in your blog posts. However, the other website got rid of that page where you retrieved the information for some reason. Now, this will create a broken link on your website.
The Broken Link Checker will now identify the broken link on your website and makes it easy to remove with just a couple of clicks. Once the plugin finds broken links, it provides you the HTTP status code (e.g., 404, 410), anchor text, and source of the link so that you can easily find and fix those issues.
The only drawback of this plugin is that it can slow down your WordPress hosting server as it can become resource-intensive. As a result, some hosting providers like WP Engine already block this plugin.
If that’s the case, you can use the Ahrefs tool for broken link detection because it makes sure your website runs smoothly.
Nevertheless, with 700k + active installations, Broken Link Checker is both simple to use and a powerful WordPress plugin.
- Monitors internal and external links
- Detects links that don’t work
- Detects missing images and redirects
- Prevents search engines from following broken links
- Simple to use
- Highly configurable
SEOPress
SEOPress is yet another powerful WordPress SEO plugin that helps to optimize your WordPress website. It functions to boost your web traffic, improve social sharing, build custom HTML and XML sitemaps, create optimized breadcrumbs, and so on.
This plugin is fast and straightforward to use and lets you manage all your meta descriptions and titles for posts, pages, custom post types, and terms. It includes simple and easy controls for beginners and more advanced controls for experienced users.
SEOPress plugin leaves no footprints, advertising, and white label in both backend and frontend. It offers a thorough content analysis to help you write search-engine-optimized content.
SEOPress also supports importing settings from other popular WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, RankMath, and All in One SEO Pack. You can use some handy features of the SEOPress plugin for free. However, you need to upgrade to its pro version for more advanced features, which is significantly cheaper at $39 per year.
- Easy-to-use installation wizard to quickly set up your website
- Content analysis with unlimited keywords for SEO-optimized posts
- Image XML sitemaps and HTML sitemap
- Google Analytics with downloads tracking
- Redirections in pages, posts, and custom post types
- Automatic image optimization
- Import and export settings from site to site
- Open Graph and Twitter Cards support
- Video XML sitemap (premium)
- Automatic schemas with advanced conditions (premium)
- Broken link checker (premium)
- Google Page Speed Insights (premium)
All in One Schema Rich Snippets
All in One Schema Rich Snippets is a handy WordPress plugin that makes your website stand out on search engines by improving the way your pages appear on search results.
Rich Snippet usually is a short summary of your page in the search engine results and sometimes in the Facebook news feed in pleasant format with star ratings, author photo, image, and so on.
All in One Schema Rich Snippets plugin supports these types of Schemas:
1. Review
2. Product
3. People
4. Event
5. Video
6. Recipe
7. Software Application
8. Articles
Rich Snippets are more important for e-commerce sites. People don’t have to go through many steps to read a review of your products. They can just see the star rating from the search engine results page.
The best part of using this plugin is that you don’t have to acquire a web developer’s knowledge and skills.
- Offers search engines only the important and precise information to display in search result snippets
- Boosts CTR (Click Through Rate)
- Helps your website get higher ranks on search engines
- Helps Facebook display relevant information when users share your links on Facebook
- Very interactive and easy to use
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is yet another handy plugin that you should consider for your WordPress SEO. It is a lightweight plugin without any ads or upsells. Plus, it focuses on simplicity and doesn’t include the features that are not necessary for everyone.
The SEO Framework plugin is built for smaller enterprises as opposed to massive corporations. Nevertheless, it includes all the necessary SEO functions that you look for in any SEO plugins. The features include custom post types, support for Open Graph and Twitter Cards, website title and meta description, and many more.
Similarly, the plugin offers a colored scale showing you how to optimize your blog posts for search engines. You can hover your cursor over the bars in the SEO column to get the tips on how to improve certain pages on your website properly.
The SEO Framework plugin is available in a free version that provides you with many of the necessary features for your website’s optimization. It offers an excellent experience with highly configurable settings. You can easily switch to its paid version, which starts from $7 per month, paid yearly.
With 100k+ active installations, The SEO Framework is the only feature-complete SEO plugin that tags along with the white-hat SEO guidelines and rules imposed by WordPress and search engines.
- Available preconfigured
- Helps to optimize your metadata
- Supports and allows you to tailor the Open Graph, Facebook, and Twitter Cards protocols
- AMP integration
- Color-coded guidelines to improve your SEO score
- Social sharing control
- Breadcrumbs for Google
- Redirects
- Comment caching for spammers
- Incognito mode
Which Is The Best WordPress Plugin For Your WordPress SEO?
The WordPress plugins explained above hold their unique features. All of them make it easy for you to optimize your WordPress website and rank better on search engines. If we have to pick one among them, we will go with RankMath.
RankMath has a 1x-click advanced SEO analysis tool that helps you perform a wide audit in a flash. Likewise, it also allows you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free. It’s very easy to use and helps equally for both beginners and experts. RankMath holds a firm ground among other WordPress SEO plugins because of these features:
- Easy-to-follow set up process
- Simple and clean user interface
- Broken link checker and 404 error monitor
- One-click SEO audit
- Automatic SEO image optimizer
- Google keyword suggestions
- XML sitemap
- Rich snippets
- Internal linking recommendations
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How can I make my WordPress site SEO friendly?
To make your WordPress website SEO friendly, you should follow these steps:
Select a managed hosting service
1. Choose an SEO-optimized WordPress theme
2. Use WordPress SEO plugins
3. Update your permalink settings
4. Create XML sitemaps
5. Optimize your web page titles and meta descriptions
6. Optimize your images
7. Focus on internal linking
8. Organize your content properly with categories and tags
Is WordPress good for SEO?
Yes! WordPress has earned a reputation for providing a solid SEO foundation as a CMS. As a result, WordPress sites tend to rank well on Google. WordPress automatically alerts Google each time you make changes on your website, which helps your recent blogs to move up the ranks in Google search results.
Here are some of the main reasons why WordPress is good for SEO:
1. It offers default site templates with clean codes and allows you to customize each page for SEO easily.
2. WordPress sites have fast load times, which can be made even faster using certain plugins.
3. With easy-to-customize themes, you don’t need to have web design skills to start a WordPress website. You can launch your site in no time and focus the rest of your time on SEO campaigns.
4. WordPress sites are easy to crawl for search engines.
Is there any writing assistant WordPress SEO plugin?
Yes! You can install the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin. It offers instant recommendations for content optimization based on Google’s top 10 ranking pages for your target keywords in a given location.
To get started with SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant, you should connect or register a SEMrush account for free. You need to set your target keywords to get recommendations for your website content and choose a target location and device. The plugin then offers recommendations for you based on those keywords.
SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin has the following features:
1. It checks the article’s overall score according to metrics like readability, text length, and target keywords.
2. It evaluates your content’s difficulty based on the recommended Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score.
3. It shows semantically related keywords to add to your content.
4. It validates that your content is original with a plagiarism test.
5. It checks your links for possible errors and problems.
Does boosting my website’s speed help with SEO? How can I do it?
Your website’s speed is a significant factor in search rankings. As a result, you need to monitor its performance to ensure that it does not affect your SEO. The most convenient way to boost your website speed is to use a WordPress caching plugin.
WP Rocket is hands down one of the best WordPress caching plugins on the market. It makes your WordPress website load faster in a few clicks. WP Rocket allows you to set up caching without diving into any technical stuff.
What is the best way to incorporate keywords in my WordPress content to make it SEO friendly?
As per the research, 95% of people only look at the first page of search engine results, and half of the clicks on that page go to the first three search results. This research concludes that if you get your keyword use wrong, you will fail to create SEO-friendly content and seriously hurt your blog business.
That’s why you need to incorporate your keywords properly to get the best out of your blog posts. The following are some places where you should include your primary keywords to craft SEO-friendly content:
1. Page titles
2. Meta descriptions
3. Subheadings
4. Images
5. URLs
6. Link anchor text
7. Social media
8. Directories and external listings
Conclusion
So are you ready to optimize your WordPress website with these best-featured WordPress SEO plugins? You should be! WordPress SEO plugins could be your best weapon to hold your ground in the competitive market with the growing competition and everyone fighting to rank higher in search engine results.
Every one of the best WordPress plugins for your WordPress SEO listed in this article work in their own ways to give you a detailed analysis of the optimization techniques best for your website. From content recommendation to keywords, meta descriptions, sitemaps, and ranking factors, just installing any of these plugins with a few clicks gets you started with your website’s SEO campaign.
We hope that you found this information helpful. If you have any other similar SEO plugins on your mind, please share it with us in the comment section below. We will look into your suggestions and add them to your list based on the performance.
