5 Best Must-Have SEO Plugins for WordPress (With Pros and Cons)

WordPress Performance 11 min read
Last Update on January 14, 2023

With WordPress, you can make websites that look great in just a few easy steps. These sites would be safe and easy to use on the phone. It’s also important that your newly made website has SEO built in because SEO is the way to get your website near the top of search engine results when a user looks for something.

Enabling is a technical process, but that shouldn’t scare you. Plugins do their job well.

5 best seo plugins for wordpress

SEO plugins are like add-ons for browsers and other types of software. Some specific functions are added to the source software by the plugin. This is good for search engine optimization, online marketing, and other similar things.

You can add metadata to every website page with an SEO plugin. Your page code and search engine results will include the page title and meta description. This lets the search engine figure out what your website is about. You need to write a meta description and optimize it for your customers’ keywords to look for your product or service.

And WordPress sites do well in this area. A plugin can do many things for you to get your website up and running with all the features you need. You might already be wondering, “What are the best plugins for WordPress to use to make a site that is SEO-friendly?”

Read on to learn about the five best SEO plugins for WordPress.

Yoast SEO

Yoast makes it easy for any kind of site to do SEO. It’s one of the reasons why it’s one of the most-used plugins for WordPress. Whether a big company or a small startup in the neighbourhood, every online business needs strong SEO to get its website in front of the right people.

With this plugin, you can type the word or phrase you want Google to use to find your webpage. Yoast also lets you put in keywords that are related. It alerts you if you don’t update your content in six months.

Pros

  • Yoast SEO is easy to get to and easy to use.
  • Yoast SEO finds basic SEO problems with the site’s content, such as too much use of passive voice, long sentences, spelling mistakes, etc. These make a site’s SEO score worse.
  • Yoast SEO will check your content for spelling mistakes or wrong keywords and fix them for you.

Cons

  • Sometimes, if you want to come up with catchy keywords, you might have to bend a grammar rule slightly. But in this case, Yoast will show a red light. Some flexibility built in would be nice.
  • Yoast pays too much attention to what is written without fully understanding what is meant. You might change the keyword a few times to get the desired effect. But Yoast will only rate how SEO-friendly a site is if exact word matches are found.
  • There aren’t many useful features in the free version. So, you won’t have many choices besides the Premium option.

RankMath

RankMath is also one of the most used SEO plugins for WordPress. It comes with a step-by-step setup wizard that walks you through the installation and configuration process, giving you a perfect SEO for WordPress.

Pros

  • It is simple to use.
  • You can import settings from Yoast and other plugins.
  • It costs nothing at all. Yes, it has everything.
  • It comes with a module for redirection.
  • Up to 5 keywords can be optimized.

Cons

  • Since RankMath doesn’t support this import, it will be hard to switch from it to another WordPress SEO plugin.

All-in-One SEO Pack

Since 2007, more than 65 million people have downloaded the All in One SEO Pack (AIOSEO). That says a lot about how popular it is and why it is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It comes with support for XML Sitemap and Google Analytics. It will also create Meta tags on its own.

Pros

  • Simple to set up and easy to use.
  • It helps to optimize your site’s titles for different search engines.
  • There are also nice features in the free version. For example, you can use it with e-commerce sites through WooCommerce.
  • You can make changes to the title and description with no trouble.
  • It’s easy for other plugins to get to.
  • Advanced tools that control tagging, search engine following, and indexing can be turned on and off for each post.

Cons

  • Lack of SEO scoring and content analysis.
  • In the free version, there isn’t any professional help. But it stays in the Pro version for a year.
  • Google Search Console doesn’t make it easy to import data.

SEOPress

It’s quick, it’s strong, and it’s not hard. This SEO plugin from WordPress fits well with these words. SEOPress is also very popular because it has already been installed more than 1,000,000 times. You can make sitemaps in both XML and HTML. SEOPress is ready for Google Analytics. Even in the free version, there are no ads.

Pros

  • The free version gives you content analyses, and you can use it on as many websites as you want.
  • Link Manager gives you the tools to build your internal links.
  • Helps with setting up Google News.
  • There are both front-end and backend white-label solutions.
  • Provides Google Analytics as a service. WooCommerce has made E-commerce better.
  • It helps check for broken links and make new ones that are SEO-friendly.
  • It is available for $39 per year, which is not much.
  • Google Local Business feature is not included.

Cons

  • There is a lot to learn here because it has many features. Even if you’ve been working with SEO for a while, you’ll need to spend a lot of time with SEOPress to understand its features.
  • Customer service isn’t always as good as it should be. The backend team can take up to a couple of days to respond.
  • It is hard to move settings from one SEO plugin to another.

The SEO Framework

Some things about the SEO Framework make it different from other SEO plugins. It has all the features and is the fastest SEO plugin. It is also unique because it is the only SEO plugin with all the features that follow the white-hat rules.

The SEO Framework makes it easy for people to get their websites ready. It gives the user a stable workplace where they don’t have to deal with ads and branding. And users don’t need to know anything about SEO to use it. Also, as soon as you turn on The SEO Framework plugin, your site will be protected from SEO attacks that try to hurt it.

Pros

  • The only solution that can make important SEO meta tags in more than one language.
  • The technical SEO settings can be changed in many ways.
  • Easy optimization of metadata is made possible.
  • It has no ads.
  • The plugin is free in its entirety, with all of its features.

Cons

  • You won’t be able to use helpful features like on-page SEO content analysis in the free version.

So, which of these five are the best WordPress plugins for SEO? It’s hard to pick out just one or two. Each one of these is different and has its pros and cons. Choose the plugin that has a good mix of pros and cons and is the closest to what you had in mind for your site’s SEO plugins.

Like this article? Spread the word
Like this article?

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *