The 7+ Best SEO WordPress Plugins [2024]

Mark Spera

There are over 59,000 WordPress plugins.

And over 1,000 SEO WordPress plugins.

screenshot of all the seo wordpress plugins

So choosing the right one for your business and use case can be difficult.

There are a ton of great SEO plugins out there that can help you with everything.

Choosing the right one is difficult.

I’ve worked in digital marketing for over a decade and I’ve grown and sold WordPress sites. I’ve tested all of these tools, and in this post, I’ll tell you which is right for you based on:

  • Features
  • Pros and cons
  • Pricing
  • And specialized use cases

Don’t make the same mistakes I made 10 years ago. Here we go!

Also read: The 21+ Best SEO Tools on Earth

The Best WordPress SEO Plugins

1. Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO plugin is the most beginner-friendly, famous, and one of the best SEO plugins for your WordPress site. In some ways, it’s become synonymous with WordPress.

Yoast has been around for over 10 years, it has over 5 million installations, and over 20 features to help your site rank.

If you’re going to get one plugin, it’s usually the right one. Heck, I use it for this site!

Yoast SEO plugin screenshot

Key Features Of Yoast

Yoast has almost all the features you need for your WordPress site, especially if you are starting your business. These are some of the features:

  • Readability Score: This is a tool to measure the readability of your content. It will help improve your readers’ content engagement and search engine rankings. It includes subheadings divisions, passive vs. active voice usages, consecutive sentences, and more.
  • SEO Score: This is a tool to measure the quality of content. It will help improve your content quality for search engines. It includes how to structure H1-H6 headings and use keywords in your content. In addition, this feature also gives suggestions like internal links, outbound links, images, length of content, and more.
  • Meta Descriptions and Titles: Yoast SEO enables you to create titles and meta descriptions for the Google search engine results page (SERP) right within your blog posts.
  • Google SERP Preview: This feature helps you to see how your website will appear in Google Search Results. It also helps you adjust your site to appear on the first page of Google search results. You can use this to adjust the length or content of your titles and metas.
  • Focus Keyphrase: This feature will help you add a focus keyword or phrase to your post to improve your content quality and SEO. The main idea of the focus keyphrase is for you to set your target keyword for the entire blog post or web page.
  • XML Sitemaps: This feature will create and submit XML Sitemaps to significant search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and more. Sitemaps help these search engines to find and index your new or changed web pages. This is super convenient and saves you time and effort doing this manually.
  • Technical SEO: canonical URLs and redirects.
  • Schema.org Integration: add schema to your pages with no code so that you can claim the Google snippets at the top of the SERP.
  • Faster Loading: Innovative way of managing data in WordPress to speed up your site.

Pros Of Using Yoast

  • It scores your post against the most used SEO practices and gives feedback on what you can improve.
  • It highlights your meta descriptions and helps you improve them so your articles can rank higher in search results.
  • It also offers several new fields to the WordPress edit post screen, so you don’t have to hassle with editing codes.
  • It’s a diversified product, so it can take care of many of the most important SEO strategies for your site.
  • It’s affordable

Cons Of Using Yoast

  • It becomes tricky to use if you are trying to optimize for several different keywords.
  • It has no keyword tracking or performance feature.
  • It also lacks backlinks information and keyword research — so it probably can’t be your only SEO tool.

Customers Of Yoast

Some of the notable customers of Yoast SEO include:

  • SEO Monkey
  • Kinsta
  • PortraitFlip
  • Growth Marketing Pro

Yoast Pricing

Yoast has three pricing levels. The features described above are available in the free version, but if you want advanced features, you may want to upgrade to other levels.

  • The Premium costs $99/year for more features.
  • Plugin Subscription; this Plan is best if you want to optimize your business on platforms other than WordPress. It includes Shopify, video SEO, and more.

Also read: 8+ Best Yoast Alternatives

2. Rank Math

Rank Math is a modern and high-performance WordPress SEO plugin that helps you grow your business with SEO, without draining your hard earn revenue. It optimizes your content and increases your rankings on Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. Rank Math has a lot of features, so if you have no experience with SEO it will take a little time to learn. That said, the UI is pretty intuitive. Rank Math also uses a setup wizard, so you can make the switch to their plugin and get started right away. 

Rank Math is like a combination of Yoast and Semrush or Ubersuggest, in that it has many WordPress optimization features, plus some light keyword research and rank tracking features. Technically, it could serve as your only SEO tool.

Key Features Of Rank Math

Like Yoast, Rank Math has many, many features. In fact, most of them are pretty similar:

  • SEO Titles: It helps you improve your search engine rankings by making your titles search-friendly and clickable. It allows you to write different titles in search engines like Google. 
  • Meta Descriptions: Rank Math helps you create unique and engaging meta descriptions to show in search results. This result in increased CTR and conversions.
  • SEO Basics: This feature helps you know how to optimize your meta description, SEO title, focus keyphrase, and more. The SEO basics are like the Yoast SEO analysis tool.
  • Google SERP Preview: This feature shows you how your posts, pages, and website categories will look in Google search results so you can compare and improve them.
  • Google Trends Integration: This feature enables you to know what topics are trending in Google so that you can focus on relevant topics for your business. It’s like light keyword research.
  • Content Readability:  With the Rank Math content readability feature, you can optimize your content for readability. It offers suggestions like whether your sentences and paragraphs are short or not, whether your images are optimized, and also suggests proper table of content usage.
  • Others: Sitemap, schema, and a search console integration

Pros Of Using Rank Math

  • It offers robust features like managing 404 errors and creating 301 redirects. 
  • In addition, you can write SEO titles and meta descriptions.
  • It detects and analyzes each keyword you set at the beginning and shows you various recommendations to optimize and improve the search position for your site.
  • It has technical SEO features like XML sitemaps and schema.

Cons Of Using Rank Math

  • The free version of RankMath doesn’t offer much compared to other plugins like Yoast.
  • It may be challenging to use, especially if you’re starting.

Customers Of Rank Math

Rank Math boasts of more than one million customers, including notable brands like:

  • WebMD
  • Jeep
  • AppSumo
  • Twitch
  • And more

Pricing Of Rank Math

Rank Math is no longer a free plugin because the free features limit what to do to improve your site rankings. Most of the plugin’s features are in the premium plans:

  • Pro Plan: $59/year, perfect for bloggers, solopreneurs, and individuals.
  • Business Plan: $199/year, perfect for freelancers, businesses, and agency owners.
  • Agency Plan: $499/month, perfect for agency owners with high volume.

Also read: Rank Math vs Yoast

3. GrowthBar

GrowthBar is an all-in-one SEO tool that can help you research, write, and optimize your blog content. It also happens to have a WordPress plugin that can be accessed through its Chrome Extension. GrowthBar’s WordPress plugin stands apart from others because it enables you to optimize your posts and pages for over 100 metrics and enables you to write with AI.

Even more, GrowthBar has best-in-class keyword research, competitor research, rank tracking, and dozens of other AI writing features. GrowthBar can truly solve all of your SEO needs, except the technical stuff like schema, XML sitemaps, and redirects (use Yoast or Rank Math for those).

Key Features Of GrowthBar

Growth Bar provides everything you need to write and optimize long-form content without hassle. Some of the features in Growth Bar’s WordPress SEO plugin include the following:

  • Headlines Suggestions: Headlines are one of the best ways to structure your content for search engines and readers; GrowthBar’s headline suggestions allow you to drag-and-drop headlines that are already performing for your competitors.
  • Content Optimizations: GrowthBar give your content an overall optimization score of 0-100%; the higher the percentage, the better. It provides you with unique keywords you can use throughout your content, and above all, you can do it in the WordPress dashboard without slowing down your site.  
  • Meta Description: Meta descriptions are a vital part of WordPress sites. You can make it easy by using the GrowthBar meta generator to write attention-grabbing and zero-fluff meta descriptions for your WordPress posts and pages.
  • Optimal Content Length: As Google becomes more sophisticated, long-form content performs and ranks higher in SERPs. So to make long-form content practical, GrowthBar will suggest the optimal length for every blog article you write using signals from the Google SERP.
  • AI Writer In WordPress: If you like writing your blog posts directly in the WordPress editor, look no further than Growth Bar’s AI writer in WordPress. It allows you to write faster, better-optimized blog posts in WordPress, score your content’s overall performance and offer suggestions on improving your rankings in search. Write 10x faster!

Pros Of Using Growth Bar

  • GrowthBar is one of the easiest-to-use WordPress tools in the market, and if you are new to SEO, you will love it.
  • GrowthBar’s Site Inspector makes it unique among other SEO tools. You can spy on competitors and get links to your site through outreach if you get the hang of the Site Inspector.
  • The optimizer is one of the best and most accurate you can get for your business.
  • The price is also very reasonable.

Cons Of Using Growth Bar

  • GrowthBar does not have technical SEO features like redirects, sitemaps, etc.

Customers Of Growth Bar

Growth Bar boasts more than 5,000 customers worldwide. Notable brands include:

  • Dell
  • Monday.com
  • Codeless
  • Almanac
  • Cube
  • Minted
  • And more

Pricing Of Growth Bar

GrwthBar offers three plans with 5-days free and a 100% money-back guarantee.

  • Standard Plan: $29/month, perfect for beginners to create optimized content or blog posts at a fast speed.
  • Pro Plan: $99/month, perfect for large businesses who want to scale content creation and SEO strategy.
  • Agency Plan: $199/month, perfect for those who want to bring on team or agency members for content collaboration.

Also read: The 7+ Best Content Optimization Tools

4. AIOSEO

All-In-One SEO (AIOSEO) is one of the best WordPress plugins that can help you take your blank WordPress installation to number one on Google SERPs without draining your wallet. AIO is easy to install and configure, reducing the need to install several plugins for your WordPress site. 

Admittedly, AIOSEO is very similar to Rank Math and Yoast. If you have a WordPress site, you don’t need more than one of those tools.

Key Features Of AIOSEO

  • TruSEO On-page SEO Analysis: this feature helps you quickly add the things you need for better On-Page SEO optimizations like title tags, meta descriptions, keywords, and more.
  • Local SEO: You can use this feature to serve local customers in your territory. AIO gives you the tools to increase your local rankings, especially in Google Maps.
  • XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps are crucial for your WordPress site. It is for search engines consumptions. AIO can automatically generate sitemaps and notify search for any updates.
  • Technical Tools: Like schema and redirects.
  • Social Media Integrations: This feature can control how your content and thumbnails will look on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels.

Pros Of Using AIOSEO

  • AIO is easy to set up and use for your WordPress site.
  • It’s also good for beginners to use.
  • It has a wide range of features, so it can cover absolutely everything you need for WordPress SEO.

Cons Of Using AIOSEO

  • It lacks modern features like a rank tracker and keyword research, which is vital for your search rankings. So like the rest, it probably cannot be your sole SEO tool.

Customers Of AIOSEO

You can join thousands of brands using AIO to grow their SEO strategies, including:

  • WordPress Consultants
  • Bloggers
  • Freelancers
  • And more

Pricing AIO SEO

You can get AIO SEO through any of their four plans:

  • Basic: $49/year, essential for one site.
  • Plus: $99/year, Great for three sites.
  • Best Deal: $199/year, excellent for up to 10 sites.
  • Elite: $299/year for up to 100 sites.

5. SEOPress

SEOPress is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins you can use to increase rankings and grow your business. You can download the plugin directly from your WordPress admin and follow their on-screen wizard to configure your favorite features. In addition, You can migrate your posts’ meta titles and descriptions from other plugins to SEOPress.

SEOPress is more like a Semrush than it is like Yoast, AIOSEO, or Rank Math. It has a lot of analytics features, keyword research, and technical SEO features. Of course, it has some of the same features as Yoast or Rank Math — like titles, metas, and sitemaps — but it has a whole lot more.

Key Features Of SEOPress

SEOPress comes in two forms freemium and Premium. Some freemium features include:

  • SEO Titles & Meta Tags: Like any WordPress SEO plugin, you can add meta titles and meta descriptions in SEO Press.
  • Sitemaps: You can use this feature to automatically create a sitemap for search engines and grow your search traffic from day one.
  • Images SEO: Images are a huge deal for bloggers, marketers, and strategies. That’s where SEO Press images SEO comes into play. It automatically optimizes your images, helping you get more traffic from Google images.
  • Social Media: Sharing your content on social media will expose it to more eyes. Using this feature in SEO Press can help to increase your conversions on social media channels.
  • Integrations: with Google Analytics, WooCommerce,
  • Technical Features: Like redirects and structured data.
  • Content Analysis: Like GrowthBar, there are some content analytics features so that you can optimize posts as you go.

Pros Of Using SEOPress

  • SEOPress is simple and easy to use.
  • Most of the basic functionalities are available to help with your SEO needs.
  • It covers a lot of territory: from rank tracking and keyword research to redirects and schema. You could get away with just using SEO Press as your only SEO tool.

Cons Of Using SEOPress

  • If you’re switching from other plugins, it may be challenging to use at first, though they have a migration service.
  • Content analytics is more limited than GrowthBar or Yoast.
  • There is a bit of a learning curve because of how comprehensive the tool is.

Customers Of SEOPress

Bloggers, small businesses, and brands that use SEOPress includes:

  • GoDaddy
  • Microsft
  • HubSpot
  • And more

Pricing Of SEOPress

SEOPress provides its service at three pricing levels:

  • SEOPress Pro: $49/year for unlimited sites. This Plan gives you premium features to increase your rankings.
  • SEOPress Insights: $99/year/site for those who want to take care of their off-page SEO.
  • SEOPress Bundle: $128/year for all the features SEOPress has to offer.

6. Schema Pro

Schema Pro is the simplest way to implement schema markup and boost your website SEO in a few clicks without technical knowledge. In addition, Schema markups don’t have to be complicated with Schema Pro. You can use their friendly interface to set up schema markups without code requirements.

If you’re serious about schema — because you have a directory site with reviews, you want author bios to show in the SERP, or you want your ecommerce listings to show up with stars in the SERP — Schema Pro has you covered. Plus, Schema Pro plays nice with Yoast!

Key Features Of Schema Pro

The features of Schema Pro are for solving and providing solutions to Schema problems, including:

  • FAQ Schema: Frequently Ask Questions (FAQs) can help you present answers to users’ queries beautifully and uniquely. Schema Pro will be great if you want to provide customers with useful FAQs about your business.
  • How-to Schema: You can use this schema to display a summary of an entire procedure to do something, which draws people’s interest in knowing more about your articles. So Schema Pro’s how-to schema helps readers better understand your content and search engines.
  • Review Schema: If you love reviewing products, that’s where Review Schema by Schema Pro comes into play. It helps you add structured information like user reviews ratings so search engines like Google can display those rich snippets without hassle. 

Pros Of Using Schema Pro

  • Schema Pro is an excellent plugin for adding schema to your site. In addition, the team updates the product to meet Google guidelines.

Cons Of Using Schema Pro

  • It lacks other SEO features like meta titles, descriptions, keyword research, and content optimization. So this is definitely not your all-in-one SEO tool.

Customers Of Schema Pro

Over one thousand customers trust Schema Pro with their businesses, including:

  • Blogging Wizard
  • Kinsta
  • Search Engine Journal
  • Elementor

Pricing Schema Pro

You can get Schema Pro for any of their two plans:

  • Schema Pro: $67/year to automate your schema needs easily.
  • Growth Bundle: $187/year, you get the complete suite of tools to grow your online business.

7. Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO is an all-in-one SEO suite that takes head-scratching out of search engine optimization through the power of AI. With Squirrly, you get over 650 features pre-configured for your site during installation. Squirrly is very comprehensive. It includes content optimization recommendations, audits, rank tracking, keyword research, and a lot more. Technically, it could serve as your only SEO tool.

Key Features Of SEO Squirrly

  • Keyword Research: You can do basic keyword research with Squirrly. Squirrly even recommends less competitive keywords if it identifies one.
  • Technical: It offers automatic XML sitemaps for your site and redirects.
  • Content Optimization: Squirrly gives you some broad content optimization features so that you can optimize for SEO as you write.
  • Tracking: Squirrly does rank tracking and gives you insights about changes to your site based on impressions, CTR%, and more.

Pros Of Using SEO Squirrly

  • Squirrly excels in tracking metrics. It slurps data from your Google Search Console to provide you with on-the-fly wins and losses to help illuminate your biggest SEO opportunities. This is super helpful as you test different strategies.
  • It helps with some basic keyword research and rank tracking.
  • It has a seriously wide breadth of features.

Cons Of Using SEO Squirrly

  • Like SEOPress, it’s a bit overwhelming because of how comprehensive it is.
  • Content optimization and keyword research are both a little limited.

Customers Of SEO Squirrly

  • QuickSprout
  • Elegant Themes
  • Kinsta
  • Backlinko
  • And more

Pricing Of SEO Squirrly

Depending on the need of your business, you can get Squirrly for $71/month or $75/month.

Factors To Consider When Selecting Your Best WordPress SEO Plugin

Choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin is not an easy process. So you must consider many factors before choosing or switching from your current one.

  • Speed: The speed of your site is vital, so make sure the plugin you choose doesn’t slow down your site.
  • Budget: Your pocket is crucial when choosing a service for your business. For example, consider your content needs and several factors before selecting your plugin. You can use the free Yoast SEO plugin plus Growth Bar’s suite of tools if you’re starting.
  • Features: It also depends on your needs or your business needs. If you want keyword research in addition to content creation, you can use Growth Bar and Ahrefs for backlinks checking and site audits.
  • Metrics: You must also consider the metrics you want to monitor over time. Do you want to monitor backlinks or general website metrics like pageviews and sessions? Or use a tool like Rank Tracker in Growth Bar SEO for an affordable price.

Conclusion

Deciding on the best WordPress SEO plugin is not a size-fit-all journey. Instead, it will be best to consider several factors before deciding on the plugins to go with your business. 

Yoast SEO plugin is the most beginner friendly to go with for your WordPress site. It covers almost everything you need for SEO except keyword research, rank tracking, and competitor research. So it’s not the only tool you should use, but it’s probably the best for WordPress SEO.

If you want all things about schema, then go with Schema Pro.

GrowthBar is an excellent tool to quickly create highly-optimized content as a blogger without draining your pocket.

If you’re looking for something that can be your soup-to-nuts SEO tool, you want SEOPress or Squirrly.

I hope this guide helps you find a fantastic WordPress SEO plugin.