Are you looking for the best on-page SEO tools for WordPress?
On-page SEO is key for a successful content strategy. That’s because it takes the guesswork out of content creation and it maximizes your revenue.
In this article, we're going to share our picks for on-page SEO tools that’ll help you dethrone competitors as your content climbs the search engine rankings.
In This Article
What are On-Page SEO Tools?
On-page SEO tools are software products that analyze your content and provide recommendations to help it rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages).
The best tools make hard SEO tasks as easy as clicking a button. And they can help you plan and write content that gets more conversions.
In this article, we're going to focus on WordPress plugins but we’ll include a few online tools too.
The Best On-Page SEO Tools for WordPress: Tested and Compared
To help you whittle down the options, here's our curated list of quality on-page SEO tools.
1. AIOSEO (All in One SEO): Complete On-Page SEO Tool
This SEO plugin has become a favorite of small businesses and bloggers because it makes SEO tasks easy. It's racked up thousands of 5-star reviews on WordPress.org, and over 3 million people are currently using it.
AIOSEO shines when it comes to on-page SEO thanks to its simple interface and clear instructions.
It's easy to optimize on-page SEO basics, like title tags, meta descriptions, and focus keywords. And it shows you exactly what to do to optimize individual pages.
The plugin also analyzes your use of image alt tags and focus keyphrases and makes recommendations for improvements. (A focus keyphrase is the main keyword or topic that your article is about.)
You can see the plugin's recommendations at the bottom of any WordPress page or post or in the right-hand sidebar menu.
One of our favorite features is the Link Assistant. Link building is one of the most powerful SEO tactics, but it can be time-consuming and complicated.
Link Assistant shows you which pages on your site need more internal links. And it finds recommended articles to link from. It even selects a specific passage and anchor text to link on. All you have to do is click a button to add a link.
AIOSEO automatically generates XML sitemaps and provides HTML, RSS, and Google News sitemaps. The Pro version includes video sitemaps.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is a good choice for small businesses and bloggers who want a tool that's easy to use and can get pro results.
Features:
- Numerical SEO page score
- Headline Analyzer
- Local SEO for small businesses
- Click-button redirects
- Easy connection to webmaster tools
- SEO Analysis (site audit)
- Click-to-add Schema markup for rich snippets
- ChatGPT and Google Search Console integration
- SEO revisions
AIOSEO Pricing: Starts at $49.60 per year, free version available on WordPress.org.
Good to know: All in One SEO just launched a unique SEO revisions feature. This enables you to see the impact of your edits on your search engine rankings.
Using headless WordPress? All in One SEO includes an integration with the WordPress REST API to make SEO management easy.
2. MonsterInsights: Find Out What's Working
MonsterInsights takes the guesswork out of analysis by showing you how your SEO actions are impacting your website results.
This plugin connects to Google Analytics and provides simple displays of your website's most important data, including:
- Revenue trends
- Which pages, forms, or pop-ups are converting the most people
- Average order value and top-selling products
MonsterInsights is a good complementary tool for SEO plugins like AIOSEO. Once you know what's working, you can do more of it.
Features:
- Simple user interface
- Ecommerce tracking
- Track popularity of content, authors, tags, and categories
- Integrates with top plugins like WPForms, WooCommerce, and EasyDigitalDownloads
MonsterInsights Pricing: Starts at $99.50 per year. There is a free version available.
3. Ahrefs: Plan Content that Ranks
Ahrefs is an online tool designed to help you improve your search engine rankings.
It’s loaded with features to support smart content and outreach planning. These include a keyword research tool, referring domains data, and backlinks analysis. (Backlinks, or links from other sites to yours, are a significant ranking factor. They’re sometimes referred to as “off-page SEO.”)
You can pop an article URL into Ahrefs to see what organic keywords it’s ranking for. And you can discover which keywords your competitors are ranking for too.
Popular with marketing professionals, Ahrefs may also appeal to intermediate-level users looking for a keyword research tool to plan their content with.
Note: Ahrefs also has a free WordPress plugin designed to display SEO performance of your content and recommend content updates.
Features:
- SEO audit for content
- Monitor backlinks
- Traffic and page rank for each article
Ahrefs Pricing: Starts at $99/month. The WordPress plugin is free.
4. WP Rocket: Speed Up Your Site
Did you know that optimizing your site speed is a form of SEO?
Search engines reward good user experience and penalize poor user experience. So it’s not surprising that website loading time is a ranking factor.
This is where a caching plugin like WP Rocket comes in: you can speed up your site in minutes.
Tip: Check your site's loading time, before and after WPRocket, in Google's PageSpeed Insights.
Anyone who cares about increasing their traffic and conversions should make sure their site's loading as fast as possible.
Features:
- Page caching, browser caching, and pre-loading
- Minifies and combines CSS and JavaScript files
- File compression plus lazy loading of images
WPRocket Pricing: Starts at $59/year.
5. SmashBalloon: Optimize Your Social Media Feeds
This is a beginner-friendly plugin that adds social media feeds to your WordPress website, the right way. The problem with social media feeds is they usually bog your site down.
SmashBalloon stands out because it optimizes all those ultra high-definition images in your feeds so they load fast. It also minimizes something called “external requests” and that speeds things up too. (To display a social feed, your website sends “requests” to that social media site.)
SmashBalloon is fast and easy to use.
Features:
- Boost SEO and CTR (click-through rates) with embedded social content
- Display multiple feeds
- Increase conversions with social media testimonials
SmashBalloon Pricing: Starts at $49/year per plugin.
6. Semrush: Gain Competitive Advantage
Semrush is a standalone analysis tool for conducting keyword research and running site audits.
It's similar to Ahrefs, and both are highly rated and widely used by content marketing professionals.
Both tools will show you the keyword difficulty and search volume for a term. And you can use either tool to find long-tail, low-volume search terms that can help you win traffic that converts.
Like Ahrefs, Semrush has a free WordPress plugin, but it's very different. The Semrush plugin is a “writing assistant” that makes suggestions for improving articles.
The Semrush plugin is free. Full access to the online Semrush platform starts at $99.95/month.
Not a professional marketer? Don't need a year's worth of Semrush? You can cancel at any time.
Note: AIOSEO includes an integration with Semrush, to display related keywords for any given article.
Features
- Site audit
- Keyword recommendations
- SEO content templates
Semrush Pricing: Starts at $129.95/month
7. Google Search Console: Performance Insights
Google Search Console is an auxiliary tool that supports your SEO strategy.
When launching a new website, one of the first actions you'll take is to submit the sitemap to Google. And this is where you do that.
Sitemap submission helps Google's crawlers know when you publish new content or modify existing content.
You can also inspect any URL on your site. Add it to the field at the top of Google Search Console to see if the page is indexed. You can click a button to request indexing.
More importantly, GSC shows you how your content's been performing in search results. Specifically, the Search Console Insights page provides
- Total clicks for the month
- Your most popular posts
- Which pages grew the most in traffic
Insights also shows which search queries are responsible for the most click-throughs to your site.
Note that All in One SEO (AIOSEO) includes an integration with Google Search Console. So you can get this data right inside the WordPress dashboard.
This feature is available in the Elite version of the AIOSEO, which costs $299.60/year (the equivalent of $24.96/month).
So who is Google Search Console (GSC) for? Every site owner should have a GSC account. It’s indispensable for sitemap submission and site monitoring.
Its search performance metrics are valuable, and if you prefer to get these in WordPress, consider All in One SEO.
Features:
- Alerts for sitemap errors or manual penalties.
- Click and search term metrics.
- Insights into content performance.
Google Search Console Pricing: Free
Also Explore
Below we've listed some well-regarded on-page SEO tools that you may also want to explore.
Yoast SEO: Well-Known, Could be Simpler
Yoast SEO is a well-known, all-purpose SEO plugin. It provides the standard on-page SEO tips for title tag and meta description length, as well as keyword (focus keyphrase) usage.
The interface seems a bit cramped compared to AIOSEO's. And you'll need to upgrade to Yoast's Premium plugin to get recommendations on how to use your focus keyphrase to optimize your content for SEO.
Some may find Yoast's product pricing page to be confusing: there are 11 different SEO plugins to choose from.
But this is a comprehensive SEO plugin with a strong track record. It will appeal to small businesses or bloggers interested in ease-of-use and results.
Features:
- Emoji-based SEO score
- Semrush integration to find related keywords
- Schema markup for rich snippets
Yoast SEO Pricing: Starts at $99/year.
Rank Math: Versatile, but Skip the ‘Content AI’
Like AIOSEO, Rank Math provides snippet previews for your content and meta-tag analysis. But the display of title tags seems a bit nerdy to us: it includes bits of code called Regex. Beginners may wonder, “What do I do with this?”
Rank Math's setup wizard is simpler than Yoast SEO's but not as simple as AIOSEO's.
A unique feature of Rank Math is its “Content AI” tool, which provides recommendations to help your content rank higher. We tried it out on two articles: one that currently ranks in the #1 slot on Google for its keyword and one that currently ranks in the #2 slot for its keyword.
Rank Math's Content AI gave both articles a failing grade.
We think Rank Math is a unique and versatile SEO plugin, but the Content AI tool needs work.
This plugin is a good fit for those who know Regex or aren't afraid to learn how to use it. (It's not hard.) Like All in One SEO (AIOSEO) and Yoast SEO, Rank Math is suitable for small businesses and bloggers.
Features:
- On-page SEO recommendations
- Schema markup tool
- Content AI
Rank Math Pricing: Starts at $59/year.
Clearscope: Create Content that Outranks Competitors
Clearscope helps you plan and create high-quality content that gets more traffic.
You start by adding a target keyword to Clearscope, which runs a report on it. (New to keyword research? Check out this guide for beginners.)
Using your keyword, Clearscope sifts through real-time Google data to provide clues to searcher intent. This is how the Clearscope report helps you create an article that is better organized, more helpful, and more comprehensive than your competitors'.
As with all digital tools, you need to use your judgment when it comes to assessing the page content recommendations and deciding what to do with them.
The need to use your judgment is highlighted by Clearscope's occasional inclusion of recommended “terms” (subtopics) pulled from the comments sections of ranking articles or from alternate videos on YouTube pages.
Clearscope has a WordPress plugin, so you can get these content recommendations right in your WordPress editor. Realize though that you'll need a Clearscope account for the WordPress plugin to work.
We think this tool is a good fit for professional content teams that need to scale.
Features:
- Displays searcher questions related to a keyword
- Reveals themes present in top-ranking content on a given topic
- Content grading (up to “A++”)
Clearscope Pricing: Starts at $170/month.
MarketMuse: Intelligent Content Planning
MarketMuse is AI-based software for planning and creating content that ranks. It's also effective for building topical authority.
Add a keyword to MarketMuse and it will pull data from related search results into a report that you can use to guide content creation.
And just as with Clearscope, you need to use your judgment when assessing any AI-based recommendations.
As you may have guessed, Clearscope and MarketMuse are competitors.
However, MarketMuse has a unique advantage in that it analyzes your entire site and assigns topic authority and competitive advantage scores to your pages. As you do keyword research, you'll see what your current topical authority is for that term.
This helps you prioritize which content to create. And it supports a pillar and topic cluster strategy.
MarketMuse is a good choice for content teams that need to scale. However, solopreneurs and bloggers can benefit from the free tier.
Features:
- Competitive content analysis
- Keyword research that supports topical authority strategies
- Keyword difficulty score based on your existing content
- ChatGPT integration
MarketMuse Pricing: Starts at $149/month for 1 user. Free version supports 1 user, 10 queries/month, limited page-level insights.
ScreamingFrog SEO Spider: Pro-Level Diagnostics
ScreamingFrog is a site audit tool for intermediate-level or advanced webmasters and do-it-yourselfers. It's a website crawler (or “spider”) that analyzes your site’s URLs to find SEO issues that could affect user experience or ranking.
It provides dozens of metrics including
- A complete list of internal and external links on your site
- Identification of broken links and security issues
- Duplicate content, including in title tags or meta descriptions.
This tool integrates with Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Google Search Console to deliver in-depth analysis of page-level performance issues.
Website designers and professional marketers use this tool to analyze site structure. And it's often used by website project managers when migrating a site to a new platform.
Features:
- Site architecture visualization
- Hreflang attribute auditing
- Structured data validation
- Integration with Ahrefs, Majestic, and Moz
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Pricing: Starts at free.
What's the Best On-Page SEO Tool for WordPress?
For simplicity and power, we think it's hard to beat the AIOSEO plugin. It has everything you need for on-page SEO and provides more sitemap types than Yoast SEO or RankMath.
Unlike Yoast, it provides focus keyphrase recommendations without requiring users to upgrade to a pricier plugin. And unlike RankMath, the setup wizard is a breeze with its minimal steps.
We think that MonsterInsights is a must-have for easy measurement.
You may have heard that SEO professionals are now charging as much as 5 or 6 figures a year per client. So these 2 tools can save you money.
What Do We Use?
We use AIOSEO and MonsterInsights for on-page SEO coupled with WPForms and OptinMonster for conversions.
These 4 WordPress plugins have the benefit of being beginner-friendly but powerful enough to deliver results for pros. They're a good fit for DIY site owners including small businesses, affiliate marketers, agencies, or bloggers.
These tools have helped us to consistently grow our traffic and revenue, month after month.
We think you deserve the same success too.
Lastly, because we need to scale across multiple content teams while maintaining quality and competitive advantage, we also use Semrush, Ahrefs, and Clearscope.
Ultimately, you'll decide what works best for you in the context of your work. “Best” often really means “recommended.” The on-page SEO tools we’ve discussed are world class. And “best” is often subjective.
FAQs Related to On-Page SEO Tools
What’s the difference between technical SEO and SEO?
The term “technical SEO” is used by writers to refer to an aspect of SEO that they think requires specialized knowledge. It's a subjective term, similar to “advanced SEO.” By contrast, “SEO” refers to the entire field of search engine optimization. As such, discussion of SEO may include material suited to beginners, intermediate-level learners, or digital marketing professionals.
What's the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
“On-page SEO” refers to aspects of a web page that impact SEO and that you have control over. These elements include page loading speed, content quality, logical structure, title tag, meta description, image and video alt tags, Schema markup, and effective use of a targeted keyword.
“Off-page SEO” refers to backlinks (links from other websites to yours), which are a significant ranking factor, as well as non-linked guest posts and brand mentions on other sites.
What free SEO tools do you recommend?
The AIOSEO Analyzer is a free Chrome extension that you can use to speed up SEO checks. In addition, we recommend the free AIOSEO SEO Analyzer to conduct a full site audit.
Ahrefs has a free toolbar that is an on-page SEO checker. It provides SEO metrics for pages you visit, including keyword difficulty, search volume and SERP positions. You can also get an SEO report for any page. Intermediate and advanced site owners may be interested in the canonical URL check and the information on directives for crawlers found in HTTP headers and meta tags.
We also like SerpRobot’s free SERP checker. You can use it to find out the page ranking of an article.
I can't afford Clearscope. Can you recommend an alternative?
While content analysis tools like Clearscope are popular with teams that run more than one website, many site owners need to do more with less. We get it. Here's an alternative approach that we've tested and used to land top slots in Google and snag the featured snippet for our target keywords.
- Use long tail keywords: When choosing a keyword (main topic) to base an article on, use a long tail keyword. It’s much easier to rank for long tails because there’s less competition. Long tails also typically drive less traffic, but here’s the thing: because these keywords contain more information (i.e., they’re detailed phrases), they tend to drive a higher quality of traffic, which typically results in more conversions.
- Scout out the competition: Do a search in Chrome Incognito for your target keyword, to see what you're up against. Scan page 1 of search results. Note any hints of related questions searchers have or problems they're trying to solve. Consider addressing some of those issues in your article. That can make the article more useful to the readers.
- Focus on quality: Google’s algorithm rewards quality, so be sure to do your best. Take time to create an outline first. That will help you stay organized. Then write an article that’s more helpful or interesting to your reader than the top-ranking ones. (“More helpful” can include being easier to understand or more comprehensive than competing pages.) Review and revise your article a few times before publishing.
And don’t forget to check your on-page SEO.
Next Action Steps
A good SEO strategy includes on-page optimization, new content creation, and improving your existing content. Our list of the best SEO tools will help you achieve these goals.
We hope this post helped you understand what on-page SEO tools can do for you.
You may also want to check out our article on the best product review plugins and how to use WordPress FAQ blocks to snatch market share from your competitors.
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Thank you for the helpful information.
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