Boosting your SEO rankings and speeding up your WordPress website is paramount to the success of your business, especially when today, the consumer base has shifted online. To do this, you have to know which keywords to include and what product pages or blogs to target and be ready to optimize your metadata. Fortunately, WordPress SEO plugins can ease this process. 

Sure, SEO can be confusing and complicated, even for advanced users. But, it can increase a website’s and business’ potential, as it boosts traffic and increases conversions. Hence, SEO audit might not be easy for most site owners, except for high-end content writing agencies, yet reorganizing your website’s structure, fixing broken links, and boosting the overall SEO performance of your posts means success. 

Let’s get into it. 

Why You Need SEO Plugins and What Do They Do

For starters, remember that SEO covers content optimization, keyword research, adding links, and more. 

But, what exactly does an SEO plugin do?

Generally speaking, SEO plugins help you optimize your blogs or landing pages so that they can rank high on search engines. This way, the chances of bringing more prospective customers to your website increase rapidly, along with the conversion rate. 

In fact, several SEO plugins, like Yoast SEO, are extremely valuable for improving the ranking of your content. For example, they help you avoid the pitfalls of SEO, such as overusing keywords or passive voice. At the same time, the plugins offer tips for improving content readability and word fluency by noting paragraph length and subheading distribution. 

Hence, SEO plugins are paramount to the SEO of your content and increase your business’ reach. Yet, keep in mind that SEO WordPress plugins don’t guarantee your content ranks high on search engines. They’re just tools. 

Using SEO plugins offers a deeper insight into your target audience and webpage’s traffic. So, use them to boost user engagement and improve your content strategy. 

Five Great SEO Plugins for WordPress in 2022

SEO plugins for WordPress are easy to install, understand, and master, and there are lots of them. For this reason, we chose to focus entirely on WordPress SEO plugins instead of plugins for other content management systems.  

Let’s just get straight to the best WordPress SEO plugins: 

Yoast SEO 

Yoast SEO is arguably considered the best WordPress SEO plugin. It has an appealing and easy-to-use interface, user-friendly options, and impressive updates that keep the tool updated with the latest Google algorithm trends. 

Yoast SEO’s website.

Yoast SEO also has premium support options, an informative blog that lets you learn more about proper SEO, and SEO courses for beginners, intermediates, and advanced entrepreneurs. 

What’s more, you can access Yoast SEO premium from their website and take advantage of its advanced features, such as keyword optimization for up to five keywords on a page and internal link suggestions to direct visitors to other pages of your website. 

However, the great thing about Yoast SEO is that if you don’t want to go for the premium version ($89 per website), you can use the free plugin, which is equally powerful. 

Best Features:

• Analyze how well your content’s optimized for specific keywords.
• High-end readability checks to understand if you need to add elements, such as subheadings or bullet-point lists.
• You can easily see what your result will look like in search engines. This way, you can adjust your meta description and title to make it more appealing to your target audience.
• Great support. 

WordLift

WordLift is an interesting WordPress plugin that’s worth using. What it does is that it organizes your content and automates structured data markup. In fact, it uses high-end AI that brings advanced SEO to the hands of marketers and content creators. On top of that, WordLift adds internal links on its own, improving content findability and recommendation widgets and metadata. 

WordLift’s website.

Also, with this plugin, you can translate your blogs into machine-friendly content that digital assistants, like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, can use, improving organic traffic. The plan starts at €59 per month (approximately $65/per month). 

Best Features:

• Google Analytics integration. 
• Natural language processing and graphs for automating data markup.
• Tracks your content’s performance and offers advice on how to improve SEO. 

SEOPress

SEOPress is a freemium WordPress SEO plugin without ads. It has no footprints and doesn’t track users, even in its free version. The plugin is fast, simple to use, and quite powerful, as it lets content editors manage all of their titles, meta descriptions, and other metadata of their blog posts and landing pages.

SEOPress’ website. 

Like most plugins on this list, the free version of SEOPress offers content analysis to help writers improve the readability and SEO of their content. With SEOPress, users can also create XML and HTML sitemaps, track users with Google Analytics, and even optimize tags to share content on social media (Twitter Cards and Open Graph). Lastly, developers can use more than 75 hooks.

Best Features:

• Ad-free
• You can add Google Analytics tracking within seconds and exclude users from tracking according to demographics or set up custom dimensions and enable remarketing. You can also enable IP Anonymization and cross-domain tracking, among others.
• Facebook open graph data and Twitter meta tags. 

SEO Squirrly

SEO Squirrly is an SEO plugin for SEO amateurs. It offers a complete SEO suite without overcomplicated elements, meaning even if you’re not an SEO expert, you’ll be able to optimize your content so that it ranks high in search engines. 

SEO Squirrly’s website.

What distinguishes SEO Squirrly from other plugins is that it generates SEO recommendations different from other plugins. For instance, as you start working on your article, the chosen keyword is punched in so that green lights are activated in real-time as you write your content. In other words, with SEO Squirrly, you get an SEO and keyword expert working along with you as you’re typing. 

Best Features:

• Keyword optimization while typing the article. A bit easier than Yoast SEO, where you have to save the article to see SEO suggestions.
• If you replace an old plugin with SEO Squirrly, the latter keeps your previous setup, which is neat.
• Exceptional competitor analysis that lets you see how to outperform competitors’ content.
• Content reports that you can send to team members. 

The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework is a fine plugin that works for those who want a lightweight and fast WordPress SEO plugin with no ads. It’s focused and helps keep your website speed high. More often than not, it’s considered a great alternative to Yoast SEO. This has to do with the visual nature of the plugin and the flexible options it offers for targeting desired keywords.

The SEO Framework’s website. 

A colored scale shows if you’re close to achieving your SEO goals. Hence, the scale tells you whether you have to keep optimizing your content or if your work is ready to rank high in search engines. 

The SEO Framework is perfect for beginners in SEO, too, as it has a clean interface. Yet, at the same time, the API is also superb for advanced users. The plugin is all-inclusive and offers extensions for users who want to take the extra mile. 

Best Features:

• Similar to Yoast SEO but without having to pay for premium features.
• User-friendly features thanks to the visual meter/scale. In other words, you can easily check if your content performs well on Google. 
• Comment spam extension that lets you remove… comment spam. 
• The SEO Framework doesn’t focus on a focus keyword but rather on a focus subject, encouraging natural writing since Google views synonyms in SERPs as the same thing. 

Conclusion

SEO can be tedious and challenging if you don’t use the right tools. Yet, as we’ve shown above, several WordPress SEO plugins can help you optimize your content, organize your keyword planning, and do a competitor analysis and reporting. 

Just give these plugins a chance to skyrocket your WordPress website’s reach. You won’t regret it. 

If you’re unsure about SEO or how to properly use the WordPress SEO plugins, feel free to reach out to a dedicated content writing agency that can take care of your SEO strategy and optimize your content.