Top Picks: The Top 3 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

By Steve Grant
| November 14th 2021

Steve Grant

Managing Director

Steve is a founder of Figment, a multi award-winning UK-based SEO agency helping clients connect with new customers online to achieve healthy and sustainable business growth. Having advised over 200 business owners, Steve combines a strong commercial background with Figment’s innovative SearchRank 360™ approach and specialist team to deliver simple, cost-effective results. His ability to lead by example and inspire his team is a testament to his unwavering commitment to excellence. As a former Apple consultant and first-class Brunel graduate in Multimedia Technology and Design, Steve brings a unique blend of technical knowledge and marketing strategy to create tailored SEO campaigns that deliver results. Outside of work, Steve is a devoted family man, accomplished jazz pianist, and talented artist. With his friendly and professional approach, Figment's founder is not only an industry expert but also a true asset to any business seeking to make its mark in the online world.

WordPress is a powerful platform on which to build a website, but if you’re going to smash your competitors out of the park and make it to the top of the search results, then you’re going to need to work on your SEO. But it’s no easy task, even for the most experienced website owners.

Hunting down broken links, reorganising site structure to boost user experience, optimising pages and posts, dealing with bloated code and oversized images, managing structured data and carrying out an SEO audit can be time consuming and complicated. Thankfully, there are some great WordPress SEO plugins that can take the strain, and get you well on your way to SEO success.

In this post, we’ll be looking at three of the best SEO plugins for WordPress, what they offer and how they can help make the task of SEO a whole lot more straightforward.

1. Yoast SEO

Cost: Free or £89 per year for Yoast Premium

Yoast SEO is possibly the most well-known and respected WordPress SEO plugin. Simple to use, regularly updated and supported by a thriving community, you can opt for the free version, or upgrade to the reasonably priced Yoast Premium to enjoy advanced features and free support.

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin offers numerous benefits to help boost your SEO efforts, including:

Keyword optimisation for up to five keywords per page or post
Page previews for Facebook and Twitter
Internal linking suggestions to help guide visitors around your site
Scoring system to guide your SEO efforts, relaying information on keyword density and usage, outbound and internal links, image alt tag usage and more
Check how your Google search results will look
Optimise meta descriptions and SEO titles to make them more compelling and keyword rich
Readability check with suggestions to help you enhance the quality of your content
Duplicate content detector to help you avoid Google penalties
Page redirect manager to prevent visitors and search engines from getting lost. It also automatically creates redirects whenever content is moved or deleted.
Social media sharing to allow you to customise your posts to make them more compelling
Permalink clean-ups to make it easier for visitors and search engines to find your content

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin helps you build an optimised site, but more than this, it can be used as a learning platform as you follow the suggestions to enhance content and fix issues.

2. The SEO Framework

Cost: Free

The SEO Framework plugin for WordPress is a simplified SEO plugin that focuses on keeping site speeds high, which is vital for SEO. Considered by some as the best alternative to Yoast, one of the most beneficial features of The SEO Framework has to be the way you get to target keywords flexibly, including the use of synonyms.

When publishing posts, there’s a coloured scale to help you see how close you’re getting to making your post search-ready. At a glance, you can understand where you need to make more effort to get things right with your SEO.

Whilst it’s ideal for those just getting started with SEO, advanced users can also find plenty of rich features in this WordPress SEO plugin. Features include:

Local SEO extension, ideal for local service providers and businesses with a local physical store
Article enhancement
SEO and uptime monitoring
Page redirect manager
Coloured scale helps you check whether posts will perform well in the search engines
Content spamming extension to manage spammy comments
Focus subject rather than focus keyword, to encourage more natural content writing and to make the most of the fact Google views synonyms as important as primary keywords

2. SEOPress

Cost: Free or $39 for SEOPress PRO

SEOPress offers both free and professional options. The free version provides a range of features that will help you enhance your WordPress SEO, including meta title and description management, XML and HTML sitemaps, visitor tracking via Google Analytics, social media sharing optimisation and more. There’s also content analysis to help you write better SEO-optimised posts.

SEOPress PRO is ideal for online stores, offering features such as WooCommerce optimisation. Other premium features include:

Local SEO optimisation to help boost success for the likes of ‘near me’ searches
Schema management to increase visibility in the search engines
Breadcrumb optimisation to aid SEO and accessibility
Video and Google News XML sitemaps
Google Structured Data Types (Schema) to boost search results visibility, including products, articles, events, local business, recipes, reviews, FAQs, courses and videos
Back links courtesy of third party integration
Google Page Speed integration to check page quality
Page redirect manager and 404 monitoring
Google Analytics statistics viewable in WordPress dashboard

Looking to beat the competition hands-down to those search engine top spots?

A WordPress SEO plugin can help. But if you don’t have the time, or the inclination, to manage your own SEO, then why not consider a managed SEO professional services from Figment? With multiple five-star reviews, and a proven track record, you’ll be in safe hands as we formulate and manage your SEO campaign, tailored to enhance your online visibility and boost your sales.

Why not talk to us today to find out how we can help grow your business?