WordPress is popular due to the large number of plugins available to help with everything from ecommerce to social media. Choosing the best SEO plugin for your needs can be difficult.
All In One SEO: Most popular SEO software
All In One SEO (AIOSEO) is a free SEO tool that lets you improve your site’s performance and rankings without a lot of complicated tinkering.
An initial wizard guides you through choosing the best pre-programmed SEO settings for your business type. You just need to select a category, provide your homepage title, meta description, logo and contact information (including business name) and social media accounts, and it will suggest the best features to enable.
Once installed, AIOSEO displays your SEO health in your WordPress backend. It provides an ongoing SEO score and alerts about critical issues, many of which can be corrected with just one or two clicks.
Advanced features like sitemaps, dynamic keywords, and social media integration are just as easy to turn on and deploy.
MonsterInsights: The Best Search Engine Optimization Software for Google Connectivity
With MonsterInsights, you can easily add, customize, and manage Google Analytics services on your WordPress site. It’s one of the top 20 most popular WordPress plugins.
Although the pro version has far more features, most SME users will find almost everything they need in the free tool.
After setup, the main page shows basic metrics like visitor sessions, pageviews, new versus returning visitors, visitor location and device, referral traffic, and the most successful or popular posts, products, or pages on your site.
The pro version goes further if needed. There are also details on top-converting products and sources. Size up your data by date range, campaign or marketing tactic. Enhanced link tracking shows you which sources point to your pages and which perform best.
The pro version of MonsterInsights contains far more features with ever-finer levels of complexity.
Yoast: The Best Search Engine Optimization Software for Beginners
Another free tool, Yoast is unique in that it creates content for both humans and search engines. The automatic 301 redirect tool, for example, sends users to a new URL rather than a broken link.
Yoast provides an easy-to-use interface for entering custom SEO titles and meta descriptions, allowing writers to better control search engine suggestions. Yoast also allows you to define your site’s breadcrumbs, making it easier for both visitors and search engines to navigate.
Yoast makes editing meta tags and descriptions simple and automatically generates your sitemap for indexing. Custom social media content is a powerful feature. When you share a link on social media, it automatically grabs the snippet text, title, and featured image. With the free version of Yoast, you can create custom posts for Facebook and Twitter.
Semrush SEO Writing Assistant: Best SEO plugin for writers
Professional SEOs use Semrush, a popular SEO tool. It was born out of the dark days when SEO was a precise science only a few could parse, and it contains the most refined early SEO tools. So the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin is useful for writers who want to use SEO to improve their website’s rankings.
The SEO Writing Assistant compares your posts or pages to the top ten websites for any keyword. After that, the assistant suggests relevant words and phrases to include, how many links it thinks the post needs, the readability of your text, and even the creative tone of your writer’s voice.
Ahrefs: The Best Search Engine Optimization Plugin for Connected Features
While the plugin is free, the Ahrefs platform subscriptions range from $99 to 999 per month. The plans vary in user count, project size, feature access, report frequency, and analysis depth. Without a paid Ahrefs subscription, you can only perform a content audit on your own site. The plugin’s real power comes from comparing your site audit to the platform’s other strong features.
With over 295 billion pages indexed and over 16 trillion backlinks, Ahrefs has the largest backlink index among its competitors. It also has some of the best user documentation we’ve seen (somewhat necessary owing to the breadth of features). This index is used by the Ahrefs SEO plugin to build a backlink profile for your site.
The platform’s heart is the Site Explorer, a dashboard that displays vital metrics like organic traffic, backlinks, and keywords. It compares your site’s SEO to your competitors’, comparing paid traffic and organic keyword research to give you an overall picture of your SEO. The Ahrefs SEO plugin connects to Google Analytics and Search Console.