You’re missing out on traffic and conversions if your WordPress site doesn’t optimize for SEO. Marketers agree that organic search is the best metric for determining content success. In 2020 67% of marketers say SEO is the best way to improve content performance and based on statistics from the latest Semrush Content Marketing Survey, they also rooted for the same analysis. In this article, we shall discuss the 12 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress that can greatly improve your website ranking if you implement then well.

There are many WordPress plugins that can take a novice’s website to the next level. But before we proceed to discuss the best SEO plugins let’s understand what WordPress plugins are

What are WordPress plugins?

WordPress plugins are tools that can be added to your site and can be used to improve the site’s functionality and increase its performance. WordPress plugins are designed specifically for WordPress sites, and without coding knowledge, you can use them to dramatically enhance your site’s flexibility.

There are over 55,000 WordPress plugins available on the official WordPress repository. The quality of each plugin can vary, and while some may not be best for your website based on your individual preferences, others may also slow down your site.

In addition to not all WordPress plugins are free and many of these are freemium, meaning they have a free option with the paid option giving access to additional features

Now you know what WordPress plugins are, below are the list of the 12 best SEO plugins for WordPress that can enhance your website performance

12 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

Wondering which SEO tool would be best for your website? There are many great SEO tools that work with WordPress. It depends on your individual needs, but it's important to know that not all of the tools are created equally.

This list will include plugins that have both a free and paid version, but this is starting with the free versions

1. Yoast's WordPress SEO plug-in (Free/Paid from $89)

Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin has features that offer both a free or paid subscription. The features include:

Powerfull integration with Semrush to target highly relevant keywords
Yoast plugin provides readability analytics on content
Yoast’s helpful page analysis features
Why the yoast plugin has a special feature for creating an XML sitemap
A redirect features
Yoast Plugin Features: Automatic Internal Linking
Automatic structured data features
Google Search Console seamless integration

2. Semrush SEO Writing Assistant (Free)

One of the best SEO plugins for WordPress is semrush SEO Writing Assistant. With instant recommendations tailored to Google’s Top 10 rankings, you have what you need in a concise format. Aside from improving SEO: semrush can offer you the following

A readability score and tips for improvement
Target keywords and recommended keywords
•A tone of voice score to make sure the content you create is appropriate for the topic.
Features for plagiarism and how to make sure content is original
What to do if your site has blocked links

3. Google XML Sitemaps (Free)

This is a handy free auto SEO WordPress plugin, created to generate a sitemap for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. An XML sitemap will help search engines see the areas you want indexed and index those valuable pages. Google XML Sitemaps maybe free but it has amazing features like

It automatically updates the sitemap whenever you publish new content.
It is easy to understand and use.
Once Google XML Sitemaps has been installed, you can adjust it’s settings and then you will not have to do anything else.

4. SEO Ultimate (Free/Paid from $49)

SEO Ultimate is an all-in-one SEO plugin that is both flexible and features other stand out qualities. These features include, but are not limited to:

Automatically setting up of keywords
Enables you to generate links on your site.
Automatically creates open graph for your posts and pages.
There is a file editor in the dashboard that means you can modify the robots.txt

5. Squirrly SEO (Free/Paid from $29.99)

For beginners, Squirrly has been designed with a basic SEO plugin for WordPress which seamlessly enhances the meta descriptions, headings and headlines of your site to increase your traffic.

The Live assistant helps optimize site content on the backend
Ability to optimize your WordPress blog for Google with detailed guide

6. Rank Math (Free)

Rank Math is an SEO plugin that will improve your ranking on both search engines and social media sites, with it being one of the best ones available to really optimize your site.

Setup and configure are seamlessly ease
Allows for easy integration of data markup with Google Schema
Options for optimizing unlimited keywords
Faster, reliable results thanks to Google Search Console integration.

7. The SEO Framework (Free)

The SEO Framework is a plugin that optimizes your site according to the best practices of SEO and how search engines to rank your webpages. SEO Framework might be free but it has amazing features like

Highly organized into color-coded guidelines on post overview pages
These plugins generate the entries for your site's meta tags so you don't have to take time to do it yourself

8. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin (Free/Paid from $199)

The SEO plugin for WordPress is highly rated thanks to its ease of use and ability to combine Google Analytics with WordPress.

The main advantage of the Google Analytics WordPress plugin is that it can be viewed from the WordPress dashboard.

It’s a Powerful Plugins that Offer Link Tracking
Tracks traffic and user engagement
Interest reports and demographics access class

9. All in One Schema Rich Snippets (Free)

This is one of the most popular schema markup plugins for WordPress. Rich snippets are an important part of SEO as it provides a more interactive summary of your post in the search engine. This positively impacts click-through rates from organic searches, increasing your Google rank.

All in one schema rich snippets plugin can generate all the content types that you might need, including product descriptions, articles, recipes, events and reviews.

Plugins that are Particularly Useful for E-commerce Sites.
Can be used for a variety of schema types, such as articles, events, products reviews and more.

10. Broken Link Checker by ManageWP (Free)

This plugin hunts down broken or missing links and fix them. It also helps with the management of images on your site that are not displaying properly. This plugin has a number of features, such as notification emails for broken links and safe browsing links for Google Chrome in order to detect malware.

• Alerts you when your WordPress site has broken links or missing images.

• Known issue of some links not working

• Can prevent search engines from following broken links

11. All in One SEO Pack (Free/Paid from $79)

The All-in-one SEO plugin is known for its user-friendly interface and the range of tools it offers to help boost your website. Some of the features provided with this plugin include:

Integration with WooCommerce
Keyword research – Can help you find keywords, and then let you add them to the title and meta description, open graph
can generate XML sitemaps and image sitemaps.
Allows you to have more control of WordPress through their features

12. SEOPress (Free/Paid from $39)

Many WordPress users find SEOPress to be a great plugin because it is cheap and most comprehensive set of SEO plugins for WordPress

This plugin is all-in-one and can quickly optimizes a WordPress site. With this plugin, you can also check whether links on the site are broken or not.

The software is convenient for both beginners and more advanced users, as it's easy to install and provides access to advanced features.

Premium WordPress SEO Plugins

WPML (Paid from $29)

WPML is a multilingual WordPress plugin that lets websites display in different languages. This plugin has many advantages and can be a great way of targeting international audiences.

Allows you to optimize you site SEO into multiple language
Sets the SEO meta information for translations
Plugin crawls your site to create machine-readable sitemaps
•Directs your site's traffic to the right sources.

Premium SEO Pack (Paid from $44)

This SEO plugin helps you rank higher in search engine results and improves your images. The highlights of this product are:

Speed insights of each post or page for both desktop and mobile
Can Monitor 404 Errors
Automatically generates suitable alt and title attributes for images.

SEOPressor (Paid from $9)

SEOPressor is different from other plugins because it keeps up with Google's latest algorithm trends. One reason that people like this plugin is that the plugin has the ability to

Detects if you are over-optimizing your site, which can result in Google penalties.
You might have known about Google's web crawler, but did you know there are others?
Can add links and keywords automatically to reduce bounce rate

WordLift (Paid from $59)

This smart plugin for WordPress can help users grow their audience through more advanced SEO. It has some excellent general features which include:

Managing structured data markup through natural language processing and knowledge graphs.
Get the best WordPress SEO plugin for Google Analytics
Tracking of content performance and providing optimization strategy using WooRank’s technology.

WPtouch Mobile Plugin (Free/Paid from $79)

This WordPress plugin helps your site using easy steps and make your site mobile-friendly in a short time. Not to have a mobile-friendly site can lower your ranking on search engines.

This uncomplicated plugin allows you to customize the mobile appearance of your WordPress site.
Top Search Engine Optimization Plugins for WordPress
Google mobile friendly test

Free Site Management WordPress Plugins

These are Plugins that can help with technical SEO issues and avail you with the guide to ensure your website functions optimally, below are some of the recommendations

Ø W3 Total Cache (Free)

This free plugin for WordPress lets you know when there is something slowing down your site and is often highlighted as one of the best plugins available. Sites speed has a huge impact in SEO, and Google says it weighs on ranking. The benefits include:

The ability to make your WordPress site lighter, faster and more responsive with the right plugins
Reduces page load time.
improved conversions and site performance
Up to 80% bandwidth savings

Ø Redirection (Free)

Redirection is a redirect manager plugin that helps you to easily keep on top of 301 redirects and other loose ends. The plugin will help minimize errors and improve site ranking, and it is often considered the best WordPress redirect plugin because it of the following

It is simple to keep track of 404 errors and implement 301 redirects.

Provides support for 4xx status codes.

Gives support for other kinds of 3XX directs.

Ø Yet Another Related Posts Plugin YARPP (Free)

The plugin is great because it will show related posts, pages, and custom post types to the user while they are reading the page. It should help to keep readers on the site for as long as possible with low bounce rates boosting SEO. It has the ability to

To re-arrange or filter search terms and it is a powerful tool in SEO

The Thumbnail View plugin is the most popular choice to show related content.

A customizable algorithm that ensures you show your best posts

Ø Rel NoFollow Checkbox (Free)

If you have links on your site with affiliate information, then use Rel NoFollow Checkbox to make it easier for people to tick when adding links in WordPress. It will help you rank higher. It has an amazing feature that will save you time like

No need for code editing when you want to insert ‘no follow' links

Easy to install and use.

Ø All in One WP Security & Firewall (Free)

This plugin offers exceptional security for your WordPress site, to ensure your user experience is protected. This plugin has some of the best features, like blocked hack attempts and suggestions for password changes.

It also has security points score feature that shows you and how secure your website is
What WordPress plugins are necessary to have on your site to get a high SEO score?
With this security measure, bots and hackers will not be able to discover your personal information when they see your permalink.

Conclusion and recommendation

What WordPress Plugin Should You Use For SEO?

The best WordPress SEO plugin is going to be one where a user can get features that they need. When it comes to choosing a plugin, always look at the on-page and technical SEO features it has – what you need may not be what someone else needs. Consider reviews if a plugin struggles with site speed, or if it overloads your site with too many plugins.

Are there any plugin services you want us to include in the future that we have overlooked? Let us know in the comments…… SHALOM