20 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress You Need To Know Right Now

Want to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO)?

Using the best SEO plugin for WordPress has helped me grow my website to over 200K visitors a month.

In this article, I’ll reveal the 20 best SEO plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO score and rank higher.

But, before we begin, let’s cover the basics.

What are SEO plugins for WordPress?

An SEO plugin for WordPress is software designed to add complementary features to the toolset in order to help make websites and blogs created through WordPress better.

WordPress already comes with some SEO features built in like auto sitemap, although not very useful. This is why there are plenty of XML sitemap plugins, as well as some on-page SEO tools like meta descriptions and social previews.

That’s where plugins become important. These additional add-ons will offer you a larger array of SEO tools like:

• Custom XML sitemap to make it easier for web crawlers to find the most important pages on your site
• Audit checklist for your website to find and fix important errors and issues
• On-page SEO checker with optimization ideas
• SERP Analysis to check what top ranking competitors are doing right
• Link analysis and acquisition including webpages that are linking back to you, as well as link building and removal recommendations

Why Do You Need SEO Plugins for Your WordPress Website?

Search engine optimization is important, especially if you want your website to be successful and grow a larger audience. SEO plugins will help you find any issues regarding SEO which can then be used to improve it.

Optimizing your website for search engines will allow them to crawl your website easier, and if it’s well written, rank higher when someone searches for a topic or phrase.

A website that has their SEO right will:

• Build authority, which will tell Google that your website is important and has credible information.
• Help PPC campaigns perform even better. Having a paid article not only appear on top, but also rank high will lead to a better outcome, especially with pages that include low CPC keywords.
• Rank better in local search results. Local searches are on the rise, and have high conversion rates.
• Enhances the user experience. Writing quality content with adequate and useful backlinks and interlinks is a great start. Add to that a well-optimized website that loads fast and is easy to navigate, you’ll quickly get users coming back over and over again.

How to Choose the Best SEO Plugins & Tools for WordPress

Choosing the best SEO plugin for WordPress will depend on what you can afford and your experience with SEO. If you’re not sure how to create a website that ranks well, you will need all the help you can get.

When shopping for the best SEO plugin for your site, make sure to look at these features and whether or not they’re important to you:

• Some form of website auditing with an in-depth analysis and recommendations
• An on-page SEO checker with recommendations
• A detailed competitor analysis
• Keyword finder to help you find keywords with high search volumes
• It should also be able to find keywords relevant to your primary keyword
• Google Analytics test
• Ranking tool to see where URLs on your website rank on search engines
• Link suggestions

List of 20 Best SEO Plugins and Tools for WordPress

I have rounded up 20 of the best WordPress SEO plugins. I hope they help you improve the SEO of your website.

1. Semrush – Best SEO Plugin with the Largest Keyword Database

Semrush’s SEO toolkit is an excellent SEO tool that can be integrated with WordPress.

They have access to a large database with over 22 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks, and 808 million domain profiles. More data equals more insights.

Their Keyword Magic Tool is able to segment keywords by topics and offer a detailed analysis of the best keywords to use.

Its SERP analysis offers valuable insights into a URL's traffic and keywords.

On-page SEO is important. There are many SEO on-page factors that can affect your search results rankings.

The on-page SEO checker is able to quickly evaluate a page’s SEO score, offer ideas on how to improve it, as well as offer the top 10 similar pages.

Key Features

• The Keyword Magic Tool has the largest database of keywords on offer
• Fastest backlink crawler on the web
• Detailed domain analytics
• On-page SEO checker
• Position tracking daily
• Log file analyzer
• Site audit tool

Pricing

• Pro: $129.95/month
• Guru: $249.95/month
• Business: $499.95/month

If you’d like to know more about Semrush, check out my full Semrush Review

2. All in One SEO – Best Overall SEO Plugin for WordPress

AIOSEO is the original SEO plugin for WordPress. All in One SEO offers powerful tools that will help boost your website's SEO performance like its Image SEO, with automatic title text and alt text for images.

AIOSEO will also automatically create an XML sitemap for your website, so that search engines can easily crawl your website. It’s customizable as well if you ever need to change anything.

One of the best features of AIOSEO is its automatic search engine notification. Whenever you update a page, All in One SEO will notify search engines such as Google and Bing, that a page has been updated.

AIOSEO also offers a dashboard that’s easy to understand when auditing your website.

Key Features

• Advanced SEO support for WooCommerce
• Creates XML sitemap automatically
• Local SEO module
• Image SEO module
• Connect to important webmaster tools easily
• Site audit that’s well organized and easy to understand
• Checklist and tools for SEO like meta descriptions
• Quick and easy setup

Pricing

• Basic: $49.60/month (doesn’t include Local SEO module and Image SEO module)
• Plus: $99.60/month
• Pro: $199.60/month
• Elite: $299.60/month

3. Ahrefs – Most Informative Site Auditor and SEO Plugin

Ahrefs excellent, simplistic SEO dashboard, which can show multiple domains and their key SEO data, makes it an excellent choice for larger businesses or agencies that have multiple sites.

When auditing your website, Ahrefs offers a real-time log while crawling your website. Their site auditing tool can monitor your website for 100+ different SEO issues.

Their site explorer combines 3 traditional SEO tools into one, convenient dashboard. These tools are:

• Organic traffic research
• Paid traffic research
• Backlink checker

Having all 3 together in a single dashboard makes it easy to get a quick idea of how well you and your competitors’ URLs are performing.

Key Features

• Keyword research for 10 different search engines
• SERP overview dashboard that also offers search traffic estimations of top 10 ranking URLs
• Daily updated backlink graphs
• SERP history analysis
• Monitor linked domains
• Site auditor
• Content explorer

Pricing

• Lite: $99/month
• Standard: $199/month
• Advanced: $399/month
• Enterprise: $999/month

4. MonsterInsights – Best SEO Plugin with Google Analytics Integration

MonsterInsights is one of the best SEO WordPress plugins you can purchase. It offers universal website tracking and Google Analytics integration with one click.

The Google Analytics dashboard, as seen below, has all the details needed in a convenient form factor. It’s easy to navigate and find needed info quickly.

It also offers ecommerce analytics for WooCommerce users, as well as optimization tools like A/B testing, and speed and sample rate adjustments.

Its low-cost Plus package packs a large feature set, which makes it a standout choice for small businesses that only have 1 website.

Key Features

• Real-time analytics dashboard
• Site reporting of speed, publishers, and keywords
• Universal analytics tracking including affiliate, backlink, engagement, and file download tracking
• Headline analyzer
• Smart URL builder
• A/B testing through Google Optimize

Pricing

• Plus: $99.50/year
• Pro: $199.50/year
• Agency: $399.50/year

Want to know more about ecommerce platforms? Read The Best Ecommerce Platforms for SEO in 2024.

5. Yoast – Honorable Mention

Yoast SEO helps your site meet the highest SEO standards by offering you the right tools to optimize your content for SEO.

Yoast offers a keyword and phrase finder that will offer related phrases and synonyms.

It also offers what they call an “SEO workout,” which is meant to create routines around optimizing content on your website consistently by identifying SEO issues like hard-to-find content.

Yoast Premium also offers internal linking tools, a snippet preview, readability rating, and social media view.

Key Features

• Front-end SEO inspector (beta)
• Keyword density checker
• Meta description tool
• Link support
• Permalink cleanup
• Social view and sharing
• Integration with other plugins like Elementor, WordProof, and, Semrush

Pricing

• The free version of Yoast is an excellent plugin, but if you want the premium features it costs $99/year

6. Rank Math

Rank math helps your website be more SEO-friendly and is worth your attention.

Its simple installation process offers pre-selected settings for optimal performance, while also setting up social profiles, your webmaster profile, and other SEO settings.

The SEO performance dashboard is another excellent feature, with a great design and simple layout. When hovering over the graph, you can quickly gauge the number of clicks, impressions, and keywords on your website.

Rank Math also has an AI assistant to help you when writing content. It’s able to scan your written content, and offer advice on keywords to add, headings to use, and links to add.

The dashboard is another standout, offering analytics, keywords, keyword positions, and other data like search impressions and average CTR.

Key Features

• Simple user interface
• AI generated writing recommendations
• Advanced SEO analytics module that integrates with Google Analytics
• Rank tracker
• Advanced Schema generator
• Google Trends tool
• XML sitemap

Pricing

• Pro: $59/year
• Business: $199/year
• Agency: $499/year

7. HubSpot

HubSpot’s SEO tool is fairly simple, offering the most essential features and a simple layout.

This SEO tool will crawl your website and offer recommendations to improve its SEO. These actions will be recommended from highest to lowest priority.

Here’s an example of a page that was crawled with HubSpot’s SEO tool. The on-page SEO tool offers a range of issues present on the page that was scanned and offers recommendations on how to fix the issues.

Key Features

• On-page SEO checker
• Quick and easy to use
• Offers valuable insights
• Integration will all other HubSpot marketing and CRM tools

Pricing

The SEO tools are part of their CMS hub package, which offers plenty of other content management tools as well. SEO tools are only part of the 2nd and 3rd tiers.

• Professional: $360/month
• Enterprise: $1200/month

8. a3 Lazy Load

Lazy Load is used to speed up the loading of pages on your site and is thus one of the most useful SEO WordPress plugins. It is easy to set up, and it works best on content-heavy sites.

This SEO WordPress plugin’s admin settings can be used to determine which elements are to be lazy loaded.

As the user scrolls down the site, the elements you have applied lazy load to are loaded only when they become visible to the user in the viewport.

Key Features

• Supports all embeds including YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5
• Built-in support for iframe content from any widget or source
• Load in images with effects
• WebP support

Pricing

• Free

9. SEOPress

SEOPress is one of the most feature-packed plugins and marketers consider it to be one of the best SEO tools.

This plugin can improve your website’s SEO, increase traffic, and create XML sitemaps and navigation breadcrumbs.

It enables you to control page titles and meta information. And it supports Google Analytics and allows you to edit your Robot.txt.

The content analysis dashboard allows you to enter keywords, find Google suggestions for them, as well as check keyword density throughout your website or webpage.

It even has a rank tracker tool, to help you find the highest-ranking keywords.

Key Features

• Instant indexing for Google and Bing
• Integration with all page builders
• Content analysis
• Google Analytics integration
• XML sitemap
• Keyword rank tracker
• WooCommerce integration
• Local and image SEO

Pricing

• Pro: $49/year
• Insights: $99/year
• Bundle: $128/year

10. All in One WP Security and Firewall

The All-in-One WP Security and Firewall plugin is easy to use, and offers stable security.

It checks for vulnerabilities and implements and enforces the latest security practices and techniques. This includes an overview of your website’s security, login records, user lockdown options, brute force login prevention, and firewall rules.

To do this, it uses a security points grading system to ensure you activate recommended security features. It ensures user account security, user login security, user registration security, database security, and more.

It also comes with blacklist features, blocking specific IP addresses through specifying, wild card, or user agents.

It even offers a password strength checker with estimations of how long it would take a computer to crack the password.

Key Features

• Prevents brute force logins
• Comment spam security
• Add captcha to prevent bots on your website
• File system security to keep your files and folders protected, as well as your PHP code
• User registration security, including manual activation of user accounts
• Password strength tool

Pricing

• Free

11. Broken Link Checker – Best SEO Plugin for Audits

This is one of the most important WordPress SEO plugins when conducting audits of your website.

It helps you clean up your WordPress site. You can spot and remove broken links and fix redirections.

Broken links affect the SEO of a site negatively, therefore, they should be fixed quickly.

The Broken Line Checker plugin checks all the URLs on your WordPress site and gives you a complete report of broken or redirected links.

Key Features

• Monitors external and internal links
• Detects links that are broken, missing images and redirects.
• Prevents search engines from following broken links
• You can search and filter links by URL and anchor text
• Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page

Pricing

• Free

12. CDN Enabler-WordPress CDN Plugin

This WordPress plugin rewrites URLs used in CSS, JavaScript, and images, to be served by a content delivery network.

A CDN-content delivery network helps distribute content via proxy servers and data centers. The CDN Enabler Plugin for WordPress helps you integrate a CDN into your WordPress site easily and quickly.

This plugin links your content to the CDN URLs. It can define exclusions and help you manage HTTPS by enabling and disabling them when needed.

Key Features

• Manual and WP-CLI cache purging
• WordPress Multisite network support
• WordPress REST API support
• Works perfectly with most third party plugins
• Include URLs in the rewrite by file extensions
• Exclude URLs in the rewrite by strings

Pricing

• Free

13. EWWW Image Optimizer

The EWWW Image Optimizer helps your site load faster by optimizing your images.

It has no speed limits, and it can manage large files by using automatic background optimization and optional parallel optimization.

It supports JPG, PNG, and PDF files and compression offers the best of both worlds with the highest compression rate without compromising image quality.

Uploads are capped at 150 MB per image, but if you have a file larger than that, you can always contact their support team.

Its intelligent conversion option delivers the right image format and the best compression/quality ratio. You can quickly optimize all images on your site by selecting them as bulk actions.

Key Features

• Simple user interface
• AI generated writing recommendations
• Advanced SEO analytics module that integrates with Google Analytics
• Rank tracker
• Advanced Schema generator
• Google Trends tool
• XML sitemap

Pricing

The core features are free, but if you want to convert images on more than one site, exceed the data limit, or want faster optimization times, you can check out their paid options.

• Standard: $7/month
• Growth: $15/month
• Infinite: $25/month

14. SEO Squirrly

The SEO Squirrly plugin is a useful SEO plugin that helps you optimize your content to perform better in the search engine rankings.

It helps you find the right keywords and topics for SEO purposes. This includes recommendations for keywords that might have less competition, writing focused articles under 1500 words, and adding SEO context keywords

It tracks and helps you manage your content strategy. You can also get help on your ecommerce SEO strategy. It helps you manage information and metadata as well.

Squirrly also creates an XML sitemap upon registration of you website, as well as offers over 650 pre-configured features to optimize your website immediately.

Key Features

• SEO live assistant
• XML sitemap
• SEO auditor
• Duplicate removal tool
• Works with ecommerce plugins and socials
• Blogging tools

Pricing

• Business: $71.99/month
• Agency: $75.99/month

15. SEO Editor

Do you edit your SEO data page by page? If so, then you will probably agree that it is a time-consuming process. The SEO Editor plugin for WordPress saves you time by helping you edit SEO data on multiple pages at once.

This includes meta titles, descriptions, and keywords from different pages. If you’re looking for a free solution to quickly edit info related to SEO on your website as a whole, this is the best option.

Key Features

• Integrates with WordPress SEO, and AIOSEO
• Edit metadata, descriptions, and keywords in a single editor
• Simple to use interface

Pricing

• Free

16. Google XML Sitemaps

You can use Google XML Sitemaps, one of the best WordPress SEO plugins, to ensure that Google indexes your WordPress website properly.

This free plugin helps generate a special sitemap. It informs the search engines whenever the content on the site is updated.

If there is a page on your website that is not reachable from the homepage in a certain number of clicks, or if a page is not linked properly to other pages, Google might miss indexing those pages. Google XML sitemaps make sure it doesn’t happen.

Key Features

• Works on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com
• Supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs
• Won’t slow down your site

Pricing

• Free

17. LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin.

This PHP-based SEO Plugin offers a very efficient caching solution. Its optimization features ensure that your site takes less time to load. The fact that it’s free makes it the best site speed optimization tool available.

It speeds up loading times by reducing overhead and delivers faster-caching process at the web server level.

It also enables you to have customized settings for desktop and mobile versions, allowing you to make sure your webpages load fast, no matter which device is used.

It offers an easily understood page speed score, with recommendations to optimize it. It also has a built-in image conversion tool to optimize images to load faster.

Key Features

• Page speed score
• Image optimization
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Lazy-load images/iframes
• WebP image format support

Pricing

• Free

18. Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a popular SEO plugin as it makes it easier to manage your social links, redirects, and affiliate links.

These links are easily accessible from your WordPress website’s admin interface. The links would have your domain name thus giving you full control over how your links look and redirect.

This plugin will also help you search, group, sort, and track clicks for your links. And you can find out how your links are doing in real-time.

Key Features

• Gives you the ability to create clean, simple URLs
• Generates random 3-4 character slugs for your URL
• Tracks the Number of Clicks per link
• View click details including IP address, remote host, and browser
• Download hit details in CSV format
• Exclude IP Addresses from Stats
• Cookie based system for tracking visitor activity

Pricing

• Free

19. Pro Rank Tracker

This SEO WordPress plugin helps you analyze your SEO rankings. It provides you with a lot of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) information.

It checks the position of your site’s pages for particular keywords in Google. And it keeps you updated on the rankings of your sites and your videos.

It also provides powerful rank-tracking options across different search engines. And for that reason, it is on the list of the best WordPress SEO plugins.

Key Features

• Enterprise-level white-label reporting
• Works across most search engines
• Powerful local and mobile rank tracking options
• Daily rank updates
• Unlimited URLs, even on the free version
• Unlimited reports, included in free version

Pricing

• Free
• Starter: $13.50/month
• Pro: $89/month
• Agency: $180/month

20. Redirection

If you are looking for a good redirect manager for WordPress, check out the Redirection plugin.

It keeps track of all of your 404 errors, and it manages 301 directions efficiently. It also helps you reduce errors which, in turn, helps with the SEO of your site.

This plugin has a fully featured import and export system. And for that reason, it’s a popular SEO plugin.

Key Features

• Redirect manager to redirect URLs without Apache
• Conditional redirects for more specific redirects
• Full logging to view all redirects on your site
• Add HTTP headers to redirects
• Track 404 errors
• Query parameter handling

Pricing

• Free

Comparison of SEO Plugins & Tools

Now that we’ve discussed, in detail, the specifics of each WordPress SEO plugin, here’s a comparison table to quickly review each.

Plugin Name	Price	Keyword Finder	Website Auditing	Google Analytics Integration	Support
All in One SEO	Starts from $49.60/month	No	Yes	Yes	Good
Semrush	Starts from 129.95/month	Yes	Yes	Yes	Great
Ahrefs	Starts from $99/month	Yes	Yes	Yes	Great
MonsterInsights	Starts from $99.50/year	Yes	Yes	Yes	Great
Yoast	Free or $99/year	Yes	Yes	Yes	Average
Rank Math	Starts from $59/year	Yes	Yes	Yes	Good
Hubspot	Starts from $360/month	Yes	Yes	Yes	Average
a3 Lazy Load	Free	No	Page speed loader	No	Good
SEOPress	Starts from $49/year	Yes	Yes	Yes	Good
All in One WP Security and Firewall	Free	No	Website security check	No	Good

And that’s a wrap, now let’s head on over to the FAQs to answer any relevant questions you might still have.

FAQs

Which is the Best SEO Plugin for WordPress?

This list of 20 of the best WordPress SEO plugins can help you improve your site’s SEO. Which is the best SEO plugin for WordPress for your company?

You can experiment with these plugins and use the ones that give you the best results.

If you have been using WordPress SEO plugins, and have a favorite that’s not listed above, please share it with us in the comments section below. We would love to hear from you.