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Although you've created a fantastic WordPress website, dedicated a considerable amount of effort to developing the content, and launched it for your audience, you cannot rely on the assumption that "If you build it, they will come," as depicted in the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams.
If you want to increase your website's organic traffic (i.e., traffic not generated through paid ads), the next essential step is to engage in search engine optimization, or SEO. While SEO is a complex and ongoing process, WordPress offers a range of tools to simplify it.
To optimize your WordPress site for search engines, you can choose a high-quality WordPress theme and an SEO plugin to help you implement your SEO strategy. This article will provide an overview of the best SEO plugins available for WordPress, explaining what they do and why they might benefit your business.
Pro Tip: Before you begin the optimization process, it's essential to have a solid understanding of the basics of SEO. HubSpot's guide to on-page SEO and MOZ's excellent beginner's guide to SEO are great resources to start with.
Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
HubSpot
All in One SEO
Yoast SEO
MonsterInsights
Rank Math
Premium SEO Pack
WP Meta SEO
W3 Total Cache
Rankie
SEO 2021 by SQUIRRLY
Redirection
Schema - All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Ahrefs
SEMrush Writing Assistant
SEOPress
1. Hubspot
To develop a high-quality SEO strategy, good data is essential. This is where HubSpot's free WordPress Plugin can be incredibly useful. With the plugin, you can access built-in analytics that provide insights about your marketing performance, presented in easy-to-read dashboards.
You can monitor the quantity and quality of your traffic on a page-by-page basis or get an overview of your entire site. By using this plugin, you can quickly identify where to focus your attention without having to leave WordPress.
Another benefit of this plugin is that it includes live chat, email marketing, forms, and more, all of which can help you grow your business.
This plugin is ideal for small and scaling businesses because it's free and integrates seamlessly with HubSpot's suite of products, including its CRM.
2. All In One Seo
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is a popular choice for those looking to improve on-page SEO, with over 2,000,000 professionals using it. The plugin includes an SEO audit checklist that examines your entire WordPress site to identify errors and provide recommendations for improving your SEO and increasing traffic.
AIOSEO can also generate and submit sitemaps automatically to popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others, maximizing your online presence. Other essential features include schema, knowledge graph, AMP, local SEO, and more.
This plugin is ideal for local and small business owners who rely on online searches to generate sales and revenue, as it can save time and money.
3. Yoast Seo
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most widely used SEO plugins for WordPress and offers nearly every feature you'll need to optimize your website, making it a great choice for businesses of all sizes. This free plugin includes SERP previews, XML sitemap creation, meta description rating, and more.
One of the key highlights of the Yoast SEO plugin is its on-page SEO insights feature, which provides guidance on how to best incorporate your target keyword, assesses whether you have used the keyword enough times (or too many times) on the page, and recommends optimizing your title, meta description, and URL for the keyword. It's designed to guide you through each element based on SEO best practices.
This plugin is ideal for businesses with in-house teams of writers who prioritize the reader experience. The plugin provides actionable tips for optimizing content, helping writers delight readers and search engines without having to memorize every SEO best practice.
4. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is an indispensable tool for tracking analytics and performance, as it is essential for SEO. The WordPress plugin is designed to bring Google Analytics directly to your WordPress dashboard and provide actionable insights to enhance your website's performance. With this tool, you don't have to worry about installing the Google Analytics tracking script manually, and you can easily observe how visitors are finding and using your website.
The content report feature also highlights the pages that receive the most traffic on your website. If you find Google Analytics complicated, MonsterInsights provides a simplified and streamlined way to analyze your data without ever logging into the Google Analytics platform.
This tool is particularly useful for marketers and other stakeholders looking to optimize their website for conversions. It provides a "trail" to track how people are finding your website and why, allowing you to enhance the user experience for visitors.
5. Rank Math
Rank Math is a powerful tool that helps you optimize your website while you write content, providing real-time insights about your posts without ever leaving the WordPress interface. This plugin allows you to optimize your titles and meta descriptions with a snippet preview, reducing the risk of errors in Google's search engine results pages (SERP) display. The best part is that Rank Math is optimized for speed, ensuring that your website's speed does not affect your SEO efforts.
Additionally, Rank Math offers advanced SEO features such as redirections, 404 monitoring, and SEO for WooCommerce sites. It provides all the essential data you need to manage your website's health and work on content and SEO as a one-person team through its advanced SEO analytics module.
Rank Math is ideal for people who manage their website's content, SEO, and overall health. With Rank Math, all the pertinent data you need is at your fingertips, making it easy to optimize your website for search engines and improve your online presence.
6. Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack stands out from other SEO plugins due to its advanced features that handle SEO elements that other plugins do not cover. While it includes foundational features such as sitemap generation and Google Analytics monitoring, it offers unique features for monitoring page speed, rich snippets, 404 checking, and link building. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into your website's internal linking structure.
This plugin is ideal for creatives who host their portfolios on the web and face the constant trade-off between website appearance and performance. With features like notifications on image SEO-friendliness and minifying CSS and JavaScript for speed, Premium SEO Pack makes both aesthetics and performance a priority.
Overall, the Premium SEO Pack offers a comprehensive set of features that cater to the needs of both beginners and advanced users. It is an excellent choice for those who want to take their website's SEO efforts to the next level.
7. WP META SEO
If you're working on a website redesign, it's crucial to optimize your new pages for search engines. WP Meta SEO is an excellent tool for this purpose. It offers a meta information bulk editor, making it easy to perform optimization across the entire site at once, saving you valuable time.
The plugin also integrates with Google Search Console to power its keyword suggestion features. This integration allows you to use accurate data directly from Google to make informed decisions about your keyword strategy. Additionally, WP Meta SEO includes other essential SEO features such as a redirections manager and a sitemap generator.
WP Meta SEO is ideal for entrepreneurs or marketers who handle website, SEO, and content. The bulk editor feature can significantly speed up your workflow, allowing you to spend more time crafting content to reach your audience. This plugin is an excellent choice for those looking to optimize their website for search engines without spending countless hours editing person pages.
8. W3 Total Cache
Site speed is crucial because search engines aim to retrieve sites that provide a satisfying user experience while meeting the searcher's query. W3 Total Cache is a plugin that can improve site speed through caching, minifying, and CDN integrations, making it easier to manage all these benefits in one place on your website.
This plugin is ideal for website owners who manage lots of content on their site, such as gifs, videos, and images, as it directly impacts a significant aspect of SEO ranking - site speed. With W3 Total Cache, you can improve your website's loading speed, resulting in better user engagement and higher search engine rankings.
Overall, W3 Total Cache is an excellent choice for those who want to improve their website's speed and enhance their overall SEO efforts. It's a valuable tool for website owners who want to optimize their website's performance and user experience.
9. Rankie
Rankie is an essential plugin for SEO and marketing data analysts who want to understand their site's performance in the SERP and in the eyes of the reader. This plugin provides you with more data to make smart SEO decisions for your site. By helping you track your rankings and create powerful reports, Rankie offers the insights you need to make modifications to your pages without needing to open up a new tab for Google Analytics, WordPress, and a random excel spreadsheet you use to track every keyword you plan to target.
With Rankie, you can track your target keywords to monitor your ongoing performance and add new keywords that visitors are using to discover your content. This plugin allows you to view the rankings of your keywords and pages in an easy-to-use dashboard.
Overall, Rankie is an excellent plugin that provides valuable insights into your site's performance and helps you optimize your SEO strategy. It is an ideal tool for those who want to stay on top of their site's ranking and make data-driven decisions to improve their SEO efforts.
10. SEO By SQUIRRLY
Squirrly uses machine learning algorithms that have analyzed more than 600,000 sites in 7 years to conduct website audits based on internal architecture, keyword usage, backlinks, web authority, and other factors.
Through its artificial intelligence capabilities, the tool can pinpoint the gaps that hinder your site's ranking potential and suggest the most effective actions to take for the fastest results. The objective is to attain significant improvements with minimal efforts, saving you time and resources.
This tool is ideal for professionals seeking an SEO audit tool for their website. If you are taking over an existing website and need to develop a new SEO strategy, SEO by SQUIRRLY could be the perfect solution to help you get started.
11. Redirection
Here's a riddle for you: How do you remove a page that you no longer need, but it has a high Google ranking for a top keyword and several backlinks that you don't want to lose?
The solution is to set up a 301 redirect that will redirect users and search engines to another relevant page on your site.
301 redirects are a crucial component of any SEO strategy, and they can be implemented with minimal effort. All you need to do is specify the new URL that the old page should redirect to, and you're good to go. By doing this, you not only maintain your search engine ranking and traffic but also provide a better user experience for visitors who are looking for that particular content.
As an added bonus, using 301 redirects also helps you keep track of 404 errors, which can negatively impact your site's search engine ranking.
This solution is perfect for marketing or development teams that are undertaking a website redesign and need to restructure their website's content without losing traffic or rankings.
12. Schema - All In One Schema Rich Snippets
A rich snippet is a Google feature that displays search results in an attractive way that could even boost your click-through rate. They are often interactive and can display photos, star ratings, price, author, and more. Therefore, earning placement in a rich snippet helps you break through the competition and win more traffic.
The All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin helps you compete for more of these snippets by implementing schema coding such as Review, Events, Recipes, Article, Products, and Services. The best part is that you don't have to be a web developer to use it.
Ideal for: Small businesses, blogs, and review sites looking to establish a greater presence on SERPs.
13. Ahrefs
Ahrefs, a well-known SEO toolkit for keyword research and other SEO campaign data, has recently launched a WordPress plugin that delivers more practical insights directly to your dashboard. This plugin offers several unique features, including backlink analysis powered by the largest backlink index online, SEO analysis based on your Google Analytics data, and a content audit tool that provides real-time recommendations during content production.
This plugin can be useful not only for SEOs and content writers but also for PR professionals and social media managers. Sharing access to this data with those teams can reveal valuable partnership opportunities and potential guest collaborators, ultimately contributing to the growth of your website's traffic. Understanding your backlink profile is crucial in this regard.
14. SEMrush Writing Assistant
In a fiercely competitive market, knowing your competitor's SEO trends can be worth their weight in gold. The SEMrush Writing Assistant plugin for WordPress not only helps you write better but also provides valuable insights into what your competitors are ranking for and why.
SEMrush, a renowned keyword research platform, has made its widely popular Writing Assistant available as a WordPress plugin. The Writing Assistant automatically checks your content as you type and offers recommendations based on your keywords and competitors, allowing you to produce content that is more competitive with what's already out there and ranking.
This plugin is particularly useful for marketers and content creators who have a basic understanding of SEO best practices but are not experts in the field.
15. SEOPress
SEOPress is an ideal choice for business owners who aim to redesign their website to enhance user experience and require bulk optimization.
If you're concerned about plugin overload, SEOPress offers an all-in-one package that caters to your SEO needs, such as breadcrumbs, redirections, schemas, and sitemaps. You can optimize titles and meta descriptions, submit your sitemap to Google's index, and even check broken links, all from your WordPress dashboard.
This plugin is especially useful for large websites that require peak performance to handle high traffic and a significant amount of content.
If you want to increase your website's organic traffic (i.e., traffic not generated through paid ads), the next essential step is to engage in search engine optimization, or SEO. While SEO is a complex and ongoing process, WordPress offers a range of tools to simplify it.
To optimize your WordPress site for search engines, you can choose a high-quality WordPress theme and an SEO plugin to help you implement your SEO strategy. This article will provide an overview of the best SEO plugins available for WordPress, explaining what they do and why they might benefit your business.
Pro Tip: Before you begin the optimization process, it's essential to have a solid understanding of the basics of SEO. HubSpot's guide to on-page SEO and MOZ's excellent beginner's guide to SEO are great resources to start with.
Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
HubSpot
All in One SEO
Yoast SEO
MonsterInsights
Rank Math
Premium SEO Pack
WP Meta SEO
W3 Total Cache
Rankie
SEO 2021 by SQUIRRLY
Redirection
Schema - All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Ahrefs
SEMrush Writing Assistant
SEOPress
1. Hubspot
To develop a high-quality SEO strategy, good data is essential. This is where HubSpot's free WordPress Plugin can be incredibly useful. With the plugin, you can access built-in analytics that provide insights about your marketing performance, presented in easy-to-read dashboards.
You can monitor the quantity and quality of your traffic on a page-by-page basis or get an overview of your entire site. By using this plugin, you can quickly identify where to focus your attention without having to leave WordPress.
Another benefit of this plugin is that it includes live chat, email marketing, forms, and more, all of which can help you grow your business.
This plugin is ideal for small and scaling businesses because it's free and integrates seamlessly with HubSpot's suite of products, including its CRM.
2. All In One Seo
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is a popular choice for those looking to improve on-page SEO, with over 2,000,000 professionals using it. The plugin includes an SEO audit checklist that examines your entire WordPress site to identify errors and provide recommendations for improving your SEO and increasing traffic.
AIOSEO can also generate and submit sitemaps automatically to popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others, maximizing your online presence. Other essential features include schema, knowledge graph, AMP, local SEO, and more.
This plugin is ideal for local and small business owners who rely on online searches to generate sales and revenue, as it can save time and money.
3. Yoast Seo
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most widely used SEO plugins for WordPress and offers nearly every feature you'll need to optimize your website, making it a great choice for businesses of all sizes. This free plugin includes SERP previews, XML sitemap creation, meta description rating, and more.
One of the key highlights of the Yoast SEO plugin is its on-page SEO insights feature, which provides guidance on how to best incorporate your target keyword, assesses whether you have used the keyword enough times (or too many times) on the page, and recommends optimizing your title, meta description, and URL for the keyword. It's designed to guide you through each element based on SEO best practices.
This plugin is ideal for businesses with in-house teams of writers who prioritize the reader experience. The plugin provides actionable tips for optimizing content, helping writers delight readers and search engines without having to memorize every SEO best practice.
4. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is an indispensable tool for tracking analytics and performance, as it is essential for SEO. The WordPress plugin is designed to bring Google Analytics directly to your WordPress dashboard and provide actionable insights to enhance your website's performance. With this tool, you don't have to worry about installing the Google Analytics tracking script manually, and you can easily observe how visitors are finding and using your website.
The content report feature also highlights the pages that receive the most traffic on your website. If you find Google Analytics complicated, MonsterInsights provides a simplified and streamlined way to analyze your data without ever logging into the Google Analytics platform.
This tool is particularly useful for marketers and other stakeholders looking to optimize their website for conversions. It provides a "trail" to track how people are finding your website and why, allowing you to enhance the user experience for visitors.
5. Rank Math
Rank Math is a powerful tool that helps you optimize your website while you write content, providing real-time insights about your posts without ever leaving the WordPress interface. This plugin allows you to optimize your titles and meta descriptions with a snippet preview, reducing the risk of errors in Google's search engine results pages (SERP) display. The best part is that Rank Math is optimized for speed, ensuring that your website's speed does not affect your SEO efforts.
Additionally, Rank Math offers advanced SEO features such as redirections, 404 monitoring, and SEO for WooCommerce sites. It provides all the essential data you need to manage your website's health and work on content and SEO as a one-person team through its advanced SEO analytics module.
Rank Math is ideal for people who manage their website's content, SEO, and overall health. With Rank Math, all the pertinent data you need is at your fingertips, making it easy to optimize your website for search engines and improve your online presence.
6. Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack stands out from other SEO plugins due to its advanced features that handle SEO elements that other plugins do not cover. While it includes foundational features such as sitemap generation and Google Analytics monitoring, it offers unique features for monitoring page speed, rich snippets, 404 checking, and link building. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into your website's internal linking structure.
This plugin is ideal for creatives who host their portfolios on the web and face the constant trade-off between website appearance and performance. With features like notifications on image SEO-friendliness and minifying CSS and JavaScript for speed, Premium SEO Pack makes both aesthetics and performance a priority.
Overall, the Premium SEO Pack offers a comprehensive set of features that cater to the needs of both beginners and advanced users. It is an excellent choice for those who want to take their website's SEO efforts to the next level.
7. WP META SEO
If you're working on a website redesign, it's crucial to optimize your new pages for search engines. WP Meta SEO is an excellent tool for this purpose. It offers a meta information bulk editor, making it easy to perform optimization across the entire site at once, saving you valuable time.
The plugin also integrates with Google Search Console to power its keyword suggestion features. This integration allows you to use accurate data directly from Google to make informed decisions about your keyword strategy. Additionally, WP Meta SEO includes other essential SEO features such as a redirections manager and a sitemap generator.
WP Meta SEO is ideal for entrepreneurs or marketers who handle website, SEO, and content. The bulk editor feature can significantly speed up your workflow, allowing you to spend more time crafting content to reach your audience. This plugin is an excellent choice for those looking to optimize their website for search engines without spending countless hours editing person pages.
8. W3 Total Cache
Site speed is crucial because search engines aim to retrieve sites that provide a satisfying user experience while meeting the searcher's query. W3 Total Cache is a plugin that can improve site speed through caching, minifying, and CDN integrations, making it easier to manage all these benefits in one place on your website.
This plugin is ideal for website owners who manage lots of content on their site, such as gifs, videos, and images, as it directly impacts a significant aspect of SEO ranking - site speed. With W3 Total Cache, you can improve your website's loading speed, resulting in better user engagement and higher search engine rankings.
Overall, W3 Total Cache is an excellent choice for those who want to improve their website's speed and enhance their overall SEO efforts. It's a valuable tool for website owners who want to optimize their website's performance and user experience.
9. Rankie
Rankie is an essential plugin for SEO and marketing data analysts who want to understand their site's performance in the SERP and in the eyes of the reader. This plugin provides you with more data to make smart SEO decisions for your site. By helping you track your rankings and create powerful reports, Rankie offers the insights you need to make modifications to your pages without needing to open up a new tab for Google Analytics, WordPress, and a random excel spreadsheet you use to track every keyword you plan to target.
With Rankie, you can track your target keywords to monitor your ongoing performance and add new keywords that visitors are using to discover your content. This plugin allows you to view the rankings of your keywords and pages in an easy-to-use dashboard.
Overall, Rankie is an excellent plugin that provides valuable insights into your site's performance and helps you optimize your SEO strategy. It is an ideal tool for those who want to stay on top of their site's ranking and make data-driven decisions to improve their SEO efforts.
10. SEO By SQUIRRLY
Squirrly uses machine learning algorithms that have analyzed more than 600,000 sites in 7 years to conduct website audits based on internal architecture, keyword usage, backlinks, web authority, and other factors.
Through its artificial intelligence capabilities, the tool can pinpoint the gaps that hinder your site's ranking potential and suggest the most effective actions to take for the fastest results. The objective is to attain significant improvements with minimal efforts, saving you time and resources.
This tool is ideal for professionals seeking an SEO audit tool for their website. If you are taking over an existing website and need to develop a new SEO strategy, SEO by SQUIRRLY could be the perfect solution to help you get started.
11. Redirection
Here's a riddle for you: How do you remove a page that you no longer need, but it has a high Google ranking for a top keyword and several backlinks that you don't want to lose?
The solution is to set up a 301 redirect that will redirect users and search engines to another relevant page on your site.
301 redirects are a crucial component of any SEO strategy, and they can be implemented with minimal effort. All you need to do is specify the new URL that the old page should redirect to, and you're good to go. By doing this, you not only maintain your search engine ranking and traffic but also provide a better user experience for visitors who are looking for that particular content.
As an added bonus, using 301 redirects also helps you keep track of 404 errors, which can negatively impact your site's search engine ranking.
This solution is perfect for marketing or development teams that are undertaking a website redesign and need to restructure their website's content without losing traffic or rankings.
12. Schema - All In One Schema Rich Snippets
A rich snippet is a Google feature that displays search results in an attractive way that could even boost your click-through rate. They are often interactive and can display photos, star ratings, price, author, and more. Therefore, earning placement in a rich snippet helps you break through the competition and win more traffic.
The All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin helps you compete for more of these snippets by implementing schema coding such as Review, Events, Recipes, Article, Products, and Services. The best part is that you don't have to be a web developer to use it.
Ideal for: Small businesses, blogs, and review sites looking to establish a greater presence on SERPs.
13. Ahrefs
Ahrefs, a well-known SEO toolkit for keyword research and other SEO campaign data, has recently launched a WordPress plugin that delivers more practical insights directly to your dashboard. This plugin offers several unique features, including backlink analysis powered by the largest backlink index online, SEO analysis based on your Google Analytics data, and a content audit tool that provides real-time recommendations during content production.
This plugin can be useful not only for SEOs and content writers but also for PR professionals and social media managers. Sharing access to this data with those teams can reveal valuable partnership opportunities and potential guest collaborators, ultimately contributing to the growth of your website's traffic. Understanding your backlink profile is crucial in this regard.
14. SEMrush Writing Assistant
In a fiercely competitive market, knowing your competitor's SEO trends can be worth their weight in gold. The SEMrush Writing Assistant plugin for WordPress not only helps you write better but also provides valuable insights into what your competitors are ranking for and why.
SEMrush, a renowned keyword research platform, has made its widely popular Writing Assistant available as a WordPress plugin. The Writing Assistant automatically checks your content as you type and offers recommendations based on your keywords and competitors, allowing you to produce content that is more competitive with what's already out there and ranking.
This plugin is particularly useful for marketers and content creators who have a basic understanding of SEO best practices but are not experts in the field.
15. SEOPress
SEOPress is an ideal choice for business owners who aim to redesign their website to enhance user experience and require bulk optimization.
If you're concerned about plugin overload, SEOPress offers an all-in-one package that caters to your SEO needs, such as breadcrumbs, redirections, schemas, and sitemaps. You can optimize titles and meta descriptions, submit your sitemap to Google's index, and even check broken links, all from your WordPress dashboard.
This plugin is especially useful for large websites that require peak performance to handle high traffic and a significant amount of content.
