7 Best WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools that You Should Consider Using in 2024

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Getting a higher ranking for your WordPress website on the search engines is quite difficult, there are many methods to achieve it and one of the primary ones is to use a good set of SEO plugins and tools.

There are hundreds of SEO plugins in the WordPress directory, but not every plugin is worth using. Some plugins barely get updated and some are discontinued. However, in this article, I will share some of the best SEO plugins and tools that I have been using.

Why to use SEO Plugins?

The default WordPress doesn’t come with any features apart from a simple design; to make it fully functional, you need to install a suitable WordPress theme and some plugins. An SEO plugin will make your WordPress website fully compatible with search engines and users.

By installing an SEO plugin, you can control and display the relevant information with Meta description, Schema data, and Knowledge Graphs in search engines. SEO plugins can also improve your click-through rate and conversion rates.

WordPress SEO Plugins I have been using:

Below are the tools and SEO plugins I’ve been using over the years on my WordPress websites; these tools helped me rank higher on search engines and can help you too.

If you’re a beginner, you can try these plugins to get started.

Rank Math

Rank Math is one of the best lightweight SEO plugins I’ve been using it for a couple of years now. Before Rank Math, I used Yoast SEO for nearly nine years, like many others. One of the main reasons to migrate from Yoast SEO was speed; Rank Math is half the size of Yoast SEO and uses fewer resources. You can read my comparison article on Rank Math vs Yoast SEO.

You can easily get started with their Setup Wizard which automatically configures suitable settings for your WordPress website.

There are two versions of Rank Math; free and Premium; the free version has been used by over 2 million websites. The Premium version comes with many added features and AI-based tools.

Rank Math offers many features including Rank Tracker to track your keyword and website’s performance; with this, you can keep an eye on your keyword position over the last few months. Besides, it also comes with Content AI; an AI-based writing assistant to improve your content.

Like other SEO plugins, Rank Math offers an Advanced Schema Generator that delivers search engines and users with relevant information related to your website or the product you review. Additionally, you can custom-build and add multiple Schema to your posts.

You can also integrate your website with Google Search Console to identify issues using Rank Math. Further, it also comes with an Internal Link Builder, Redirection Manager, Sitemap, WooCommerce Support, etc.

Rank Math also provides various types of Schema such as Review Schema, FAQ Schema, and How-To Schema to add relevant structured data to your article which helps search engines display Rich Snippets of your content.

In the above screenshot, you can see Rank Math’s review schema in action on the Google Search Results page of my article. While the Rank Math plugin adds relevant structured data to your page, Google only displays it if your site has a good reputation and if it is considered helpful for the users.

This plugin also comes with an import tool to import all your SEO settings from Yoast SEO or any other popular SEO plugins.

Yoast SEO

While I no longer use Yoast SEO on this blog, it’s one of the oldest and most popular SEO plugins with over 13 million active installs. In fact, most of Rank Math’s features are inspired by Yoast.

Yoast SEO also offers free and Premium version plugins for your WordPress websites. The Premium version is priced at $99 per year.

The premium version of Yoast SEO comes with AI-optimized SEO titles and a meta descriptions generator for your posts and pages. It also offers an automatic link manager to ensure no broken links or 404 errors.

Additionally, it provides real-time suggestions for internal links that can help you boost on-page SEO for your website.

The paid version is Ads-free and you’ll get 24/support via email for all your queries.

Pretty Links

I’ve been using Pretty Links since the beginning of my blogging career. As the name suggests, Pretty Links helps you clean up and manage all your affiliate links in one place.

For example, the Pretty Links plugin can convert your not-so-nice-looking affiliate URLs like rankmath.com/?ref=adithya%20sh into a clean-looking link like theblogmetrics.com/go/rankmath with a 307 Temporary Redirect.

Pretty Links helps you shorten and track the affiliate links using your own domain, this will result in better click-through rate and conversion.

The Pretty Links WordPress plugin comes with both free and Premium versions. Pretty Links can track every click on your URL and deliver a full report of the operating system, browser, and host. Additionally, you can track clicks from emails, social media, etc.

With the premium version of Pretty Links, you can showcase your products with their attention-grabbing Product Displays CTAs. Also, with their PrettyPay feature, customers can make One-Click Checkouts by integrating with Stripe and cut down cart abandonment.

The Page Link Health by Pretty Links will help you find broken links with weekly evaluations and improve your SEO rankings.

FlyingPress

FlyingPress is not an SEO plugin per se, but it helps you boost your rankings on search engines by speeding up your website. According to Google, Page Speed is one of the ranking factors they consider in their search algorithm; so it’s important to ensure that your site is in accord with Google’s Core Web Vitals.

FlyingPress is a premium cache plugin that supercharges your site by making it load in seconds. I’ve been using this plugin for a couple of years now, and it is worth the price. Before FlyingPress, I’ve used the free version of W3 Total Cache for quite a few years, while they’re good they do lack features like Preloading links on mouse hover, automatically removing Unused CSS, etc.

The pricing starts at $60 for the first year for a single site and the Agency plan costs $500 for up to 500 websites. Apart from this website, all of my sites are hosted on the LiteSpeed web server, so I only purchased a Personal plan from FlyingPress.

FlyingPress also offers another plugin called FlyingPress CDN, which offers Cloudflare Enterprise CDN for just $5/site/month.

Some other popular SEO Plugins and Tools to check out:

Below are some of the Popular SEO Tools and Plugins you might find useful.

All-in-One SEO (AIOSEO)

All-in-One SEO is another popular WordPress SEO plugin that has been in the market for over a decade. Currently, it’s owned by Syed Balkhi, the Founder of WPBeginner. The free version of the AIOSEO plugin has been active on over 3 million websites.

Similar to Rank Math and Yoast SEO, the All-in-One SEO plugin also offers major features such as Rich Snippets (Schema), SEO Optimizer, Sitemaps, Local SEO, etc.

Migrating from other SEO plugins is easy with AIOSEO, you can use their Setup Wizard to import settings from your older SEO plugin.

AIOSEO’s SEO Audit Checklist will analyze your entire site to detect errors and get insights to fix and improve your WordPress website.

With a feature called TruSEO, the AIOSEO plugin provides scores and suggestions to improve your SEO optimization on Meta descriptions, word count, and Headlines.

The AIOSEO offers Smart XML Sitemaps that automatically generate a WordPress XML and ping all search engines.

This plugin also comes with Link Assistant which gives relevant suggestions for adding internal links to your old posts. Additionally, it also has a Redirection Manager to manage and redirect broken links.

With the Author SEO addon, you can now add information about your authors on relevant experience, where they went to school, expertise, and bio to Improve your E-E-A-T signals and Trust with Google and other search engines.

With the Search Statistics feature, you can view the relevant performance indicator from the search console directly from your WordPress dashboard. The plugin shows you the top-performing keywords and pages to help you understand and improve.

Schema Pro

Schema Pro will add Schema Markup to your website to boost SEO with a few clicks. Schema markup is a bunch of code that contains structured data to communicate with search engines to help them understand your website pages.

Schema Pro supports over 20 Schema types such as Reviews, Book Schema, Product Schema, Recipe Schema, Local Business Schema, etc.

This plugin works together with Yoast SEO without causing any issues. It can automatically map fields and add schema markup to your whole WordPress website with a few clicks.

It also offers a custom markup tool that lets you create your own schema. Additionally, you can test and validate your markup with a direct link to the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

The base plan pricing starts at $69 per year with unlimited websites and the lifetime plan costs just $229 which comes with lifetime support and updates.

Semrush

Semrush is not an SEO WordPress plugin, but an advanced keyword research and competitor analysis tool that can help you audit and improve your website.

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that provides comprehensive SEO tools for your businesses; The keyword research and competitive analysis modules come with data and insights necessary to optimize your search engine rankings.

Link-building and technical optimization modules allow you to maximize the visibility and performance of your website on the search engine results page.

The Content Marketing tool helps you get hundreds of content ideas to create helpful content for your audience. You will have access to SEO Writing Assistant which will analyze your content and help you improve the readability and originality.

The Site Audit tool will crawl your whole website within minutes to generate detailed actionable solutions to fix your website’s technical issues.

Conclusion:

SEO plugins will add structured data to your WordPress website which helps search engines determine the type of pages and content your website has; using relevant and useful schema types can boost your SEO rankings.

I use Rank Math to optimize and add Schema markup to all my posts and pages. So I highly recommend them.

FAQs on WordPress SEO Plugins