Having an amazing website with top-notch content that ranks on the fifth page of search results is every website owner’s worst nightmare.
And the key to avoiding this is to optimize your website for search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help you rank higher in search results, gain more visibility, and improve the quality and quantity of traffic your website gets – all of which can help your bottom line.
But here’s the catch – SEO can often be complicated and confusing for website owners, especially if you don’t have prior knowledge or a strategy in place. Analyzing content for keywords, creating a site structure, tracking rankings, and most importantly, staying on top of search engine algorithms is not an easy feat.
The good news is there’s a wide range of WordPress SEO plugins that can simplify the job for you. With features like content analysis, keyword tracking, and SEO audits, these plugins can help you optimize every part of your website effortlessly so you can gain more visibility online.
Like with many plugin categories, if you go looking, you can get lost in a sea of SEO plugins because there are simply so many of them. But we’ve done the legwork for you and prepared a list of the eight best plugins to supercharge your website traffic.
Let’s dive in!
1. Rank Math (Rank Math team)
Although a new kid on the block, Rank Math is an excellent WordPress plugin offering more than 50 features to improve your site’s SEO.
These features include real-time content insights, snippet preview (to optimize your titles and meta descriptions for SERPs), schema, 404 monitoring and redirection, rank tracking, XML sitemaps, and image SEO. It’s also compatible with WooCommerce, allowing you to optimize product pages and categories to increase your store’s visibility and sales.
The plugin’s integration with Google Trends lets you quickly check search trends for keywords and even compare keyword opportunities visually through a graph.
Interestingly, it also automatically tells the search engines when you upload a new post or update an old one (called Pinging) to make indexing faster.
Top feature: It integrates tightly with Google Search Console, helping you understand which keywords you’re ranking for and spot SEO errors right from your WordPress dashboard.
Pricing: Currently starting at $59/year.
2. Yoast (Yoast team)
Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, having 27,000+ 5-star ratings – and its popularity is not without good reason.
It offers all the features you need to optimize your website – from structured data, SERP, and social previews to XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, 404 monitoring, redirection, and detecting duplicate keyphrases.
What makes Yoast further stand out are its powerful on-page SEO features – it checks your content against more than 15 factors (like keyword density, distribution) so you can quickly make changes and optimize your page.
Its “SEO workout” feature is also intriguing – it helps you improve the rankings of your most important content pieces and identify unlinked content to direct some links to them. The plugin also enables you to create a strong internal linking strategy – with blocks like breadcrumbs and related links section – to help search engines and visitors easily find your content.
Top feature: Besides SEO tools, it also offers readability checks to improve your content and provide a better experience to readers.
Pricing: $89/year. Also offers a free version.
3. Squirrly SEO (Squirrly SEO team)
Squirrly is a one-stop-shop for your SEO needs, offering keyword research, content optimization, technical SEO, audits, rank tracking, and WooCommerce SEO. Despite all these features, it’s still lightweight and doesn’t slow down your website.
Its in-built keyword research tool is beneficial – it tells you a keyword’s search trends, your chances of ranking for it based on the competition, and even suggests related keyphrases.
What’s more, you can save and organize your keywords in a “Briefcase” – this can help you prepare, track, and improve your content strategy.
The plugin comes with an SEO live assistant that gives you feedback on your content on the go. Besides tracking your ranking performance, it also conducts audits to provide you with information on technical SEO issues, website and page traffic, social media shares, etc.
Top feature: Its Focus Pages tool analyzes every page individually, telling you exactly what you need to work on to improve a particular page’s ranking.
Pricing: Starts at $29.99/month.
4. AIOSEO (AIOSEO team)
An excellent tool for beginners, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) offers several features to make your website SEO-friendly.
It automatically creates and sends XML sitemaps to search engines and notifies them about updates on your site. It also supports different schema markups – like FAQ, product, recipe – to help you increase click-through rates and traffic.
Besides this, AIOSEO offers powerful on-page SEO features, helping you edit titles and meta descriptions and assess keyword usage and readability to improve chances of ranking. It also integrates with social media platforms and even WooCommerce – for the latter, it helps you optimize product titles, descriptions, images, and more.
The best part? It comes with a setup wizard to get you started on the right foot and configure your SEO settings in minutes.
Top feature: It lets you control access to different SEO features through user roles. For instance, you can give your authors access to only SEO analysis, removing features like search appearance or sitemap settings for them.
Pricing: Currently starting at $39.60/year (one site) with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
5. The SEO Framework (The SEO Framework team)
The SEO Framework provides all the basic features of a great SEO plugin. But what makes it different is that it comes preconfigured – based on the settings that work best for most websites. However, you can also modify these settings as per your requirements.
The plugin automatically generates meta tags for your site, but you can also manage SEO yourself – through the meta box on each post. It also shows you how your posts will look on social media so you can optimize your website for both search engines and socials.
What’s more, the plugin comes with many extensions enhancing its functionality. The “Focus” add-on, for instance, checks your page against different SEO factors to help you write targeted content that ranks better. On the other hand, “Articles” increases your chances of ranking by adding structured data to your posts.
Top feature: It uses a color scale to show you where you’re lagging and what you can do to boost a page’s SEO.
Pricing: Offers a free plan; paid plans start at $7/month (paid yearly).
6. SEO Ultimate (SEO Ultimate team)
Like other plugins, SEO Ultimate lets you create meta titles, descriptions, sitemaps and comes with tools like a 404 monitor, permalink editor, and slug optimizer – all of which help improve your site’s SEO.
It also lets you add structured data, supporting more than 22 schema markups (like FAQ, reviews, events).
The plugin also offers many exciting features besides these to make your site search-engine ready. For instance, its “Deeplink Juggernaut” lets you create a solid internal linking structure in your website. All you have to do is specify the anchor text and destination page – it’ll automatically search your entire site and link the anchor texts.
The “Deep Silo Builder” is equally fascinating – it helps you create smart site structures so search engines can understand what your website is about and visitors can navigate it better.
Top feature: Its mass editing functionality lets you edit meta tags, internal links, Open Graph data, alt attributes, and more for up to 100 pages together.
Pricing: Licenses start at $49.
7. Slim SEO (Slim SEO team)
Slim SEO is a great WordPress plugin that automates all the SEO work for you, automatically generating sitemaps, meta tags, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, image alt texts, and more to improve your site’s SEO.
What’s more helpful is that you can enable or disable any of these features based on your needs.
Like The SEO Framework, this plugin also comes preconfigured, so you don’t have to go through complex settings. It also integrates with WooCommerce, helping you optimize your store and product pages to boost ranking.
Its Pro version – which is in development – will further extend its functionality by offering local SEO, internal and external link analysis, and redirection to fix broken links.
Top feature: It’s lightweight and fast, meaning you can work on your website’s SEO without affecting its speed or performance.
Pricing: Free; Slim SEO Pro will be chargeable.
8. SEOPress (SEOPress)
Search appearance, social media preview, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, schema, WooCommerce, and local SEO – SEOPress provides all the essential features you’ll need to optimize your website without bloating it.
It also offers a content analysis tool that checks your pages against 16 factors (like title, image alt texts) based on the keyword you’re targeting. The best part is that it lets you add unlimited keywords – and optimize your page for all.
Its “Google suggestions” feature helps you find search trends related to your keyword that you can use in your content to improve ranking. What’s more, the plugin also gives you relevant internal linking suggestions so you can look after and leverage this aspect of SEO.
Top feature: It integrates with Google Analytics, giving you rich insights on your visitors, page views, average session duration, bounce rates, etc.
Pricing: Starts at $39/year; also offers a free version.
Conclusion
While SEO plugins can’t guarantee top rankings in search engines, they can certainly improve your chances of it by creating a website that search engines can crawl through, or understand better.
These eight plugins are some of the best to get started with SEO on your website. They all offer helpful features but make sure to do your research, carefully check reviews, and pick one that matches your requirements down to a T.
WooCommerce: Top 8 SEO Plugins to Grow Your Traffic .