Best WordPress SEO Tools for 2020

With more than 50 million websites to date, WordPress is undoubtedly the biggest site builder and blogging platform in the industry. Thus, it is critical for companies to be very careful about choosing the best SEO tools for their WordPress Site.

Remember, whether you’re a newbie or an industry expert, you will need these SEO tools if you want the best ranking for your company on search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

So here are the best SEO tools for WordPress websites:

Plugin (click to learn more)	rating	Price	Link
Yoast SEO		Freemium	LEARN MORE
Google Search Console		Free	LEARN MORE
Ahrefs		$99/month	LEARN MORE
SEMRush		$99.95/month	LEARN MORE
SEO Press		Freemium	LEARN MORE
Schema Pro		$79/year	LEARN MORE
Grammarly		Freemium	LEARN MORE
W3 Total Cache		Freemium	LEARN MORE
Broken Link Checker		Freemium	LEARN MORE
All in One SEO Plug-in		Freemium	LEARN MORE

Yoast SEO

This plugin is one of the most popular WordPress SEO tools in the library.

It has over 4.5 million downloads, along with an average of 4.7 stars over a 5-star rating scheme. Developed by Joost de Valk, Yoast SEO is touted as one of the best plugins so it is not surprising that is used by popular sites such as the online magazine called Mashable.

There are a free version and a premium version with more features that you have to pay annually to enjoy access to Yoast SEO Premium.

One of the great things about Yoast is that it has an option to make your site more social media-friendly because you can easily integrate the Facebook open graph and Twitter metadata.

It also comes with on-page SEO data analytics powered by Linkdex.

Furthermore, Yoast provides custom boxes for your keywords and meta description, as it automatically checks the keyword density in your post.

A hint will also be given where you can best position this keyword. It also goes the extra mile by checking if the keyword/s are present in the title, and URL. After analyzing both your inbound and outbound links, Yoast will give you a rating on how effective this is based on a 100% score.

Yoast also comes with a built-in Flesch Reading Ease scale, so you can double-check if your post is reader-friendly or not.

This is a unique element that truly gives you the power to optimize your content so you can catch the attention of more readers.

Apart from this, the Yoast SEO tool has a host of advanced options like noindex tags, breadcrumbs, sitemaps, canonical tags, Google authorship verification, RSS optimization, and more to help you customize your site.

To Learn more about Yoast SEO and how to set it up on your site view our Yoast SEO beginners guide.

Google Search Console

A tool such as the Google Search Console makes it possible for you to find out about your website’s current standings.

On top of that, this tool also helps in the improvement of your site’s appearance on the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages, which helps your site stand out from the rest of the pack. On top of that, this informs you how users interact with the data from your site, which can help you plan your content.

Industry oldies may remember this with its former name called the Google Webmaster Tools. It has been rebranded to Google Search Console, which is a free service that will enable you to track your SERP standing in Google’s index.

It will also help you to monitor your website errors, uncovering code markup errors, resolving these errors, integrating your application with your website, and more.

By verifying your site with the Google Search Console, you improve your site’s search appearance data, submit a sitemap and see other relevant information about your website’s performance in Google.

You will also be able to access structured data testing and make the necessary improvements to the HTML of your site. This will even allow you to double-check backlinks and optimize your internal links.

This doesn’t just improve website rankings but it boosts overall website performance which makes it a great SEO tool.

Ahrefs

Dubbed as the profession grade SEO tool, Ahrefs is another well-known tool among industry insiders.

It is not the most downloaded, but it is well-loved by many professionals. It is not the go-to tool for newbies because everything must be paid for. Even the trial isn’t for free, and it costs a discounted trial price of $7 for seven days.

There are four different plans billed monthly with lite at $99, standard at $179, advanced at $399, and agency at $999. All of these come with corresponding discounts if paid annually. Each plan has its own features, with more perks as the price goes higher.

Ahrefs is known for being exceptionally site-specific, for its internet-wide crawling capabilities, and for its extensive backlink indexing. This tool provides a solid ad-hoc keyword search function so you can truly optimize the site. It also comes with comprehensive domain monitoring and comparison, covering all the primary SEO bases.

Complaints against Ahrefs are limited SEO reporting, bare-bones UX, and no built-in keyword organization function but we use Ahrefs at wpseoexperts.com as one of our main tools.

SEMRush

This is another popular SEO tool that is a web-based version produced by SEO Quake.

This is not a WordPress plugin but a complete SEO suite that is easy to work with even for newbies. Industry experts will also find satisfaction with its more complex and advanced offerings. SEMRush has so many great features that will allow you to perform all your SEO work within one organized place.

SEMRush will help you from your keyword research phase to optimization. It will also help you track your keyword ranking, so you will always be abreast of how your post stands in relation to the market. This tool has been crafted to help you spot SEO issues that prevent and deter the organic growth of your site.

The SEMRush SEO tool will also help you identify the keywords which are boosting traffic to a competitor’s site. This helps you get a glimpse of what keywords are working for your niche.

The only caveat is that it is not for free. There is a 14-day free trial offer so you can test out how this tool will work for you before you commit to their plans. They have four plans with various features, charge monthly ranging from Pro at $99, Guru at $199, Business at $399, and Enterprise with the price given after an inquiry.

SEO Press

This is another great plugin for those that want to boost their online visibility. Some say that this industry newbie is a great alternative to Yoast. It has all the same fundamental elements of Yoast that organize the SEO tools into a series of menus within just one plugin. This was produced by Benjamin Denis, who is the same developer for WP Cloudy and WP Admin UI.

This SEO Press comes in a free and a pro version. The free is already fairly comprehensive with all the tools you need to climb up the rank.s The latter, of course, is paid for costing $39 per year, which is around fifty dollars cheaper than the Yoast SEO Premium tool.

The SEO Pro version offers a lot of value as it comes with more features that are not available with the free basic plugin.

SEO Press is slowly gaining momentum as many say that it will not slow down your website like Yoast. Everything is already included in the Pro version, with no more add-ons that you have to spend on. It has a lot of inclusions such as Google Analytics, Knowledge Graph, and Google Local Business.

Most of all, it can be installed on an unlimited number of websites. It is actually not surprising why a lot of people are beginning to make a big shift.

If you are looking for a tool that supports custom type posts, then SEO Press is for you. This tool also integrates with WooCommerce Integration, Google XML Video Sitemap, Google Structured Data Types, and Whitelabel WOW. It also comes with email support and its own forums in case you need any help. 

Schema Pro

Schema Pro is a highly recommended plugin for on-page SEO as it will help search engines understand more about the content of your site.

This is a rich-snippet plugin that will aid your site in being more visible to search engines, helping search engines index your site, and allowing them to display your content in a better way. Those star ratings you often see when you search for something is due to this.

By installing this user-friendly schema markup (also called structured data) plugin to show rich snippets, you stand to gain better CTR and traffic. Schema Pro is dubbed as the most updated rich snippet plugin for WordPress. This tool is compatible with Yoast SEO and they can be used together.

Schema Pro supports the following schema types, which are visible in the Schema set up:

• article
• book
• course
• event
• job posting
• local business
• review
• person
• product
• recipe
• service
• software application
• video object

This tool is easy to configure and use for a new or existing site, as well as, aid you in acquiring the Knowledge Graph for your site in Google search.

Grammarly

Grammar Nazis love Grammarly because it is is a grammar checker that has been touted to make your writing a lot easier and a whole lot better.

This tool is really very helpful when it comes to spotting those grammar and proofreading mistakes in your posts that can make you look incompetent. After all, an article that is peppered with spelling errors and grammar issues is just a huge turn-off.

On top of that, Grammarly is also a plagiarism detector because it compares your work to billions of sites out there.

Since it can also set the tone of your writing style, it is a perfect fit for bloggers, students, corporate professionals, academicians, and more. It can be easily set to your English preference such as American, Australian, UK, or Canadian English.

Grammarly comes with a free, premium, and business version that will suit anyone’s needs.

W3 Total Cache

This popular caching plugin has the power to speed up your site.

As a WordPress site owner, you must understand that speed is a crucial factor used by search engines to determine your company’s search ranking. The slower your site, the poorer your ranking will be.

In a shared hosting environment, there is a tendency for your site performance to go down. With this W3 Total Cache, your site is able to store versions of your pages in the cache. This means that when your target audience visits your site, they will be given the cache version. This eliminates the time-wasting and data consuming process of running scripts.  Thus, your site loads at a faster rate and your server become even more responsive.

The best part about this W3 Total Cache is that it lets you compress your site data in just one small click. This tool can also be used for CDNs or content delivery networks, which allows your site to serve your static content, allowing users to view them faster such as CSS, images, and the like.

The W3 Total Cache is free, and it also comes in a premium version called WP Super Cache for a $99 yearly fee.

Broken Link Checker

This is a very simple yet very powerful plugin that is essential for any WordPress site because it continuously scans your entire site for broken links. Minimize 404 hits or error page visits for your audience with this Broken Link Checker. Its name truly spells out what it can do.

This plugin comes with an easy to use dashboard where you can seamlessly do all the work to fix those broken links. It will help you find and fix all your internal and external 404s or broken links. Remember, 404 links are dread dead ends for search engine spiders that push your rankings down. And nothing is more frustrating for any reader than to be led to a site with no content.

With this plugin, you can easily remove or fix these links, thereby avoiding turning off your clients. The best part, this plugin is free, and what could be better than that?

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin’s name speaks for itself. It is indeed an all in one SEO pack, which is why it’s famous all over the world. Bloggers, online corporations, e-commerce sites, magazines, and more use this.

Currently, this plugin has been downloaded over 14 million times on the WordPress library.

All in One SEO was developed by Michael Torbert, who is an industry marketing specialist and an entrepreneur. There is a free and pro version of this plugin, the latter being an add on. The pro version has a lot more features than the free one, as expected, such as premium support and installation.

This is a very easy-to-use plugin because even newbies and those old bloggers who don’t bother to perform any on-page optimization will find this tool most useful. It can automatically generate meta description for you, making your content so much easier to find and understand.

In addition to that, All in One SEO can also produce meta keywords for your blog posts. It will automatically optimize your blog post titles by relying on best practices to ensure that your site performs at its best.

Furthermore, this SEO tool can also manage to add alternate tags to all your images that you have placed within any of your posts. This is very critical because this implies that search bots can now understand all the graphics in your site because they will see the text-based explanation that has been provided for by All in One SEO.

Some vouch that this is the only SEO plugin that offers extended support for e-commerce websites. With its advanced algorithms, this tool can readily check for any duplicate content to prevent your site from receiving the panda penalty. This is a great tool for both new and pro users of WordPress.

Bottom Line

There are many other SEO tools in the WordPress library, which can help with your site customization and optimization.

There are also plugins that boost security to ensure that your site remains safe from hackers. It is important for all site owners to remember that your content may be great, but if no one can get to see it then this content is just wasted.

In order to become more visible on the world wide web, you will have to use SEO tools to target a large audience base.