If a genie granted you one wish for your website, what would it be?
(Besides asking for another 3 wishes, of course)
For me, it would be to show up , right on top in Google’s search results, for the right keywords.
Keywords that are related to my niche, that my intended visitors would be interested in.
To me, that’s what SEO means – help my customers find me!
Simple?
Optimizing your site for the search engine though, is anything but simple.
While no tool can fully take away the actual effort of identifying the right keywords and putting together the content for you, there are a whole bunch of SEO plugins for WordPress websites, that can assist you.
You still need to do all the thinking and planning yourself, don’t expect the SEO plugin to do that for you.
What should you look for while choosing a WordPress SEO plugin?
Here are some basic features you should expect from a good SEO plugin –
- Create a sitemap, while allowing you to include or exclude certain elements (pages, posts, categories etc.)
- Allow you to add meta titles, meta descriptions
- Recommend changes to meta data and content based on your focus keyword
- Evaluate readability and suggest changes
- Integrate with Google Analytics
So here’s a list of some of the most popular SEO plugins in WordPress, that include all of these essential SEO features.
RankMath free WP SEO plugin
Free 800,000+ active installations Average 4.9 star rating across 2,922 reviews
I can’t help but start this list with RankMath, a free WordPress SEO plugin.
If you haven’t heard about it, it is high time you check it out.
When RankMath was launched in November 2018, Yoast’s SEO plugin already had a huge, well-established fan following with over 5 million active websites and a nearly 8-year head start. Despite that, RankMath has had a phenomenal rise in popularity within a relatively short time.
It is easy to see why.
Did you know you can migrate from Yoast to RankMath with a single click and import all your SEO settings?
Migrate from Yoast to RankMath
I installed RankMath on this website to check it out and take it for a spin (to help me write this review) and planned to uninstall it when done.
I had already installed Yoast on this website – with my meta descriptions, FAQ blocks etc. all set up within Yoast, so naturally, I was a little apprehensive about migrating to RankMath, another completely different SEO plugin.
However, the ease of set up in RankMath, with a clear step by step walk through of the options (which included a single-click option to migrate from Yoast to RankMath) was very impressive.
Now I plan to continue using RankMath.
You can migrate all your Yoast plugin settings (meta descriptions, meta titles, FAQ blocks) to RankMath automatically using RankMath’s single click import feature.
Rank Math Analytics Dashboard
You can connect your RankMath installation to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account, so that you can view all your analytics data in your WordPress Admin Dashboard. Some of the options related to keyword data, need you to upgrade RankMath from free to pro.
Site Kit by Google, shows you some of this data. But the Pro RankMath plugin aggregates the same data points and represents the data in a way that can help you make sense of it easily. You can slice and dice the data, via different dimensions to help you understand it.
RankMath Vs Yoast Vs All in One SEO
There are a bunch of WordPress plugins for SEO, but clearly the three most popular SEO plugins are
- Yoast (most active installations)
- All in One SEO (oldest)
- RankMath (youngest of these 3, but definitely the fastest growing)
| Features | RankMath | Yoast SEO | AIO SEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans & Pricing | $59 a year (500 keywords tracking) $199 a year (10,000 keywords tracking) | Starts from $89 a year for one site with the price increasing based on the number of sites. Goes on up tp $6,675 for 150 sites. | $49 a year for 1 site, $299 for 100 sites |
| Free Version | Active installations:800,000+ Average rating of 4.9 star across 3,031 reviews https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/ | Active installations: 5 million+ Average rating of 4.8 star across 27,343 reviews https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/ | Active installations: 2 million+ Average rating of 4.5 star across 1,585 reviews https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ |
| Keyword Rank Checker Track position history of the last 12 months | Pro | No | No |
| Nofollow All External Links You can choose to make individual links follow wherever needed | Free | No | No |
| Keyword Suggestions | Free – Google Suggestions & Google Trends | Free & Premium You can integrate it with your SEMRush Pro account | No |
| Internal Linking Suggestions | Free | Pro | No |
In Conclusion
RankMath’s ease of use, it’s features and it’s support are absolutely stellar. This website now uses the free version of RankMath and I haven’t felt the need to upgrade to the Premium yet.
RankMath helps you to make sure your content is aligned with your focus keyword (or the other way round), even checking the alt text for your images to make sure the focus keyword is used.
P.S. This is not a paid review for RankMath. This post does contain affiliate links though that earn us a commission should you purchase using these links (at no additional cost to you).