Ever wonder why your site is not ranking higher on the search engines? And are you struggling to rank your WordPress site on any search engine? If yes, you would also know you are missing out on something important: Plugins and SEO tools. SEO is a complex and dynamic field; one should have complete expertise before starting a website. There are thousands of websites struggling to find their way, but they fail because of some common mistakes.
However, you do not need to worry because some WordPress tools and plugins can optimize your website and give you potential traffic to it. Additionally, these tools and plugins can analyze your website’s performance to make it ready for organic traffic and take your website to the next level. So if you are just starting or have some SEO knowledge, read the following article to learn about the top 14 WordPress SEO plugins and tools to get ahead of the competition and achieve your goals.
1- Yoast SEO
A study conducted by SEMrush found that more than 12 million websites are using this plugin, and more than 84% of WordPress users are using it. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins because of its features and the ability to optimize content for specific keywords. Additionally, Yoast SEO can provide features like preview, social media integration, breadcrumb navigation, and advanced settings for more experienced users. Most of these features are free, but a premium version includes additional features.
2- Rank Math
If you want your website to have easy setup and configuration alongside advanced settings, include the rank math plugin. The easy setup and configuration allow the users to have quick and fast responses, including control over meta tags and advanced schema options. Additionally, this plugin helps with comprehensive SEO analysis, including keyword optimization, content analysis, and schema markup. Due to the above features, Rank Math is the second most popular WordPress plugin after Yoast SEO, with 25% of respondents reporting using it.
3- Ahrefs
Keyword research is one of the most effective ways to increase organic traffic on your website, but it takes a lot of time. Ahrefs save you crucial time by providing detailed analyses of keyword research, including its volume, competition, and difficulty. This makes the identification and optimization of content easier. Additionally, this helps in backlink analysis, allowing users to identify backlink opportunities and track the performance of their link-building efforts.
4- SEMrush
Both off and on-page are important for content optimization, but people often focus on one, making it difficult for them to produce organic traffic on time. SEMrush is one of the most effective tools to help with on-page optimization. More than 20% of WordPress users use it because of its large database of over 20 billion keywords and 810 million domains, making it one of the most comprehensive SEO tools.
5- Google Search Console
It is better to know which anchor texts and keywords are getting impressions and attention from the audience, so you can make full use of these words and make your site rank higher. Google Search Console is a free and perfect tool website owners use to maintain their site’s presence on Google search engines. Additionally, when a search engine does not crawl your page, this tool will inform you about it and how to fix those errors.
6- Google keyword planner
If you want to rank your website on the Google search engine, you need to know about Google’s algorithm. It takes a lot of time and money, but Google’s keyword planner will help you generate keywords based on its algorithm. It is one of the easiest and most free tools and is mainly used by Google advertisers. Additionally, this planner helps the advertisers know about search volume, number of results, and difficulty level, which helps content writers write effective blogs.
7- SEOPress
Only some plugins include all SEO-related features like meta titles, descriptions, open graph support, image and content XML sitemaps, redirects, and more. The SEOPress plugin is one of them. It has free and paid versions, each with its advantages. The free version of this plugin includes all the basics of SEO, and the paid version is for experienced and advanced users. Get the SEOPress plugin for your website and get ahead of your competitors.
8- Schema Pro
Snippets are very important if you want your website to stand out in search results because this plugin shows star ratings below a review, prices below a product, images or videos next to the description, and so on. Most business websites are using this to attract potential customers to their sites.
9- Keyword Tool
To have organic traffic on your website, you must write an SEO-based blog. And for such blogs, keywords are very crucial. However, keyword search is very time-consuming and hectic. The Keyword Tool is a way to make keyword searches easier for you. It gathers Bing, Google, Youtube, Amazon, and more keywords. These keywords help you learn about each keyword’s volume, cost per click, and other data.
10- SEOQuake
It is one of the most useful SEO tools for anyone owning a website because of its ease to use and big data. SEOQuake can be added to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers, making it easier for website users. Additionally, this tool helps the user to have data related to age, health, age, last update, Alexa rank, and many other parameters. In terms of ease of use and data, you would not find a better tool than SEOQuake.
11- HubSpot
HubSpot is a free tool that small businesses use to monitor their site or a single page for web traffic. Additionally, the tool works in email marketing, forms, and live chat. For this, the tool gathers a lot of good data and creates an SEO strategy. This analytics is then shown to the readers on dashboards, helping them know which SEO areas need improvement.
12- WP Rocket
Developing a website is easier as compared to maintaining and ranking it. Improving a website’s performance and load times is one of the biggest problems many website users face. You do not need to worry if you are one of them because WP Rocket can help you. This plugin has a range of features, like creating static HTML files of your website’s pages, using statistic resources such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files, in visitors’ browsers, and reducing the time it takes to load these resources on subsequent visits.
13- Broken Link Checker
Even a small error or mistake can damage your website. That is why you need to be very cautious about it. They can harm your website’s SEO, creating a negative user experience and negatively affecting your website’s search engine rankings. Broken links are one of the most common problems faced by website owners. Broken Link Checker helps you avoid this problem by detecting and fixing broken links and missing images. Additionally, the plugin will notify you about these errors, allowing you to fix them quickly.
14- Smush
Many SEO experts increase website loading times and user engagement by optimizing images because it has been found that reducing image file sizes by 25% can result in a 70% improvement in loading times. The Smush plugin reduces the file size and helps optimize the site’s automatic optimization. It is one of the top-used popular WordPress plugins for users who want to improve website loading times and user engagement.
All-in-One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO)
It is one of the most effective plugins for SEO because of its wide range of features and ease of use. The XML sitemap generation due to this plugin helps the search engines easily crawl and index your website. Additionally, AIOSEO helps with on-page optimization and integrates with popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to optimize their social media presence.
