Whether your WordPress website is a personal blog, ecommerce store, or hosting website, choosing the right SEO plugin shouldn’t be ignored. In this post, we’re comparing the top SEO plugins for WordPress, so you can learn how to best optimize your site for search engines. Doing this the right way will improve your search visibility, page and post ranking, boost your traffic, and improve your sales.
You may have heard about the Yoast SEO plugin by now which is currently the most popular All-In-One SEO tool for WordPress.
But, did you know that there are also other well viable options on the market as well? SEO Optimization tool Rank Math has built a huge and successful community in a short period.
This proves that while you are building your fantastic website with quality content, ready for visitors to consume, you don’t have to think about things such as; will anyone see my content or if my website is good enough.
With so many great solutions out there combined with the right managed WordPress hosting provider, driving the website traffic has never been this easy.
In this article you will learn the following:
- What are SEO Plugins for WordPress
- SEO tips everyone should use
- 6 Best SEO Plugins compared
Let’s get started.
What Are SEO Plugins for WordPress?
The great thing about SEO plugins is that even if you are not SEO-savvy, you can still take advantage of the latest SEO tweaks. They provide a great all-in-one solution for the end-user.
All you have to do is choose the Plugins option on your WordPress Dashboard, click “Add New”, type the name of the plugin in the search bar, Install, and Activate.
Most of these SEO Tools come either with a free version and optional premium version as well. Just keep in mind that none of these tools is a perfect “do-it-all” option.
There are a lot of other things to consider when it comes to search engine optimization such as keyword research.
This brings us to the next chapter.
SEO Tips You Should Consider
Even though all-in-one SEO tools are great, there are other important things you have to do as well.
If ranking high on Google and other search engines was easy as walking, everyone in the world would have a successful website and do this.
Since that is not the reality, and the majority of published posts don’t get any traffic, here are some useful SEO tips that we recommend.
Keyword Research
This is the most important step to take. There are many great free and paid tools that will ease your keyword pursuits such as Ahrefs and Ubersuggest.
Once you have found a niche with relatively low competition you are ready to go. Oh and don’t forget to export as many keywords as you can for future use.
Using Social Media to Your Advantage
You have published a few posts and pages, so what do you do next? Share all your post on all major social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Pinterest.
Join all major groups, follow the biggest profiles, and don’t forget to take part in discussions as often as possible.
Link Building
To rank your page on the first page of search engines, you shouldn’t forget to build links from other websites and use internal links.
Since links are an important ranking factor and each acquired backlink is viewed differently by Google, do not sleep on this.
Now, let’s see which plugins made our top list.
Our Top 5 Favorite SEO Plugins for WordPress
1. Yoast SEO
PRICING: Free/Premium(from $104.50)
ACTIVE INSTALLATIONS: 5+ million
WP SCORE: 4.9 out of 5
KEY FEATURES:
- Keyword optimization
- Readability check
- Redirect feature
- Google Search Console integration
- Automatic creation of XML sitemap
- Excluding the “noindex” types of content from being indexed in search engine results
- Title and meta description templates
- Duplicate content detection
- Regular updates
- Open Graph data for sharing posts on social media
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO tool for WordPress, and for a reason. It has over 5 million active installations and over 25.000 five star user reviews.
It comes as a free and premium version. While the premium option comes with extra things like redirect manager, internal link suggestions and block, content insights. The free option is great as well.
It is the complete SEO tool that helps websites to rank higher in search engines, and the Yoast team provides regular support on wordpress.org forums(Premium Users).
Anyone new or old to WordPress should at least give the free Yoast version a try.
2. Rank Math
PRICING: Free/Premium(coming in Fall 2020)
ACTIVE INSTALLATIONS: 500.000+
WP SCORE: 4.9 out of 5
KEY FEATURES:
- Easy to follow Setup Wizard
- User-Friendly Interface
- Google Webmaster Central Integration(In progress)
- Keyword Comparison & Google Trends Tool(TBA)
- Google Crawl Errors
- Contextual Help (tooltips, notices, help tabs, etc)
- Image SEO
- Schema rich snippets and article schema
- News Sitemap for Submitting Websites on Google News(TBA)
- Ping Search Engines
- Manage meta tags such as noindex, noarchive and such
Rank Math is the new player in the SEO website optimization game and the fastest-growing as well. Some would argue that it’s also the most powerful.
This fantastic tool lets you optimize your website for search engines and social media. Unlike Yoast, Rank Math is still a free tool packed with premium options which otherwise, you would have to pay for.
The premium version is gonna be released very soon with more features that are announced on their official Facebook page. If you are still doubting whether you should switch from Yoast to Rank Math, don’t worry, you can do this easily by the 1-click migration wizard which comes integrated by default.
3. All-In-One SEO Pack
PRICING: Free/Premium(from $57)
ACTIVE INSTALLATIONS: 2+ million
WP SCORE: 4.7 out of 5
KEY FEATURES:
- XML Sitemap support
- RSS Sitemap
- Google AMP support
- Google Analytics support
- Schema.org Markup
- Support for SEO on Custom Post Types
- ONLY free plugin to provide SEO Integration for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce
- Nonce Security built into All in One SEO Pack
- Generates META tags automatically
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend its functionality
If you don’t want to use Yoast or Rank Math, consider the All-in-One SEO Pack as your third option. As with the before-mentioned plugins, it also does the same thing, and it has a clean and user-friendly interface.
It offers a wide range of features, both free and paid tools to which help your website. One of the neat features this plugin offers is that you can use it to edit .htaccess file without FTP and edit your robots.txt file which is suited even for complete beginners.
As with Yoast and Rank Math, it also supports AMP (Google-friendly mobile version of your website). You can also optimize the WooCommerce store for SEO, and it’s packed with additional addons as well.
Clean, simple, and more affordable than Yoast.
4. SEOPress
PRICING: Free/Premium for $39
ACTIVE INSTALLATIONS: 100.000+
WP SCORE: 4.9 out of 5
KEY FEATURES:
- Redirections and 404 monitoring
- Google Analytics stats in your WordPress dashboard
- Video XML Sitemap
- Titles & metas
- XML sitemap
- HTML sitemap
- Backlinks from integration with Majestic
- Keyword suggestions for your content via Google’s Suggestion tool
- Google Structured Data Types: product, recipe, review, FAQ, course, article, event, local business, and video
- Google Page Speed integration
SEOPress is a popular, fast, and simple SEO friendly plugin tool for website optimization. This is all thanks to its affordable price, clean interface that comes with a comprehensive set of features.
As with other SEO plugin tools in this list, expect to find open graph support, image, and content, XML sitemaps, meta title, and description features integrated within the plugin.
This means that you don’t have to slow down your website with other plugins that do one specific thing since SEOPress provides that in one affordable package.
What differentiates this plugin from others in its price range is a unique feature of discovering new keywords via Google’s Suggestion tool.
5. SEO Framework
PRICING: Free/Premium(from $7)
ACTIVE INSTALLATIONS: 100.000+
WP SCORE: 4.9 out of 5
KEY FEATURES:
- Duplicated content protection
- XML Sitemap(Basic & Google News)
- SEO Management for Robots direction, 301 redirects, and Canonical URLs
- SMO management for Open Graph, oEmbed, RSS management
- Includes structured data for breadcrumbs, corporate contact, blog posts, site links, search box
- Automation for the title, robots, Facebook tags, Twitter card, and structured data generation
- Google Search Console integration
- Bing webmasters tools
- Pinterest Analytics
- Google AMP
SEO Framework is the only plugin on the list which claims to be a white hat SEO tool and it’s a great alternative to Yoast and Rank Math.
More lightweight than others and can intelligently generate critical SEO meta tags. This is achieved by reading a user’s WordPress environment in any language.
Design vise, the plugin is clean, simple, and looks like a part of WordPress. What it offers differently than others in the game is a colorful scale that shows you exactly what should you do next.
You can start with SEO Framework for free without any obstructive ads harassing you while you work. I would single out two fantastic features of this plugin and those are:
- Uses a focus subject instead of a focus keyword, encouraging you to write more naturally
- Without any additional plugin, SEO Framework removes spam comments
Side-by-Side Comparison
Let’s do a quick rundown of all five Seo Plugins, compare their features, and see how they stack against each other.
While Rank Math is completely free and has clear advantages against other plugins, keep in mind that a premium version is coming out in the coming months.
Yoast | Rank Math | All-In-One SEO Pack | SEOPress | SEO Framework | |
Free Version Available | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Annual Pricing | $39/site | N/A | $57/site | $39/site | $105/two sites |
Rank Tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
On-Page Optimization | Premium | Yes | No | No | No |
XML Sitemap | Yes | Yes | Premium | Yes | Yes |
Customer Support | Premium | Yes | Premium | Yes | Yes |
Now You Know
SEO can get hard and confusing without the right tools. While using any of the mentioned tools is great on its own, here are some other options to accompany top SEO plugins for WordPress you should check out:
- WP Rocket: all-in-one website speed optimization tool
- Autoptimize and Wp Fastest Cache – free alternatives to WP Rocket
- SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant: recommendations for content optimization based on the qualities of Google’s top 10-ranking pages for your given keywords.
- Broken Link Checker: Broken link management tool
- Ahrefs – Premium keyword research tool and resources to grow your search traffic
- Google Analytics by MonsterInsights: website analytic tool enhanced with the ability to review your data from WordPress directly
If we had to choose only one from all of these plugins, that would be Yoast in case you want a right-out-of-the-box simple and easy-to-use plugin. Otherwise, Rank Math is a tremendous option for those who like to fiddle around with extra features.
Either way, your website needs SEO optimization, so it’s best to just pick one tool and stick with it, as there is something for everyone on the list.
It is alright if you don’t become an SEO expert in one day, as these things take time. Try to take it easy and have fun.