Are you looking for the best SEO plugin for your WordPress website?
Considering search engines are the top traffic source for most websites, optimizing your site for search engines like Google can help your content rank higher in search results. And as a result, it can significantly grow your business.
In this article, we’ll explain what an SEO plugin is and the best SEO plugins and tools for your WordPress site.
What Is an SEO Plugin?
An SEO plugin is an extension for WordPress websites that allows you to perform WordPress search engine optimization (SEO) tasks. These tasks include editing parts of your website’s code structure, so it’s easier for search engines to crawl and index.
For instance, you can:
- Edit your meta description and title tag to tell search engines what your content is about.
- Optimize your social media metadata to show details of your content on social media platforms.
- Add canonical tags to specific pages to prevent duplicate content issues.
- Find internal linking opportunities.
- And more.
In contrast, an SEO tool provides you with alerts and data about your site’s overall health. As such, they can help you find opportunities to improve your SEO and weaknesses that prevent you from ranking.
Can I Use 2 SEO Plugins?
Many people ask, can you use more than 1 SEO plugin on your WordPress website?
The answer is no. You should only install 1 SEO plugin on your website. Using multiple SEO plugins can cause plugin conflicts, usability issues and impact your site’s performance.
That being said, you can use SEO tools to monitor your optimization efforts.
For example, you can install the All in One SEO WordPress plugin to improve your content and use SEMRush to look for ranking opportunities.
What Are the Best SEO Plugins and Tools?
With the above information in mind, let’s look at the best SEO plugins and tools to improve your WordPress website.
1. All in One SEO for WordPress
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin on the market. With over 2 million users, it’s the most user-friendly SEO toolkit that allows you to improve your search rankings without configuring any complicated settings.
The getting started wizard makes it easy to choose the best SEO settings for your business type. And its TruSEO on-page analysis shows a handy checklist for optimizing your posts and pages.
The checklist includes a meta tag generator for your SEO title and meta descriptions that uses dynamic values like:
- Current year
- Month
- Day
- Custom fields
- Author info
This means you don’t need to update a post to change the SEO title.
Plus, AIOSEO integrates with Semrush, so you can easily discover and rank for additional keywords that you might not have known about.
AIOSEO also has rich snippet schema markup, XML sitemaps with advanced controls, SEO health checks, and other helpful features to improve your search engine visibility.
For social media, it can add Open Graph metadata. This allows you to choose the thumbnails that show when your posts are shared on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
eCommerce websites can also take advantage of AIOSEO’s WooCommerce SEO tools. This allows you to perform:
- Individual product page optimization
- Product image SEO
- Dynamic optimization
- And more
If you’re more familiar with SEO, you can use AIOSEO’s advanced features to control your RSS feeds, Google News sitemaps, Video SEO, and much more.
Plus, business owners can configure the SEO options for user roles. This means you can manage access to vital SEO features without giving every user complete control of your website.
With all of the above in mind, All in One SEO is the most user-friendly and comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin available. It’s an excellent choice for all types of websites and removes the need to install multiple WordPress plugins.
Check out our All in One SEO review for further details.
2. SEMRush
SEMRush is the best SEO tool for marketers, bloggers, and business websites of any size. It offers a comprehensive toolkit to increase your website traffic and grow your business easily.
You can use SEMRush to find search terms and organic keyword opportunities that your website can rank for. It also allows you to research your competitors to see which terms they rank for and how you can improve your content to beat them.
With the built-in SEO Writing Assistant, you can compare your blog posts and pages to the top 10 sites ranking for your chosen keyword.
It then offers suggestions like:
- Relevant words and phrases to include
- How many links to include
- The readability of your content
- The tone of voice score
As a result, you can craft compelling, SEO-friendly content to compete with the top search results.
You can also use SEMRush’s position tracking feature to monitor your website’s daily rankings for a set of keywords. It has tons of features like tagging, sorting, filtering, and exporting reports that make it easy for you to find exactly what you’re looking for in your website’s SEO.
3. Google Search Console
Goole Search Console is a free SEO tool from Google that allows website owners to monitor their website’s visibility in Google search results.
Search Console tells you when Google cannot crawl and index your web pages. And it offers tips and guidance to fix crawl errors yourself.
The most important aspect of Google Search Console is it shows the keywords your website is currently ranking for, their average position, impressions, anchor text, and more. With this data, you can find keywords to rank higher in search results by optimizing your website content.
You can even use the data to come up with relevant new blog post ideas.
4. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is another top WordPress SEO plugin that lets you optimize your WordPress website for search engines.
This plugin allows you to easily add SEO descriptions and titles to your website’s posts and pages. And it even lets you add Open Graph information and social media images to your WordPress content.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can automatically generate XML sitemaps to make it easier for search engines to crawl your content. You can also import SEO data from other SEO plugins you’ve used previously.
5. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is an SEO tool that helps you generate keyword ideas from Google’s own search data. Considering no-one has more insight into what people are searching for than Google, it’s an excellent tool to consider.
This tool is available to Google’s Advertisers for free, and anyone can use it. The primary function is to show advertisers the different keywords they can bid on for their Google Advertisement campaigns.
That said, it also helps them choose the right keywords for their ads by showing search volume estimates, total results, and ranking difficulty.
Even if you’re not an advertiser, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords with high search volumes, interest, and the potential to outrank your competitors.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool for bloggers, businesses, and marketers. It’s a viable alternative to SEMRush and offers many similar features and functionality.
With Ahrefs, you can carry out:
- Keyword research
- Competitor analysis
- Backlink research
- Monitor keywords rankings
- And more
It also has a comprehensive content analysis tool to improve your website content while targeting specific keywords.
Despite the overlap of features, Ahrefs particularly excels at backlink analysis. For example, you can see which websites are linking to your competitors and not you. As a result, you can focus on building partnerships with those sites to get more backlinks.
You can also use Ahrefs to see content that your competitors rank for, and you don’t. With that information, you can create content on those topics to increase your exposure.
Even better, Ahrefs can help you find duplicate content and cannibalization on your website so you can merge and upgrade content to boost your search rankings.
7. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to install Google Analytics in WordPress and show easy-to-understand reports right inside your WordPress dashboard.
This plugin tells you where your website visitors come from, what they do on your website, and which content performs best. You can also monitor your eCommerce SEO by looking at your most popular products and seeing where you lose customers.
Considering most beginners rely on their best guess for making marketing decisions, MonsterInsights removes the guesswork by showing the insights you need to improve your sites’ SEO strategy.
8. SEOPress
SEOPress is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that’s both simple and powerful. It has all the features you need from an SEO plugin, such as:
- Meta titles
- Meta descriptions
- Open Graph support
- Image and content XML sitemaps
- Redirection
- And more
This plugin is easy for beginners to set up and has advanced controls for more experienced WordPress users. As such, it’s comparable to other top SEO plugins when it comes to features and settings.
You’ll also find that SEOPress’s paid version is a lot cheaper than other premium WordPress SEO plugins on the market. Just remember, you only need 1 SEO plugin on your WordPress site.
9. WP Rocket
Your site speed is another critical factor for search engine rankings. If your website is slow, chances are you won’t rank as well as your competitors. As such, you should monitor your website speed and performance to ensure it’s not negatively affecting your SEO.
The easiest way to improve your website speed is to install a caching plugin. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. It lets you cache your website to boost its performance instantly.
WP Rocket has powerful features, including:
- Gzip compression
- Page caching
- Cache pre-loading
- And more
It also allows you to lazy load images, use CDN for WordPress, and DNS pre-fetching to improve page load times further.
8. Rank Math
Rank Math is a user-friendly and popular WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media networks. It comes with a beginner-friendly setup wizard to import data from other SEO plugins during the setup process.
With this plugin, you can add meta titles, descriptions, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. It also allows you to generate XML sitemaps and connect your website to Google Seach Console.
You can even control who can access the plugin features based on user role. While Rank Math is a viable All in One SEO alternative, keep in mind you should only use 1 SEO plugin on your WordPress website.
9. Schema Pro
Schema Pro is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add rich snippets to your website, so it stands out in search results. They do this by showing star ratings below reviews, prices under products, images next to descriptions, and more right inside the search results.
Many of the best WordPress SEO plugins like All in One SEO already add structured, rich snippet data to your website. Yet, if you need more schema types or want to extend your current SEO plugin’s functionality, Schema Pro is an excellent choice.
Schema Pro is perfectly safe to use with your existing WordPress SEO plugin. This is because it maps the plugin data to Schema Pro fields.
10. KeywordTool.io
Another powerful SEO tool for your website is KewordTool.io. It’s one of the best free keyword research tools on the market.
With KeywordTool.io, you can quickly generate keyword ideas by entering a search term or phrase. Then it shows keyword suggestions gathered from Google’s autosuggest feature.
You’ll also see keyword suggestions from Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and more, providing a treasure trove of valuable information. And if you upgrade to their paid plan, you can see search volumes, cost-per-click, and more data for each keyword.
11. Redirection
Redirection is a helpful WordPress plugin that lets you set up SEO-friendly redirects on your website. This means you can easily fix 404 errors and keep track of 301 redirections in WordPress.
Broken website links can negatively affect your SEO rankings and provide a poor user experience. So if you’ve had your website for some time, you should check it for broken links and fix them as soon as possible.
Fixing your broken links is relatively straightforward. Once you find one, you can redirect it to the right piece of content or remove the broken link.
12. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a free SEO tool that helps you create optimized content for your website. Just enter a keyword, and it will show you related words and phrases that people use when searching for that topic in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
You can use these search terms as latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords in your website content. This ensures your website shows in search results where it should and attracts people who are genuinely interested in what your site offers.
13. SEOquake
SEOquake is an excellent SEO tool for many website owners. It comes as a web browser add-on for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, and other browsers.
This tool provides SEO information for any website, including:
- Page age
- Web page health
- Date of the last update
- Alexa rank
- And more.
It’s also one of the most downloaded browser addons for SEO professionals.
The SEOquake toolbar also shows the same data and search results when typing a keyword. You can use this information to see the competition for different keywords and even download your search results as a CSV file.
14. Google PageSpeed Insights
As mentioned earlier, your site loading times play a role in how well it ranks in search results. Slow website loading times impact user experience and can increase your website’s bounce rate.
With Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you can see how fast your web pages load. If the online tool detects any issues with your speed or performance, it suggests steps for fixing them.
Google PageSpeed Insights works seamlessly with the MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin. This means you can check your page speeds right inside your WordPress dashboard, removing the need to access multiple tools outside your website.
15. Broken Link Checker
Our final solution is Broken Link Checker. This free WordPress SEO plugin monitors your website for broken links and helps you fix them easily.
You may not have the time to manually check your content for link issues, so a plugin like this is super-useful. It automatically checks your archive of published WordPress content, notifying you about broken links and images.
Which SEO Plugin is The Best?
After looking at the SEO plugins and tools listed above, you probably want to know which is the best. In our opinion, we believe that:
- All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin
- SEMRush is the best WordPress SEO tool
With this plugin and tool, you can create a complete SEO framework for your website, carry out crucial on-page SEO tasks, and monitor your SEO performance in real-time.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for your small business website or blog.
You might also like to see our showcase of the best WordPress landing page plugins to boost your website conversions.
And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more helpful tips and tutorials.
