There are a lot of free WordPress SEO plugins available, but finding the best one that suits your needs can be a challenge. In this post, I’ll break down my top 5 WordPress SEO plugin recommendations together with a few important features they have in common.
Some people prefer to use an SEO tool for WordPress instead of the default SEO options. However, many free tools are full of spammy links or are just plain joke tools. So, I’ve done the research to find the best free SEO tools for WordPress !
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Easy-to-use setup wizard.
Moz Link Explorer
Link Explorer is a powerful and effective WordPress SEO tool that was created by the website Moz. To get all the features, you’ll need to subscribe to Moz Pro.
Features:
- Awesome link-building features.
- SEO research and link analysis.
- Uncover lost links + tools to help so you can make a plan to get them back.
- Free version lets you search 10x/month.
- Great graphs to help you see what’s going on using data visualization
KeywordTool.io
KeywordTool.io is a basic, free tool that’s landed on our list of must-have SEO plugins for WordPress because it’s simple and it works.
Features:
- Type in a keyword and get content suggestions.
- Uses Google’s autocomplete tool to show you what people are really searching for.
- Provides fresh and topical ideas since it’s linked to Google’s autocomplete, so you can provide content that’s relevant.
- Also gives you keyword suggestions from Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and others.
- See search volume, CPC, and more with a paid plan.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a quirky website that you can use as an SEO tool to do keyword research. It’s a free online SEO content optimizer that works great if you know how to use it right.
Features:
- Shows you search queries people use for specific keywords.
- Displays results from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
TinyPng
We’re huge fans of the very helpful TinyPng tool. It’s a website instead of a plugin, but totally deserves a spot on this list if you want to boost site speed. You’ll want to use this with any image before you upload it to your website.
Features:
- Compresses your images without loss of quality so you can speed up your site.
- Completely free.
- Allows for up to 20 images to be uploaded at a time, more for paid accounts.
- Straightforward and easy-to-use.
Schema Pro
Schema Pro isn’t needed for most small business website owners if you’re using a top WordPress SEO plugin like AIOSEO. However, if you want advanced SEO functions or to add extra schema types, this is a good tool to check out.
Features:
- You can use it with your existing WordPress SEO plugin by mapping data to Schema Pro fields.
- Rich snippets for extended functionality on the search engine results page.
- Display prices of products, star ratings from reviews, images, and videos.
SEOPRESSOR
SEOPressor (again – not to be confused with SEOPress) is a premium SEO plugin that operates on a monthly billing model.
Monthly payments aren’t especially popular in the WordPress plugin world, but SEOPressor backs up its pricing with some neat on-page analysis features that aren’t present in other plugins.
A few of the unique on-page SEO features are:
- Keyword over-optimization check
- LSI Keywords Engine – suggests latent semantic indexing keywords.
- SemantiQ Density Analysis – tries to predict if your content is semantically related to your keyword.
These features go beyond Yoast SEO’s focus keyword functionality and mesh more closely with Google’s approach to semantic search.
Of course, SEOPRessor also includes more standard SEO plugin features. That is, you can:
- Control titles and meta descriptions
- Add a variety of structured data for local SEO, Dublin Core, social media, and more.
- Generate XML Sitemaps
Other unique features include a smart linking feature that lets you automatically link keywords in your content, as well as a broken link checker, and a site-wide SEO audit:
If you think you’ll make use of SEOPressor’s on-page recommendations, it may be worth it to spring for the monthly fee.
ALL IN ONE SEO
WIth over 38 million downloads, All in One SEO isn’t exactly an unknown quantity in the SEO plugin ecosystem.
It’s not surprising that All in One SEO is right on Yoast SEO’s tail – the plugins are quite similar in core functionality.
While All in One SEO lacks the focus keyword and readability analyses offered by Yoast SEO, it offers competitive functionality when it comes to:
- Setting titles and meta descriptions
- XML sitemaps
- Social meta information
And some areas where All in One SEO shines in comparison to Yoast SEO are:
- Google Analytics support
- SEO integration for WooCommerce
Additionally, like SEOPress and The SEO Framework, All in One SEO is modular when it comes to features, so you can easily toggle off features that you don’t need to avoid any potential performance hit.
If you’re not a fan of Yoast SEO’s sometimes shallow analysis functionality, All in One SEO is a good alternative.
Squirrly SEO
SEO by Squirrly – Best AI WordPress SEO Plugin 2021 – Rank Faster With AI SEO Strategy
Author(s): Squirrly SEO
Current Version: 11.1.10
Last Updated: October 22, 2021
squirrly-seo.zip92%Ratings100,000+InstallsWP 4.3+Requires
Squirrly SEO is a beginner-friendly SEO tool that generates recommendations in real-time. It enables you to optimize content for your chosen keyword as you’re writing your content. Also, it provides a competitor analysis with suggestions of what you can improve to outrank similar pages.
Besides that, Squirrly SEO comes with innovative features to help with your marketing efforts. For instance, it measures your audience engagement and offers actionable advice to improve your click-through rates (CTRs). Plus, it will transfer all your pre-existing settings if you switch from another SEO plugin.
Other features include:
- Schema markup
- Free coaching sessions
- ‘Noindex’ options
- Advanced eCommerce features
- Google Analytics integration
- Custom Robot.txt for site crawlers
- Sitemap XML
- Social media monitoring
Pricing: Free.
If you want to access the advanced features, pricing starts at $20.99 per month.Get Squirrly SEO
The SEO Framework
Creator: The SEO Framework Team
Ratings: 5.0
Active installations: 100,000+
WordPress Version: 4.9 or higher
PHP Version: 5.6 or higher
Download Here
If you are looking for the lightweight seo plugin without any ads then The SEO Framework is for you. It is perfect for the beginners who are more concerned about keeping site speeds high. It is considered as the best alternative to Yoast or All in One SEO. It has much to do with the visual nature of the SEO ratings. It has more flexible options for targeting keywords (like with slightly off words or synonyms).
The post SEO has basic settings to show exactly how close you are to making your post search engine-ready. As you may have already assumed, the interface is perfect for beginners. Even it is lightweight it has all the features that one needs to do on page seo.
Conclusion
Having a WordPress website is a good start. But if you want to try and get more traffic from organic search you have to install the right plugins. I have always used Yoast SEO for optimizing my content, but there are two additional plugins that will help you find keywords and optimize your images. I’ve listed them below, just keep scrolling down!