The Awesome List: WordPress SEO Plugins

The Awesome List: WordPress SEO Plugins was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

WordPress is a simple-to-use content management system that’s also free. It offers everyone from solo bloggers to the world’s leading brands a platform to create custom and powerful websites. No wonder almost a third of all websites run on WP!

Still, WordPress was made for users, not for Google or SEOs. That’s why SEO plugins exist — to plug in the holes with added functionality that helps your content be indexed by search engines and found by searchers.

As a marketer, content creator or analyst, how do you choose the best SEO plugin for your sites? Here, we’ll take a look at six plugins, their many features, and finally a price comparison chart so that you can compare them:

Yoast SEO
All-In-One SEO Pack
SEO Ultimate
SEO Squirrly
SEOPressor Connect
Bruce Clay SEO WP (our own)

Plugins often come in both free and premium versions; the premium versions unlock more functionality and service. I’ll address both versions where appropriate.

Plugin No. 6 is our soon-to-be-launched WP plugin, Bruce Clay SEO, which fills in the gaps left by other plugins on this list (see our list of what your SEO plugin is missing).

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin. It’s easy to use, driven by a simple user interface. The majority of people use the free version.

Here’s what the free version offers (from its plugin page):

XML sitemaps functionality at the push of a button
Full control over site breadcrumbs
Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content
Title and meta description templates
Content & SEO analysis to write SEO-friendly text
Snippet preview to show how your post or page will look in the search results (also on mobile)
Cornerstone content and internal linking features help optimize your site structure
Integrates with Google Search Console
Manage SEO roles to give people access to specific sections of the Yoast SEO plugin
Bulk editor to make large-scale edits to a site

Strengths: As a leading plugin, it’s driven by market awareness and brand presence. It’s easy to use. The free version is typically enough for most users.

Weaknesses: It’s built for everyone and no one industry in particular. As a result, some users feel the SEO recommendations are too generic. In addition, even though it’s fairly simple to use, the features may seem overwhelming to beginners.

Active installations: 5+ million

Rating on WordPress: 5 stars

Yoast’s Paid Version

Yoast offers a premium version for annual fees ranging from $89 for one site up to $756.50 for 15 sites. Additional offerings of the premium version include:

News SEO, video SEO, local SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions
Premium users get one year free access to a support team
Insights tool shows you what your text is focusing on so you can keep your article in line with your keywords
Multiple focus keywords to optimize your article for synonyms and related keywords
Automatic internal linking suggestions of posts to link to
Social previews to help manage the way a page looks when shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter
Redirect manager to address redirect errors from Google Search Console, deleted pages and changed URLs

2. All-In-One SEO Pack

All-In-One SEO Pack offers entry-level features to assist with SEO for beginners. It also has advanced features and an API for developers.

Here’s what the free plugin offers (from its plugin page):

XML sitemap support
Image XML sitemap submitted to Google and Bing
Google AMP support
Google Analytics support
Support for SEO on custom post types
Advanced canonical URLs
Redirect attachment pages to parent post
Automatically notifies search engines about changes to your site
Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
Provides SEO integration for e-commerce sites, including WooCommerce
Nonce Security built in
Automatically optimizes titles for search engines
Generates meta tags automatically
Avoids typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
For advanced users, fine-tune everything to optimize SEO
Override any title and set any meta description and keywords
Compatible with many other plugins
Translated into 57 languages
PHP 7 100 percent compatible

Strengths: As a leading plugin, it’s driven by market awareness and brand presence. Some users appreciate that you can turn off features you won’t need to use.

Weaknesses: This plugin is built for everyone and no one industry in particular. Some people comment that the user interface is not as friendly as they would like it to be, and say that for true beginners, it might be too complex to understand.

Active installations: 2+ million

Rating on WordPress: 4.5 stars

All-In-One’s Paid Version

All-In-One SEO Pack offers a pro version for annual fees ranging from $97 for an individual to $699 for an agency. Additional offerings of the pro version include:

Advanced support for WooCommerce
SEO for categories, tags and custom taxonomies
Video SEO module
Access to video screencasts
Access to premium support forums
Access to knowledge center

3. SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate has the most robust feature set of the all-in-one-type WordPress SEO plugins. Check out its plugin page for more details on each of the following features.

Here’s what the free plugin offers (from its plugin page):

Title tag rewriter and meta description editor
Deeplink juggernaut
Open graph integrator
Rich snippet creator
Author highlighter
Link mask generator
Canonicalizer
404 monitor
Permalink tweaker
Meta robot tags editor
SEO ultimate widgets
Plugin settings manager
SEO/SEM-enhancing custom HTML
.htaccess editor and the robots.txt editor
Textboxes to the end of your posts/pages that contain automatically generated link HTML
Meta keywords for posts, pages, categories, tags, terms and the homepage auto-generated and editable
“Read more” links include the posts’ keyword-rich titles in the anchor text
Rel=”nofollow” settings when migrating from other SEO plugins
Dashboard of green/yellow/red indicators for SEO-friendliness
Buttons that make it easy for visitors to share content on social
Remove customizable “filler words” (like “the,” “with,” “and,” etc.) from post/page URLs
Access search engine webmaster tools

Strengths: This plugin has a nice set of robust SEO features. Also, the ability to import and export data from other sources, including other SEO plugins, is something users find handy.

Weaknesses: The free version is no longer being updated for WordPress. Because the tool is advanced, it requires training to get the most out of it.

Active installations: 100,000+

Rating on WordPress: 4 stars

SEO Ultimate’s Paid Version

SEO Ultimate+ costs from $49 for one site to $249 for 20 sites annually. $500 will get you unlimited sites. Additional offerings of SEO Ultimate+ include:

Structured data, schema and rich snippets
Global canonical manager
Alt attribute mass editor for images
Improved open graph options for social networks
The code inserter+ module
HTML and XML Sitemaps
Rel previous and next pagination optimization
SEO data transporter

4. SEO Squirrly

SEO Squirrly is an SEO plugin that aims to be an SEO advisor.

Here’s what the free plugin offers (from its plugin page – check it out for more in-depth information on each feature):

Keyword research
SEO Live Assistant
Audit Suite
Briefcase, keyword strategy assistant
Twitter Cards
Facebook Open Graph support for both images and video
LinkedIn titles, images and description for better sharing
Rich Pins for Pinterest
Snippet preview
Customize meta title and description
Sitemap
Blog feeds
SEO settings
Performance analytics
Works with multisites
Blogging assistant to help keep readers on the page longer

Strengths: Robust features. Works well with the WooCommerce e-commerce plugin.

Weaknesses: The plugin is free if you do less than five posts per month on one site; otherwise, you need to upgrade to the paid version. Some features that used to be included free are now separate paid products, such as search engine rank tracking.

Active Installations: 30,000+

Rating on WordPress: 4.5 stars

SEO Squirrly’s Paid Version

SEO Squirrly offers a premium version for monthly fees of $29.99 for pro and $71.99 for business. Additional offerings of the premium version include:

Up to seven sites
Full access to SEO Live Assistant
Unlimited optimized articles
Research on hundreds of keywords
Free images; find/insert tweets; find/insert wikis; find/insert news; find/insert blog articles
Advanced site analytics
Weekly audits on hundreds of pages

5. SEOPressor Connect

SEOPressor Connect is the most advanced of these SEO plugins, in my opinion.

This is a paid plugin ($9 per month), and just some of the things it offers include:

Multiple keywords analysis
XML Sitemap generator
SEOpressor over-optimization check
Canonical link
Progressive LSI keywords engine
301 URL redirect
SemantiQ density tells you if the content is related to keywords
On-page robot rules
Schema and Dublin Core markup support
SEOpressor site audit
SEOpressor local SEO
SEO trends
Google Knowledge Graph help
SEOpressor score manager for optimization
Optimize the homepage
SEOpressor smart link manager
On-page meta settings
Sitewide link policy
Facebook Open Graph customization
Automatic smart linking
Twitter Card customization
SEOpressor role settings

Strengths: Can be used on multiple domains and works well with other SEO plugins. Many people find it easy to use with a strong user interface.

Weaknesses: Computes its own scores and tracks them over time, but lacks a connection to performance analytics data or search results. This means that the trends could be misleading since they don’t reflect how your content is actually performing in the search engines.

Active installs & ratings: The plugin does not appear in WordPress’s plugin directory, so this data is not available.

6. Bruce Clay SEO for WordPress (now in beta)

While many of the above plugins compete with each other, our approach is different. Bruce Clay SEO WP is meant to supplement and extend the free versions with powerful needed features.

We gathered input from industry practitioners on what they wanted to see in an SEO plugin. Then we designed our plugin not to replace the plugins you may be using, but to provide much more data than is available today.

Of course, our plugin provides capabilities similar to others as well, but that is just in case you’re not using any other SEO plugins.

What makes this plugin unique: It enriches your publishing workspace with SEO insights based on real-time search results and analytics. In other words, you can see beyond the page you’re working on, without leaving WordPress. It’s the integration with our SEOToolSet and Google Search Console/Analytics that makes this possible.

The Bruce Clay SEO plugin works like software as a service (SaaS). Rather than a static one-size-fits-all checklist approach to optimizing a page or post, our plugin uses a live connection with the SEOToolSet software to analyze your keywords and competition in real time.

As a result, the optimization recommendations you see are customized. So your page can better compete in its specific ranking environment.

There’s no free version, but it’s priced affordably at $24.95/month per domain. (Try it! The first week is free — then you can decide if you want to keep it.)

As a bonus, plugin subscribers can also use the SEOToolSet itself. Data is shared between the plugin in WordPress and the user’s SEOToolSet account. Those who want to can run domain ranking reports and take advantage of many other external tools.

Bruce Clay SEO features are powered by patent-pending technology. WordPress users can:

Optimize a page or post for more than one keyword.
See clearly where keywords appear in the content through color coding.
Know which pages and posts are your top performers.
Identify problems with mobile usability and performance.
Check the site for duplicate content.
Evaluate top-ranked pages for your keywords in real-time.
Get recommendations for keyword usage in tags and content (even word count) based upon competitors.
Find out how much content has been written on your site per keyword.
See how each of your pages or posts is performing, using integrated Google Analytics data.
View top-performing posts or pages per author/contributor to the website as measured by visitors over a selectable period of time.
Find out when there is a possibility of duplicate content, like meta information or the content on a page.
Discover the page or post’s readability and compare it to keyword competitors.
Use along with Yoast, if desired. Compatibility is built in.

Want to be one of the first to get the Bruce Clay SEO plugin? We ship soon. You can watch our preview video and pre-register here!

Comparing Your Options

Now that you have a sense of what these 6 awesome WordPress SEO plugins do, here is a quick price comparison chart:

Plugin



Free Version?



Paid



SaaS?



Domains Allowed




Yoast SEO
Y
$89-$756.50/yr
N
1 to 15


All-In-One SEO Pack
Y
$97 to $699/yr
N
1 to unlimited


SEO Ultimate
Y
$49-$500/yr
N
1 to unlimited


SEO Squirrly
Y
$29.99-$71.99/mo
Y
1 to 7


SEOPressor Connect
N
$9/mo
N
1 to unlimited


Bruce Clay SEO WP
N (7 days free)
$24.95/mo/domain
Y
1 to unlimited

I want to know: Have you used any of the plugins in this list? Where do you think they have strengths and weaknesses?