WordPress is the most popular CMS solution for both bloggers and business owners. However, WordPress is not an SEO friendly solution at all. The professional websites are the ones relying on the SEO plugins available in the market. The SEO plugin helps you to optimize your site for search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
This post will show you the best free and paid SEO plugins for WordPress — and we’ve also included a few alternative WordPress SEO plugins for good measure.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that helps store owners keep a close eye on their presence in Google search results.
The best part is the alert that it generates when Google is unable to crawl the store pages, This alert is a simple way of tracking page indexing issues.
The tool is popularly used to discover the keywords that the store is ranking for, with detailed reports on the clicks, impressions, and related parameters.
This data is presented in easy-to-read reports that allow you to quickly find out the keywords that you need to focus on, in order to improve search engine results position of your store.
To learn more, check out how to add Google Search Console to your website.
Features:
- Detailed Data: Google Search Console collects a lot of information about your store including the number and frequency of clicks, impressions, and errors.
- Track Store Pages: With this tool, you can easily track the performance of individual pages and see how they rank for your business keywords.
- Data in a Glance: The tool presents all data in easy-to-understand graphs that filter and present data collected for as long as 60 days.
- Pages Position: It allows you to check the web page ranking for specific keywords.
- Index URL: You can add specific URLs that haven’t been indexed by Google.
Pricing:
It’s a free service offered by Google.
RankMath
RankMath is another WordPress SEO plugin that helps you optimize your WordPress store.
RankMath offers a lot of advanced features in the premium version, which also has a free version with a limited set of features.
You can set up the RankMath plugin more quickly in 6 steps as compared to the 12 steps required to set up the Yoast plugin. Compare that to just 4 steps when you opt for the AIOSEO plugin.
For more details, see our guide Yoast vs Rank Math vs All in One SEO.
Features:
- User Friendly: This plugin is user-friendly and offers powerful features for better store optimization.
- Content Analysis: This plugin analyzes posts and store pages content to identify improvement areas.
- Keyword Placement: you can see immediate indications for the keyword placement opportunities.
- Complete Score: You get a score that signifies the status optimization of the pages and posts of the store.
Pricing:
The pro plan starts at $59 per year, and also offers a free lite version for those who are not ready to invest in the plugin.
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.
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.
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.
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO)
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. Used by over 2+ million users, it is the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that helps you improve search rankings without learning any complicated SEO jargon.
It comes with the easiest setup wizard that automatically helps you choose the best SEO settings for your business. AIOSEO shows you TruSEO on-page analysis with an actionable checklist to optimize your posts and pages.
The on-page SEO checklist includes a smart meta tag generator where you can use dynamic values (current year, month, day, custom fields, author info, and much more) in your SEO title and descriptions. This means you don’t need to update a post just to change SEO titles.
AIOSEO also comes with Rich snippet schema markup, smart XML sitemaps (with advanced controls), SEO health check, and other useful features to grow your search engine visibility.
There is a built-in social media integration to add Open Graph metadata as well. This means you can choose which image or thumbnail you want to show when your pages are shared on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
AIOSEO also comes with built-in WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites. This include features like dynamic optimizations, individual product page optimizations, product image SEO, and other handy features to bring more organic traffic to your online store.
For more SEO savvy users, it includes full control of RSS feeds, Robots.txt editor, local SEO, Google News sitemaps, video SEO, and more.
For business owners, it comes with SEO user roles, so you can manage access to important SEO features without handing over control of your website.
Overall, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the most beginner-friendly and comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It eliminates the need to install multiple plugins to do things on your website and works perfectly for all types of businesses, eCommerce, blogs, news, and other websites.
2. SEMRush
SEMRush is the best overall SEO tool on the market. Used by professional SEO experts, marketers, bloggers, and businesses of all sizes, it provides a comprehensive set of tools to grow your traffic.
You can use it to find organic keywords and search terms that you can easily rank for. It also allows you to do competitive research and see which keywords your competitors rank for, and how you can beat them.
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant tool helps you improve your website content to beat the top 10 results for your focus keyword. It integrates with WordPress, and this will help you write more SEO friendly content.
To learn more, see our complete guide on how to do keyword research for your website.
We use SEMRush for our websites because of their competitive intelligence and SEO rank tracker features.
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.
For more details, see our comprehensive Google Search Console guide for beginners.
Tip: You can use MonsterInsights to track your keyword rankings inside 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. You can also use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.
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.
For more details, see our complete guide on how to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress.
Conclusion
The best SEO Plugin For WordPress; Here we look into one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. The plugin called, “All in One SEO Pack”. I have found it to be a very powerful tool for a variety of reasons and I will be teaching you about the reasons throughout this article. I personally love adding this plugin to my websites.