SEO is used on social media platforms to help you get found easily on search engine giants such as Google and Bing. When individuals type in a certain string of words into the search engine, your site should emerge as the first result for the terms entered. This will help you acquire more targeted traffic, leading to better sales, revenues, and brand visibility.

Today, SEO is not a one-time tactic that can be implemented once and forgotten about. SEO is a dynamic discipline, so you must keep abreast of the latest rules and create and optimize your content in compliance with them. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to do this.

But don’t worry; you can do that with the help of SEO tools!

Nowadays, we have tested many plugins that help us achieve better rankings and show better results in search engine systems. Here, countless measurable experiences have been shared on what is effective and what the changing trends in SEO are.

This guide presents the Melon SEO experts’ best recommendations for WordPress SEO tools and plugins to enhance your SEO and gain better rankings.

How We Test and Review WordPress Plugins

We selected some of the best SEO plugins based on their attributes, such as functionality, ease of use, customers’ feedback, and compatibility with WordPress. Here’s our process:

1. Testing: Each plugin is installed on a test WordPress to check whether it meets the criterion. After that, we assess the installation process based on ease of use, efficiency, and relevance to your site’s general design and other plug-ins.
2. Feature Review: We run it through the mill to write about it, to see if it is user-friendly if you can customize it, and if it is reliable. Here, we see whether the specific plugin meets its respective claims.
3. What’s Unique?: Typically, not with any WordPress plugin you will use. Therefore, some features allow you to decide whether or not it is the best plugin for your site that we try to highlight or differentiate.

We are interested in plugins that will enable users to boast unique SEO knowledge, and SEO professionals are interested in website improvement to simplify the optimization process for their sites.

How to Choose the Right SEO Plugin for Your Site

Given the many SEO tools available for web use, it is crucial to identify which are most necessary for your website.

If you are looking for basic keyword research tools, do not hesitate to read the following information. Or does your project require more specific functionality, such as SEO on-page optimization tools, XML sitemaps generation, schema markup integration, and more?

Ensure that you select a perfect plugin that is easy to use and has the necessary tools to help you improve your SEO rankings.

Here are the essential features you should look at if you are serious about optimizing your site for search engines:

• On-Page Analysis: This allows you to ‘peer under the hood’ at various on-page attributes, including using heading tags, image alt tags, and internal linking.
• XML Sitemap Generation: XML sitemaps are very useful because they help search engines crawl and index content more easily.
• Schema Markups: Can assist the search engines in crawling, indexing, and improving the search results on the website.
• Redirects: This feature helps you track errors, such as 404, on your site and set up redirects for broken and old links.
• Canonical URLs: Indicate a specific URL or version of a Web page that search engines should use in indices and show in SERPs.
• SEO Audit and Reporting: To evaluate your site’s general SEO situation, summarize potential troubles, and establish more efficient steps for rectification.

Depending on your site, you may also need to use local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, Multilingual SEO, Multisite SEO, and AMP (accelerated mobile pages) support. 

Here are general guidelines for the plugin comparison so you know which features your site needs the most.

Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

A good SEO strategy must comprise a combination of tools to help people understand keywords, content, and backlinks and even ensure some technicalities are handled. We have also pointed out which are suitable for some “niche SEO” functions.

1. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

So yes, All in One SEO Pack is undoubtedly the best plugin for WordPress SEO you can have. Living up to its name, it is an ultimate, versatile collection of SEO Tools by which you can augment your site’s search engine optimization.

With All in One SEO, anyone can comfortably manage the plugin, including newbies to WordPress. If you have this plugin on your site, what happens is that whenever you overwrite your site’s settings, a setup wizard will guide you to the appropriate size settings for your site. It also includes a Site Audit feature that performs site audits on its own, and it offers tips and tricks that the website owner can use to improve the SEO of the site.

After that, when it comes to creating any page or post, you will get an AIOSEO section in the WordPress editor before the post-publication. This is the on-page SEO optimization tool where you can enter the post title, meta description, focus keyword, and schemas.

AIOSEO provides the functionalities of AI (artificial intelligence) to grade your headline and its content and tips that will help you improve the content.

If you’re an SEO expert, you’ll love the easy access to advanced features that include:

• RSS feeds
• Robots. txt editor
• Local SEO
• Breadcrumbs
• ChatGPT AI tools
• Google News sitemaps
• Video SEO
• Advanced redirect manager
• 404 tracking
• IndexNow integration

On top of all these, you get a feature called AI Link-Assistant for internal linking opportunity searches. It also makes it possible for search engine robots to crawl your website frequently and discover new content. You can also easily insert the ‘open in the new tab’ and ‘nofollow’ meta tags here.

AIOSEO also introduced its new Search Statistics add-on last year, which enables you to monitor keywords, check search data, and much more within your WordPress site’s backend.

Overall, this is the most all-inclusive SEO tool, especially if one is using the WordPress platform. It addresses multiple constituents of SEO, so you can’t need multiple plugins on your site. It is also equipped with many useful guides and well-written papers to assist you in getting the most out of this plugin.

Are you itching to use this plugin and want to learn in less than 60 minutes? Join our AIOSEO 101 tutorial and learn all the primary approaches and options you need, from the absolute basics to the most specific SEO requirements you could need for any website using All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO Highlights

• Easy setup and configuration 
• It involves major site content audits, analysis, and formulation of appropriate recommendations.
• Advanced on-page optimization features
• Web crawling/spidering: generation of the XML sitemap and its submission.
• Feature to enable sharing content on social media platforms
• Below are some best practices relevant to rich snippets for improving search results.
• These are features added to enhance image and video optimization for increased engagement.
• Local SEO techniques that may be useful to companies
• eCommerce integration for shops that use WooCommerce
• They are affected by safe and constant care and support.

AIOSEO Pricing

There’s a free plugin available. The premium plugin starts at $49.50 per year.

2. WPBeginner Keyword Generator

The keyword generator tool is very useful and free for users to access from the WPBeginner website. It assists you in generating blog topic ideas and SEO keywords to use. In fact, it is a favorable keyword research tool because it does not require one to sign up or even enter an email address.

To begin with, the user has to enter a keyword they wish to have analyzed. This would list 300+ keywords for a particular topic, derived from the search terms users use to enter Google.

These are suggestions for new letters that can be added to the English alphabet, as well as prepositions and questions on various topics that could be taken as topics for a new blog post. You can also save the keyword report by going through it offline if needed.

If you want to be redirected to keyword suggestions in specific sections of the SEO topical entity graph, click Show graph at the end of each section.

You can right-click the graph SVG file to save it to your clipboard, copy the SVG file to a text editor such as Notepad, or download the report.

Keyword Generator Highlights

• Keyword suggestions that are instantly generated to help in the creation of content
• The avatar also has a basic graphical user interface that anyone can understand.
• Check out a list of potential topics that relate to a subject.
• Content scheduling is a tool that can help assign valuable insights to particular channels.
• Assets that are open to all and can be used by anyone.

Keyword Generator Pricing

Free.

3. Free Keyword Density Checker

So you not only discover the keywords to optimize your site but also find out when you are overoptimizing a keyword. Google can even perceive it as spamming the content with keywords, which is actually against its rules and may harm the rankings.

This is where WPBeginner has another free tool, Keyword Density Checker, to assist with the same. It helps you find keywords that you require on your site to enhance its performance. It also displays an optimization keyword report, identifying any keywords that may have been over-optimized. If it discovers that your site has high keyword density, it will give a warning, either in red or blue.

You type in the URL of the site you wish to inspect, and the keyword density of that site shall be displayed to you fully. This is an opportunity that means you can also enter competitor URLs and check out their approach to keyword research. There’s always a way of obtaining a list of the most used keywords by the competitor’s websites and perhaps areas where you can outrank them.

Keyword Density Checker Highlights

• Analyze how prominently the content uses the keywords
• Make optimal keyword density management easier
• Like most products, a user-friendly interface provides a quick way to analyze the data collected or generated out of it.
• Demonstrate that the extent of the use of either related or unrelated keywords is not optimal

Keyword Density Checker Pricing

Free.

4. Semrush

Semrush is another great tool for monitoring your website or business and enhancing its SEO. It has almost all the SEO tools one can think of, and since I want to keep it short, let me give you an overview of the most widely used tools.

First is the Organic Research tool, which enables you to monitor a page or a post to check its performance. It shows a post’s performance over time. When it comes to keywords, you can see for which keywords the post is ranking and the amount of traffic each of the keywords actually receives.

Afterward, you can perform a keyword and Search Volume lookup using the Keyword Magic Tool. You may check the Keyword Gap feature if you cannot figure out more niche topics or have doubts regarding what your audience might like. It helps look for a new perspective on creating content your audience wants to consume.

Then, let’s discuss the competitor analysis tools. This functionality lets you view their expected total traffic, main sources of traffic, bounce rates, time per page, and other metrics.

That’s not all. Of course, you can also prepare your content to go live on your site. For example, Semrush has a Writing Assistant and SEO Content Template to help create your headings and additional outlines and control keyword usage.

Semrush Highlights

• Keyword research tools
• Also referred to as competitive analysis and back link-txt analysis
• Table 3: Select the right keywords for content optimization
• This should be accompanied by monitoring the particular website with more detailed analytics.
• Monitor keywords, ranking position, and traffic from organic search
• The best practice is to audit the website for technical SEO improvements.

Semrush Pricing

Subscriptions begin at $ 108 per month.

5. Schema Pro

Schema Pro is an app that enables you to add precise schema annotations to your content without writing any code.

If you’ve ever seen SEO before, patterns or tags will remind you of them. They assist in the way that they inform the search engines about what your content is all about. For instance, you may want to categorize content as an article, a review, an event, Frequently asked questions, etc.

Once you do this, Google is much more aware of where to place your content in search engine result pages. As a result, there are more chances that more people will be able to locate your site, which can assist you in getting more individuals to spend money on your site or just perform the desired action.

That way, Schema also assists you with placing your content in rich snippets, snippets located at the upper portion of the Google search bar.

Implementing Schema Pro is very easy. There is no need to know some code stuff here and so on. Once you have installed the markup, you can select from more than 20 schema types to include in your content. The cool part? A wide range of tags can be transformed and used on the entire site. And as you know, you decide when and where it appears.

Schema Pro Highlights

• Make the integration of structured data markup fairly easy
• 20+ schema types
• User-friendly interface

Schema Pro Pricing

It is fairly simple to use and starts at $69/year for a single user.

6. Rank Math

Let me introduce you to Rank Math, an app that ensures your website gets discovered by searches and search engines. I love the Level feature because Rank Math doesn’t assume you know anything about SEO, so it’s perfect for beginners and experts. It also provides integrated hints that can help raise the site’s SEO rank.

One of them allows you to easily change the SEO associated with your pages, how the search engine should index your web pages, and how you would like your site displayed when it appears in the search results list.

You can also run a statistical SEO audit, which is grounded on 30 well-known SEO factors. This assists in identifying problems that may be within your site.

A site map, schema, metadata, page speed checker, and other features are also included for SEO.

RankMath Highlights

• Easy setup wizard
• User-friendly interface
• Local business SEO
• Built-in advanced SEO analytics
• AI 5: Personal AI assistant: Content
• Google Index status
• Rank and position tracker
• Schema generator

Rank Math Pricing

Rank Math SEO has different plans, and the basic one costs $5. 75 per month plus taxes and fees.

7. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker is an add-on tool developed by AIOSEO and is totally free of cost. To summarise, this tool is a great find for site owners and managers who want to check internal links or links leading to their site for proper functioning. It visits your website at a set frequency and, among other things, verifies whether every link is valid. 

It also crawls pages and posts or even any specified custom post type you want it to crawl. These include post statuses, which range from published to draft to pending review. Our next use case is to prevent the monitoring of specific URLs. This can be easily done depending on the options set out by the system’s constructor.

It is one of those plugins that compete as a SaaS or a Software as a Service, meaning that’s located on AIOSEO’s servers, not your site’s. This is quite a wise decision because it protects your server’s IP from being blocked, as well as ensures that hosting providers do not persuade you to upgrade your plan due to consumed resources. However, this means that to get a chance to use the tool fully, one needs to pay for an AIOSEO account. There is more to it, which can be done for free and takes less than one minute.

Broken Link Checker Highlights

• When it comes to hypo5: Recognizing Valid links, broken and redirect links
• Filter according to which posts you would like to monitor
• Select URLs that should not be checked
• Scheduled checks
• Editing links can be time-consuming but can, therefore, be reduced because they are edited right where they are needed.

Broken Link Checker Pricing

Free.

8. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is arguably one of the most widely used WordPress plugins. It was specifically created to enhance the on-page SEO of websites, especially those on the Google platform. It encompasses a number of options and elements that seek to enhance on-page search engine optimization to assist websites in enhancing their ranking in the search engine result pages and increasing organic traffic.

This is a word processor that can analyze real-time content while writing or editing it and highlight content density or SEO readiness. It also suggests compounding your content, using head and keywords, and many other things.

This is implemented in Yoast SEO, where one can see how their content will look when featured in the search engine results. This makes it easier for you to craft your title and meta description more effectively to ensure they are attention-grabbing and have a high click-through rate.

You should also look for internal linking suggestions, a redirection manager, and schemas. It works well with other tools, such as Semrush and Elementor, which are also considered titan platforms.

Yoast SEO Highlights

• Some of the notable and customizable features of the software include.
• On-page SEO content analysis
• Regarding the quality of the content that is suggested for linking and the quality of the links that have already been created
• Trailers for teaser posts on different social media platforms
• Dead link checker

Yoast SEO Pricing

$99 per year. Free SEO plugin available.

9. SEOPress

This means that, through SEOPress, users enjoy many tools that boost on-page SEO and lead to better ranks in SERPs.

Like Yoast, it has the ‘Pointer’ feature that suggests improving the structure/content headings/keywords/and other on-page SEO factors. It also provides insight into where your content can be found using SEO, along with the ability to preview how it will look in a search engine and even work on your snippets to increase your click-through rate.

This tool also features a setting import/export option to ease the transfer of SEO settings between websites or the moving of content.

This WordPress SEO app offers the basic version free of charge, while a paid version includes additional tools and updates.

SEOPress Highlights

• Installation wizard guide
• Stay abreast of meta title and description
• Create XML and HTML site map
• Provide your website users with tracking through Google Analytics
• Social sharing requires the right tagging of your social account for sharing on social platforms

SEOPress Pricing

Features start at the price range of $49 per year.

10. Ahrefs

This tool is particularly famous as a backlink checker, but it has become much more. It’s an all-inclusive SEO tool that can be compared to SEMrush, the popular one.

It has a powerful dashboard that enables users to carry out backend research, site management, and performance tracking. The dashboard will include an overall report on your website’s SEO results, HTML tags, layout of social tags, and link in and out.

In addition to being helpful link-building software, Ahrefs allows you to track your rankings in the SERPs, see changes that occur, and compare yourself to the competition. You can also get your Backlink History, Referring URLs, and Referring Domains besides doing a Backlink Search.

Next, you can currently search for keywords using this ‘keyword’ option, and unwanted keywords can also be left out using the ‘-keyword’ filters that are provided. This way, you will have less say in keywords, but only amazing ones will be offered to you.

Still, while Ahrefs is suitable for enterprise-level companies with huge budgets for paid subscriptions and complex features, It is also suitable for small business owners, freelancers, and SEO specialists who need quality data to optimize the site.

Ahrefs Highlights

• Extensive keyword explorer
• The analysis of both individual and overall backlink profiles and their continuous monitoring
• Monitor progress made in a particular search engine by competitors and their key approaches.
• For each page or section, determine the best-performing content and additional possibilities
• Watch web status and other matters related to technical aspects of its search engine optimization
• Monitor and optimize the total search visibility for the given site

Ahrefs Pricing

It ranges from $99 monthly, depending on the software’s services.

11. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is an application created for WordPress users. Its primary purpose is to help them navigate Google Analytics and use its functions to track various website metrics. It allows linking a website’s multiple Google Analytics accounts to WordPress, and no PHP coding is involved.

Once integrated, the data is delivered directly to the WordPress control panel, where you can benefit from the analysis. This means that you can engage in comprehensive and detailed analysis of your site, the visitors, their sources, and more by accessing simple and clearly written reports.

For this reason, the principles of marketing mathematics will assist you in making appropriate decisions about correctly orienting your content, advertisements, and overall user experience.

MonsterInsights Highlights

• It serves WordPress websites, and it has a feature that integrates with Google Analytics, which can be useful for many websites.
• Underneath, monitor website visits and users’ engagement
• Possible analysis of various traffic: page views, bounce rates, etc.
• This is achievable by tracking the conversion rate of eCommerce through a conversion tracker.
• Another advantage is that media channels provide information about their audience’s demographics and interests.
• Modifications that may be done for tracking purposes may be made depending on your requirements.
• It should also help ease the use of the dashboard to produce easily understandable reports.

MonsterInsights Pricing

Starts at $99. 50 per year.

12. Google Search Console

Google Webmasters or Google Search Console is an SEO tool provided completely free by the giant Google Company. It can be utilized to gain insight into how users are interacting with and discovering your content.

This performance report presents key website traffic statistics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and average positions for given keywords. It is useful because it shows which keywords are used to arrive at your site and how the picture transforms over months.

There is also a URL inspection tool to discover what indexing problems and mistakes exist and how they influence the ranking of your content on Google. I can prove that this is an essential tool if any website owner wants to rank their website on Google. For this purpose, the structure and layout of your site must be submitted to the Search Console through XML sitemaps. If you use a plugin such as AIOSEO, it will do that for you, depending on how it has been configured.

This tool can scan your site to determine whether it has a security problem or has violated Google policy.

Google Search Console Highlights

• The trends of the website being indexed and how it appears to the public
• In particular, it is critical to understand the principal sources of indexing problems and mistakes.
• Monitoring the amount of traffic to the site from specific searches and tracking the position of specific keywords on search engines.
• Suggest improving the crawl ability and indexability of the website by adding XML sitemaps.
• Notifications regarding any relevant changes on the website
• Data on performance and overseeing of production, quality, and supply chain.

Google Search Console Pricing

Free tool from Google

13. Moz Pro

Moz offers a variety of tools to increase search engine ranking and is considered to be one of the most important ones. First, there is the Mozbar, which may be downloaded. It is a browser add-on that costs nothing. This is the case with SEO metrics, enabling you to look for any webpage or ERP (Search Engine Results Page). It also comprises rank, Page Authority, Domain Authority, and Spam Score.

Afterward, you can subscribe to the Moz Pro plan to get a complete SEO package. You can discover how specific individuals are interacting and engaging with your products and content and what questions users are asking to locate your information.

This data can be used when planning where to place specific keywords or when to perform particular user queries.

Moz also recognizes the performance of your site and your competitor’s site. This is done to provide you with a clear search visibility score to determine your site’s performance on the search engines.

Moz Pro Highlights

• On page optimization
• Site audits
• Backlink analysis
• Keyword explorer and Rank tracker can also be included as an important instrument among the web tools used by startups.
• Performance metrics

Moz Pro Pricing

This basically will cost from one hundred and ninety-nine dollars for the basic package and scale up to several thousand for enterprise solutions.

14. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is not a plugin with many SEO features as its primary purpose but rather a caching plugin to improve your site’s speed. After I implement this plugin, there will be a recommended percentage where 80% of the recommended settings and measures will be applied to your site automatically. This will definitely improve your site’s speed, thereby making it more attractive to users.

Why should it be in your SEO toolkit? This is an extension of the previous point, and it pertains to the fact that the speed of apps and websites affects the usability of the Internet and may even dictate the positioning of your site with search engines.

Today, it is possible to state that Google uses a number of factors to define the quality of the user experience, including the speed of a webpage that the user interacts with. This voting mechanism will likely see pages that load faster ranked higher as they provide users with a better experience.

When it comes to site speed boost, WP Rocket really makes it easy, even if you do not have any coding knowledge. First, it has assorted caching solutions, such as page caching, browser caching, and object Caching. Temporary storage allows clients to store a copy of your website in their browser memory.

When a user returns to your site for the second or third time, the cached version is delivered rather than having the page built new. This will help reduce the workload on your server and optimize the time it takes to load the page.

It also has other optimization methods, such as implementing lazy loading, turning on GZIP compression, database optimization, deferring the loading of JavaScript, stripping out unnecessary CSS, and minimizing the code.

WP Rocket Highlights

• Beginner-friendly
• Set and forget configuration
• Advanced caching
• Great support team
• eCommerce compatibility

WP Rocket Pricing

$9 per year. They assure customers by offering a 14-day money-back guarantee.

16. Redirection

Redirect is a free WordPress plugin that creates a simple interface for managing redirects to your website. The tool allows you to handle 301 redirections and 404 errors.

However, plugins such as All in One SEO have a redirection manager built in. If you are looking for a free plugin for your site, then this is the right plugin for you.

If you want to shift your permalinks, this plugin can help you do it without transferring your old database.

Another important thing is that you can include HTTP headers for the redirects, some specific pages, or even the entire site. This becomes useful in that it minimizes the effects of the redirects or, in other cases, boosts security.

Redirection Highlights

• Easy redirection manager
• Track 404 errors
• Set up conditional redirects
• Import/export system

Redirection Pricing

Free.