Do you want to know the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to increase traffic on your WordPress site?
To grow your business and create brand awareness, it’s important that your site gets discovered in search engines. And, WordPress SEO plugins and tools help enhance your site’s quality so that it would rank higher in Google and other search engines.
As thousands of WordPress SEO tools and plugins claim to provide the best SEO services, you might get into confusion while choosing them. So, we’ve tested and hand-picked some of the best SEO plugins and tools. They’re proven to skyrocket your SEO rankings in any search engine.
First, let’s start with why SEO is crucial for your WordPress site.
Why Is SEO Important for Your WordPress Site?
You might know that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the strategy to gain traffic and boost your business by ranking higher in search engines. Those SEO strategies include offering qualitative content, maximizing the site’s speed, enforcing security, making responsive web design, and so on.
Exciting for WordPress users! The WordPress platform offers some built-in SEO-friendly features and functions to some extent that’ll help you rank higher and grow your business. Thanks to the WordPress developers and contributors.
However, that’s probably not enough to optimize your site fully and get ahead of your competitors sometimes.
As a matter of fact, there’s a high chance that your site might not rank well in search engines when you first start. And, it requires you to continuously work on improving your site.
And, that’s where WordPress plugins and tools for SEO come in. By installing WordPress plugins, you can manage various aspects of your site like speed, security, URLs, responsiveness, redirection, etc.
Also, you can take advantage of available online tools to help you in finding useful keyword ideas, site analytics, site auditing, and so on.
So, here’re the 29 best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for bringing out the best of SEO on your WordPress site.
A) On-Page SEO Plugins and Tools
On-page SEO is the use of tactics carried out within your site to improve the quality of your web page and content. Here’re some of the popular On-page SEO tools.
1. Rank Math
Rank Math is one of the popular WordPress plugins for maintaining the on-page SEO of your WordPress website. It’s free and the most user-friendly SEO plugin and is packed with multiple features to grow your site traffic.
During installation, it takes you through the installation wizard which recommends your ideal settings for your website type. You can also tweak the settings if you like.
It also integrates with Google Search Console so that you can view indexing and sitemap information from the WordPress dashboard. It displays if there occurs some crawling errors so that you can fix them.
Also, you get access to its own LSI keyword tool. You can use enter your focus keyword to generate related LSI keywords which helps your post become more relevant. Thus, it engages more traffic.
There’re various other features like broken link monitoring, redirection, site SEO audit, linking suggestions, etc. Among the most important features, Rank Math lets you add multiple focus keywords for a single blog or web page.
The Content AI feature of Rank Math will help you to write SEO-optimized content. This is the first WordPress SEO plugin to use AI.
2. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO plugin is undoubtedly the most popular WordPress SEO plugin with over 5 million active installs. It consists of a large number of features helping you optimize your site for both search engines and your visitors.
It analyzes your web page and helps you create better content. Also, it points out the problems in your web pages and provides a suggestion for better SEO and readability.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can enter your focus keyword and see how well your content is optimized for SEO. Also, it checks keyword density, keywords used in image alt tags, descriptions, etc. to analyze your SEO score. Also, it scans the text and generates a readability score. It’s to make sure that your content is readable.
Yoast lets you enter your custom SEO titles, and meta descriptions, and maintain their optimum length. Also, it generates XML sitemaps which enable search engine bots to scan your website easily.
It has both free and paid versions available. The paid version has some advanced features like internal linking suggestions redirect management, keyword suggestions, etc.
3. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress comprising a large range of SEO tools. Similar to Yoast, this plugin helps in optimizing the quality of web pages and posts on your WordPress site.
It lets you enter a custom title and meta description for each individual post and web page. Moreover, it generates a suitable meta description automatically by scanning your web pages’ content. It also has a field where you can add some keywords related to your web page.
You can add Google and Bing image sitemaps for better image SEO. Besides, it supports XML sitemaps, Google AMP, Google Analytics, etc. It also integrates with WooCommerce for a better ranking of your WordPress eCommerce stores.
It also offers both free and paid versions. With the pro version, you get pro support forums, video tutorials, advanced WooCommerce support, video SEO, etc.
4. Internal Link Juicer
Internal Link Juicer is a WordPress plugin for adding internal links to your blogs and web pages. Due to internal links, your web pages become more discoverable for both search engine bots and website visitors. Search engine bots constantly crawl your web pages and head on to crawl any link they find. So, better crawling and indexing of your web pages help in search engine visibility.
The way Internal Link Juicer works is that it lets you enter linking keywords on your individual web pages and blogs. And, if any other web page contains the same keywords you’ve entered, then it’ll include the link to that page or post. And, the anchor text would be the same linking keywords encountered in other web pages.
Besides, it has functions like maximum links per post, maximum linking of the same content, etc. You can also avoid pages that you don’t want to link internally. The dashboard of this plugin lets you see the data about links in every post.
5. SEOPress
SEOPress is another useful WordPress SEO plugin to help you rank higher and boost traffic. Having more than 100 thousand active users, the SEOPress plugin works on optimizing a multitude of aspects of your site.
Similar to other plugins, SEOPress lets you write custom titles and meta descriptions with variables like category, date, time, etc. It generates XML as well as HTML sitemaps for better crawling.
It’s a close competitor of other SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, etc., and has some unique features too. For example, HTML sitemaps, backlinks finding, page speed data, Google Analytics in WordPress dashboard, etc. are the features present only in SEOPress.
It offers both free and premium versions.
B) Technical SEO Plugins and Tools
Technical SEO plugins and tools help you handle the technical aspects of your site like caching, reducing file sizes, crawling, indexing, etc.
Some of the popular technical SEO plugins and tools are listed below.
6. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a free SEO plugin for WordPress solely dedicated to caching your web pages. Caching is one of the methods that make your web pages will load faster. As search engines like Google give priority to fast websites, your site will rank higher. Also, fast websites enhance users’ experience on your site.
Basically, loading a web page requires your web browser and server to process all the HTML and other codes. This would require some time to render all the codes, images, and other files.
Now, W3 Total Cache Plugin saves a copy of your dynamic web page on your web server. Then, it displays the saved web page on users’ requests rather than loading all of the page elements from scratch. As a result, your web page will load faster.
Other alternatives to W3 Total Cache are LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, Cache Enabler, WP Fastest Cache, etc.
7. Imagify
Imagify is a WordPress plugin used to optimize images used on your website. It reduces the size of the images without compromising their quality. As a result, the website loads faster which increases your SEO rank.
You just need to install Imagify on your WordPress site and manage the settings. You can choose 3 modes of image compression: Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra. For choosing wisely, you’d have to think about how much you’re willing to compromise between the images’ quality and website speed.
Also, you can manage settings like optimizing all individual images manually, during upload, or in bulk.
Now, Imagify Basic is available in the WordPress directory for free which works for the compression of a certain number of images. Also, you can purchase its pro version for a large volume of images.
Some alternatives to Imagify are EWWW Image Optimizer, ShortPixel, Optimole, Smush, etc.
8. Lazy Load
Lazy Load is another WordPress plugin you can use to fasten your WordPress site’s load time. It works by loading images only when they’re visible on the user’s screen. It means that the images on your web page will not be loaded until you scroll down to the section of the page where the image is placed.
This will ultimately decrease the HTTP requests and your site’s load time so that it loads faster. It works fine for all major image formats and images in all possible areas like posts, iframes, etc.
9. Google Search Console
Search Console is a free tool by Google that provides you with information about your site traffic and performance. Moreover, it’s useful to ensure and monitor your site’s appearance in Google search results.
You can submit your website on Google Search Console and see a detailed report on your website stats. You’re provided with a user-friendly dashboard from where you can monitor your site’s performance.
It also helps Google bots crawl and index your site better so that it’ll help your site rank better. It’ll notify you if any indexing error occurs with the applicable solution to them.
Moreover, it displays your site’s impression, clicks, and Google search results rank for certain keywords.
10. Wordfence
Security is also an important factor in your WordPress site. Also, Google gives more advantages to secure websites in search results.
Wordfence is a freemium (both free and premium) WordPress plugin that establishes a secure environment on your WordPress site. It offers you lots of features to ensure your site’s security.
With Wordfence, You can create a firewall to identify and block malicious traffic. It detects unusual visits and blacklists the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the devices used.
Wordfence also prevents your site from brute force attacks by avoiding multiple failed login attempts. It scans your site’s each individual posts, pages, links, etc. to check the security status. It generates alerts if any issue occurs.
You can utilize its other important features like two-factor login authentication, enabling CAPTCHA, live traffic monitoring, analytics, country blocking, etc.
Some of the Wordfence alternatives are Sucuri, All in One WordPress Security and Firewall, VaultPress, etc.
11. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool by Google that helps you to check your website speed and performance. It not only displays the page speed but also the problems that are causing your website to slow down.
Google PageSpeed Insights doesn’t directly affect your page ranking. But, it lets you know what’s preventing your site from loading faster and what are the possible solutions. And by solving the problems as per the solutions, you can speed up your site.
To test your website speed, you can go to Google PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL there. Then, you can see your site’s load time and speed score for desktops as well as mobile devices separately. The suggested solution to improve the speed will also be listed.
Some of the alternatives are Pingdom, GTmetrix, etc.
12. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool by Google. It’s a simple tool that is used to test if your site is ready for mobile use.
Having a responsive website is mandatory nowadays with the increase of mobile internet users. And, you should know that Google’s ranking algorithm prioritizes mobile-friendliness and responsiveness. Thus, your site will lose the competition if not optimized for mobile devices.
So, the Google Mobile-Friendly Test helps you check if your site is mobile-friendly or not. You can just enter your site’s URL to see if it’s mobile-friendly or not. Also, it shows how your site looks on mobile devices.
13. Google XML Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file containing a list of all web pages of your website in a hierarchical way. It makes search engine bots see the proper structure of your website. And thus, the bots crawl and index your site better.
Google XML Sitemaps is a WordPress plugin used for creating sitemaps of your WordPress site. Basically, the sitemaps are in the XML file format. However, sometimes search engine bots can’t read the file properly. In that case, you can also include an HTML version of the file with Google XML sitemaps.
You can choose other options like a priority, page change frequency, including and excluding pages to crawl, etc.
14. Broken Link Checker
Broken links (dead links) are the links on your web page that no longer work due to various reasons. Those links fail to take users to the desired web page upon clicking. Instead, it shows some error why the requested page might have failed to load.
Broken Link Checker is a WordPress plugin that checks if the links on your site are working or not. It checks your website for all the links, internal and external, to find the broken links. Then, it notifies where it encounters the broken link. After that, you can work on replacing it with the best possible link.
By using this plugin, you can detect and remove the broken links on your site. So, the bots can crawl your website better without any interference which improves your site’s indexing and ranking.
Plus, users can easily reach the desired page when they click the link. Thus, your site’s engagement increases.
15. Redirection
Sometimes, broken links and missing page issues can be solved by a technique called redirection. It’s a technique of assigning URLs to other web pages so that the visitors don’t see a missing page error (404 errors).
Redirection is a popular WordPress plugin used to manage redirects on your site. With this plugin, you can detect various forms of missing page status. Then, you can enter the URL where you want users to reach on visiting the missing page URL.
Using this plugin, you can reduce bounce rates and enhance the users’ experience on your site. Thus, your site will be ranked well in search engines.
16. AMP
Google’s algorithm checks if your web pages are mobile-ready. And those sites rank higher and have mobile-first designs. That is to say, your site will rank higher if it’s mobile-ready.
Now, the AMP WordPress plugin helps you create the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) version of your WordPress web pages. That makes your web pages load faster on mobile devices by displaying only certain necessary page elements. It removes things like ads, large images, banner images, unnecessary styling, scripts, etc.
C) Off-Page SEO Plugins and Tools
As you might know, off-Page SEO is basically all the things that you do outside your website to help your site rank higher. Off-page SEO strategies include rank-building, social sharing, and other marketing strategies.
Here’s a list of some off-page SEO plugins and tools.
17. Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker
As backlinks are important for off-page SEO boosting, you need to keep track of the backlinks that your site is receiving. It can help you to strategize your backlink-building strategies.
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker is one of the tools in the Ahrefs’ SEO tools package. This tool helps you check how many backlinks your website is getting from other sites.
With this tool, you can see detailed statistics of backlinks you’re getting. You can easily see the backlinks number, the number of no-follows on backlinks, referring page domain, anchor texts, etc. when you conduct a backlink test.
Social media is ever-growing technology with billions of users and engagement. So, marketing your content with social media could help you reach more target audiences.
Social Media Share Buttons is a WordPress plugin that enables adding your social media links to web pages and blog posts. With that, your readers can easily share your web page on their social media profiles.
This plugin lets you add buttons on various social media platforms, with many designs and animations for each icon. The icons are totally responsive, so they look great and work fine on all devices.
Moreover, the icons can be added in many places on your website like header, sidebar, end of blog posts, etc. With that, you can strategically place the buttons on various sections of your web page to yield better social sharing rates.
19. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is an online tool mainly used for checking broken links on a web page. You can easily analyze the broken links of any site by just entering the site’s URL on the tool. It’ll show you details on the number of web pages scanned, number of broken links, link text, etc.
Obviously, it’s useful to see if your site has any errors in linking. Moreover, you can also use this tool as a part of your backlink-building strategy. You can use this tool to check your competitors’ broken links.
Then, you can contact the site owners notifying them about the broken link. And then, you can request them to replace their broken links URLs with your relevant web pages or blogs. That way, you’ll be creating backlinks to your site.
It’s a popular backlink-building strategy adopted by various popular webmasters, bloggers, and SEO experts.
D) Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research tools are the tools that help you analyze and choose appropriate keywords for your blogs or websites. Using related keywords on your web pages, titles, and descriptions make your web pages look more relevant. So, search engines will push your site’s rank up.
Here’re some of the keyword research tools.
20. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool offered by Google for keyword ideas and insights. It’s actually used by advertisers and marketers to discover keyword ideas for their paid ad campaigns.
However, the insights of Google Keyword Planner can also be useful for gaining traffic organically. With this tool, you enter the keyword related to your business. Then, it shows the number of monthly searches, ranking difficulty, and some alternative keyword ideas for that keyword.
You get to know what people usually type in to find a website like yours on Google. With that, you can create your content around those keywords.
21. SEMrush
SEMrush is yet another keyword research tool that provides a huge range of services to grow your traffic. It’s a paid tool with usage limits in the free version.
It’s useful for SEO, paid traffic, content marketing, and other marketing strategies. For SEO, it helps you find keywords that’ll help you rank higher in Google and other search engines.
You can just enter your focus keyword, and it provides you with a list of related keywords. By strategically placing those keywords on your content, your articles and web pages tend to rank higher.
Also, you’re provided with the Competitive Research tool that’s useful for finding the keywords your competitors are ranking for. Besides, you can do backlink analysis, site audit, position tracking, on-page SEO checker, etc.
22. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a tool used for finding out relevant keywords for your business. Like SEMrush, it’s also a freemium tool (has both paid and free models).
It lets you enter your focus keyword related to your business, and it displays a list of keyword ideas for the focus keyword. It also provides search volume and CPC (cost-per-click) of the keywords, useful for search engine marketing.
It also displays what types of content people are creating around the keyword you enter. This insight could be useful to you to plan for your own content better.
Similar to SEMrush, Ubersuggest also helps you to analyze your competitors. You can enter your competitor’s domain name, and see for what keywords they’re ranking, and in what position.
Besides, it displays other stats like search volume based on location, age, number of backlinks, domain score, organic keywords used, etc.
23. Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer
Ahrefs is among the best SEO tools popularly used by bloggers, SEO experts, and digital marketers. This tool combines a variety of SEO features and services best for you to rank higher. This paid tool can be used as an alternative to SEMrush or Ubersuggest.
Ahrefs is preferred by users due to the detailed analytics, helpful to make planned content and ranking strategies.
Mainly, the keyword research tool of Ahrefs lets you enter keywords related to your business. Then, it comes up with a list of tons of related keywords that you enter into your web pages or content.
Also, you can see the keywords that your competitors are using and ranking for. Besides, it has other tools like site audit, content analysis, rank tracker, etc.
24. LSIGraph
LSIGraph is a popular tool used to find LSI keywords for your blogs and articles.
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are the words or phrases that have a close correlation with your focus keyword. They act as supplements to your main keyword and including them makes it look relevant to the search engines and users.
LSIGraph lets you enter your main keyword and comes up with a list of LSI keywords that you can place on your blogs and web pages. Also, you can see which web pages are ranking for those keywords.
Basic keyword research is free in LSIGraph. While it has lots of features in the paid version too. With the paid version, you can select your preferred location and language for refining the results.
E) Analytics Plugins and Tools
Analytics plugins and tools mainly help you keep track of visitors coming to your site. It provides detailed data and stats on your website and traffic coming to your site. It’s useful to make plans to target a proper group of audiences. And thus, your web pages get more impressions and clicks with search engines and other sources.
Now, here’re some of the popular analytics plugins and tools.
25. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool offered by Google that helps you to track and monitor traffic on your site. If you want to grow and improve your website to get ahead in search engines, the insights of Google Analytics can be very much helpful.
It shows detailed stats like monthly traffic, source of incoming traffic, popular posts, and traffic according to country, age, gender, etc. Having access to the analytics data helps to plan and strategize content better.
You can get insights about what posts are ranking higher in Google and for what keywords. Also, you get to see the pages getting more engagement and pages that are not working well. With that, you get an idea of what type of content to focus on and what improvements are to be made.
Thus, using Google Analytics can help you get more traffic, and engagement, and increase sales.
26. MonsterInsights
Monsterinsights is one of the most popular analytics plugins in WordPress. This freemium plugin is used for integrating Google Analytics in your WordPress dashboard. With that, you can directly fetch the performance, traffic, and sales data from your WordPress dashboard.
Connecting Google Analytics to your WordPress is very easy with MonsterInsights. Just install it and configure it in just a few clicks.
It shows the important stats of your website and traffic like popular posts and pages, traffic source, country-based traffic, etc. Moreover, you can also track pretty much every bit of your website report like downloads, link clicks, ad clicks, etc. You can even find out how deep the users scroll your web pages.
MonsterInsights has more than 2 million active installations on the official WordPress repository. Its close competitor, GA Google Analytics has about 500 thousand downloads.
27. Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing is the second most popular search engine after Google. So, if you might want your site to be discovered with Bing so that you won’t miss Bing users.
Now, Bing Webmaster Tools is a multipurpose tool. It helps the Bing search engine to index and crawl your site properly through XML sitemap submission. After submission, you can verify your site’s ownership by going to your WordPress site’s settings in the dashboard.
Also, it serves as the analytics plugin that displays stats for various site activities. After you’ve verified your site, you can see a total insight into your site’s activity report from your dashboard.
This tool will display for what keywords your site is ranking on the Bing search engine. Also, it gives total information on page traffic and activity. It also provides you with a list of errors and suggestions to improve your SEO.
F) Local SEO Tools
Local SEO is the strategy to rank your local businesses on search engines to grow your business and sell more.
Here’re a few local SEO tools for improving the visibility of your local business.
28. Google My Business
Google My Business is a free local SEO tool by Google. It helps local businesses appear in search results when people search for services on Google.
To start with Google My Business, you just need to log in with your Google account. Then, you can provide your business name, location, and other information like opening hours, business category, contact number, website address, etc.
That makes your business visible to local searchers. I.e. when people search for services like yours, your business pops up in their search results in Google’s local search section.
29. Whitespark
Whitespark is a tool used for managing the SEO of your local business. It manages the citation services to gain more traffic on local businesses on Google and other search engines. To let you know, a citation is the mention of your local business on the web, which includes your business name, address, or contact.
It also provides services to increase citations, get more reviews, and improve the ranking of your business on local listings. It also helps you track the ranking of your business on local searches.
This tool is also helpful to find a citation for your competitors. Plus, you can audit your local business to fix inconsistencies and errors in the citation.
Conclusion
That’s all. We hope that you know the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to get more traffic and increase sales with your WordPress site.
From the above list, we recommend Rank Math plugin if you are looking for the best SEO WordPress plugin. It is a beginner-friendly free SEO plugin. W3 Total Cache is another plugin that we recommend to you for the cache. SEMrush is the best keyword research tool. We highly recommend this.
If you use any other WordPress SEO plugins or tools effective for your site’s ranking, then please let us know in the comment below.
You can also check our article on ‘how to choose the best WordPress plugin for your site‘.
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