What you should know about using SEO plugins

So, what should you know about using SEO plugins in WordPress? Short answer: they don’t really affect your SEO – that’s on you, but they provide tools to improve your own optimization efforts. You don’t need to use them but they can be helpful!

If you manage a website that doesn’t seem to get too much traction in organic search results, you may want to consider using SEO plugins. Learn more about them below:

Advantages to using SEO plugins

• Can connect to analytic accounts to retrieve traffic reporting data directly in your WordPress dashboard
• Get real-time recommendations to improve your on-page content based on your selected focus keyword
• Set the meta title and description for your page or post
• Access to manual redirection or auto post redirects
• Additional features that help integrate customizations

Use the tool after you have completed your keyword research, written your copy, and then apply your focus keyword. Use the recommendations provided to see if you missed something or if there is any room for improvement.

Disadvantages to using SEO plugins

• Forcing a green light or 100% score can cause more harm than good
• Implementing just enough to pass recommendations can offer a false sense of optimization
• Often contain bloated features and may use additional resources depending on your configuration

If you assume that the tool is working some magic and you aren’t doing any kind of content strategy yourself, you may be disappointed with your results.

If page and site speed is an issue to you, note that these plugins will have added scripts depending on the connections you integrate.

Applying your focus keyword

Once you have selected your focus keyword and written your copy, there are some popular WordPress plugins you can utilize to get suggestions on how to improve your content for these terms.

After configuring these tools, you’ll see a new column or row on your Edit Post or Edit Page screens in WordPress. This area features a scoring or rating system and recommendations on how to improve said score.

Enter your focus keyword first, this informs the tool what search term you’re actively trying to target and allows it to then say, “okay, well if that’s the case, try these steps to improve the strength of this keyword on your page.” (Regrettably, they don’t actually talk back to us conversationally like this, yet.)

The type of recommendations you see here will help guide how you put your content together:

• Is the focus keyword included in the URL?
• Is the focus keyword included in the meta title and description?
• Is the focus keyword included in the page title/H1 tag?
• Is the focus keyword included in the first or second paragraph of the copy?
• Is the focus keyword included in a secondary heading tag?
• Is the focus keyword included in an image alt tag?
• How many words of copy are there on the page?
• How many times is your focus keyword included?
• What is the readability of your page like?

It’s important to remember not to take all of these recommendations literally in every scenario. You don’t want to make changes just to get a green light or a 100 score in a SEO plugin. 

Nothing about these plugins are going to guarantee you a top rank in SERP, their purpose is to run an analysis (based on the focus keywords you implement) to offer general recommendations. 

The SEO plugin score 

Let’s use my highest performing blog post as an example of what I mean when I suggest you don’t need to implement absolutely all of the recommendations made by your SEO plugin.

The screenshot above was taken from my Posts page with the Rank Math* plugin installed. It reports a yellow score of 80/100 while most of my posts rank green in the high 80s or 90s. Yet…

I don’t actually want to make any further changes to the post to improve its score because it doesn’t make sense to. Either because of my own choices or for the benefit to the human being reading my content, the pending recommendations aren’t helpful in this particular post’s case.

The Basic SEO recommendations menu tells me that I’m not getting as high of a score on the post due to the exact focus keyword not being used in the URL.

It also shows a lower score applied to the length of my copy, coming in at 935 words.

Here’s why I don’t care about these points for the post:

1. The post was originally published in 2016 and the URL has never changed. When an altered focus keyword was determined in 2024, I opted not to change the URL due to the amount of backlinks this article already had and for how similar the URLs still were.
2. The post is a tutorial article, so beyond the actual accompanying screenshots and step-by-step instructions, I didn’t want to muddy the content with much more.

The Additional recommendations menu tells me that my URL is too long and that I’m not using the tool’s built-in AI option to optimize the post.

1. Again, the URL has existed since 2016, its 78 characters have been performing well. Although I would note, I would normally try to follow this rule of thumb as long titles and URLs are frustrating.
2. The fact that it appears I’m getting a negative score for NOT utilizing an AI add-on feature makes me want to ignore this particular score altogether, tbh.

The Title Readability menu recommends including power words, positive or negative sentiment words, or a number but sometimes that just doesn’t work.

As a tutorial, the title I am already using – a “how-to” is the search intent I want to be discovered with, and it can be very powerful. My post offers a solution to a problem that visitors have and are actively searching the answer for.

P.S. If I earned 1 more point somewhere along the way, a score of 81/100 lights everything up in green. And since it is my most popular page in terms of site traffic, I’d say it’s a pretty good example of showing how a SEO plugin is meant to be used as a guideline and not a be all and end all.

Custom Meta Data

WordPress SEO plugins can also give you the ability to change your Meta Titles and Descriptions.

What are meta titles and meta descriptions?

Meta titles display as the headline and meta descriptions display as the summary of what your page is about in search engine results.

These titles and descriptions have character limits so you need to be strategic about what you choose to include in both of these fields.

Including your focus keyword in each of these fields can have a positive impact for your SEO.

Tip: You may not require an additional SEO plugin to edit your meta data. Some WordPress theme frameworks have these tools built-in, so be sure to double check so you aren’t doubling up on functionality. Read How to choose what WordPress plugins to use for more recommendations!

SEO Reporting

One of the biggest bits of confusion new users have is thinking that the traffic reporting data that SEO plugins display are from the SEO plugin itself. This isn’t the case.

SEO plugins require a third-party account connection, such as Google Search Console, in order to send data to your WordPress Admin area.

I have my licensed version of Rank Math* connected to my Google Search Console account which is where all the data is being sourced from. Instead of visiting my GSC profile to view this data, the SEO plugin refreshes the data every couple of days for me to view directly in WordPress.

Tip: If you don’t have Google Analytics or Search Console profiles set-up for tracking data about your website, follow my tutorial How to set-up Google Analytics and Search Console!

Tracking 404s and Redirections

This is another feature that you may already have implementations for, in fact many plugins are made solely for tracking 404 errors and redirections. If not however, this could be beneficial if you change your permalinks or remove old posts from your website often.

Some SEO plugins give you the option to turn on 404 error monitoring which records the URLs that visitors or search engines run into when a page can’t be found.

These also offer a tool to redirect non-existent content to other URLs and some will make automatic redirects when you edit your existing permalinks.

Taking care of server issues like this can help improve your site ranking. In Google Search Console there is also an area to monitor pages caught by their engines.

Sitemaps

SEO plugins can generate a sitemap file of all the posts and pages on your website which helps search engines crawl your website’s content. This sitemap XML link can also be entered into your Google Search Console profile to request indexing.

While this is an easy to use feature, WordPress does offer sitemaps out of the box, if you’re using a recent version (which you should be for security reasons!) Typically, you can use yourdomain.com/wp-sitemap.xml to see your sitemap.

Tip: You can find various ways to create and submit website sitemaps with this tutorial.

Additional Features

In addition to providing content recommendations, meta data editing, reporting and tracking features, SEO plugins come with many more bells and whistles.

Some may seem neat but aren’t worth the added bloat to your site, while some you may use often!

SEO plugins may offer some of these additional features:

• Content AI
• Integrations with third-party tools like ACF, BuddyPress, Google Web Stories, or WooCommerce
• AMP plugin
• Image SEO
• Podcast discoverability
• Schema (structured data)
• Role managers (user permissions)

What you should know about using SEO plugins

SEO plugins are like having an assistant that can guide and remind you of the steps you need to take to pursue your search engine optimization efforts.

But remember that appeasing these SEO plugins to get green lights or 100% scores should not compromise your writing, formatting, readability, or other facets of your efforts. Use them as a guideline or learning tool.

Questions? Hire a website coach to support you!

Lean on the experience of a professional web designer and developer to support you with optimizing your website!

I’ve been building and managing websites professionally for over fifteen years and have experience with project management, search engine optimization, copywriting, and content strategy.