In this guide, we are going to share our top picks for on-page SEO tools that’ll help you dethrone competitors as your content climbs the search engine rankings.
What are On-Page SEO Tools?
On-page SEO tools are software products that analyze your website content and provide recommendations to help it rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
The best tools make hard SEO tasks as easy as clicking a button. And they can help you plan and write high quality content that gets more conversions.
In this blog post, we are going to focus on WordPress plugins but we would include a few online SEO tools too.
To help you whittle down the options, here’s our curated list of the best on-page SEO tools.
Yoast SEO
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 focus keyphrase usage.
You will need to upgrade to Yoast’s Premium SEO plugin to get recommendations on how to use your focus keyphrase to optimize your content for SEO.
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.
Yoast SEO Features:
- Schema markup for rich snippets
- Emoji-based SEO score
- Semrush integration to find related keywords
Yoast SEO Pricing: Starts at $99/year.
Rank Math
Like Yoast SEO, Rank Math provides snippet previews for your content and meta-tag analysis.
Rank Math’s setup wizard is simpler than Yoast SEO’s.
A unique feature of Rank Math is its “Content AI” tool, which provides recommendations to help your website content rank higher.
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. Like Yoast SEO, Rank Math is suitable for bloggers and small businesses.
Rank Math Features:
- Schema markup tool
- On-page SEO recommendations
- Content AI
Rank Math Pricing: Starts at $59/year
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an online tool designed to help you improve your search engine rankings.
Ahrefs Features:
- keyword research tool
- Technical SEO website audit
- Position tracking
- Content Explorer
- Backlinks analysis
Ahrefs Pricing: $99-$999 per month
Semrush
Semrush is a standalone analysis tool for conducting keyword research and running website audits.
It’s similar to Ahrefs, and both are highly rated and mostly used by content marketing professionals.
Both Ahrefs and Semrush will show you the keyword difficulty and search volume for a term. And you can use either Ahrefs or Semrush to find long-tail, low-volume search terms that can help you win website 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 blog posts.
The Semrush plugin is free. Full access to the online Semrush platform starts at $99.95/month.
Semrush Features:
- Website audit
- Keyword recommendations
- SEO content templates
Semrush Pricing: $119.95-$449.95 per month
WP Rocket
Did you know that optimizing your website speed is a form of On Page SEO?
Search engines like Google 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 website caching plugin like WP Rocket comes in: you can speed up your website in minutes.
Pro Tip: Check your website’s loading time, before and after WP Rocket, in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Anyone who cares about increasing their website traffic and conversions should make sure their website’s loading as fast as possible.
WP Rocket Features:
- Minifies and combines CSS and JavaScript files
- Browser caching, page caching, and pre-loading
- File compression plus lazy loading of images
WP Rocket Pricing: Starts at $59/year
MonsterInsights
This plugin takes the guesswork out of analysis by showing you how your SEO actions are impacting your website results.
MonsterInsights connects to Google Analytics and provides simple displays of your website’s most important data, including:
- Which pages, forms, or pop-ups are converting the most people
- Revenue trends
- Average order value and top-selling products
It is a good complementary tool for SEO plugins like Yoast. Once you know what’s working, you can do more of it.
MonsterInsights Features:
- Simple user interface
- Ecommerce tracking
- Track popularity of website content, tags, categories and authors
- Integrates with top plugins like EasyDigitalDownloads, WPForms, and WooCommerce
MonsterInsights Pricing
There is a free version available. Paid plan starts at $99.50 per year.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free online tool that supports your SEO strategies.
When launching a new website, one of the first actions you’ll take is to submit your sitemap to Google. And this is where you do that.
Sitemap submission helps Google’s crawlers know when you publish new website content or modify existing website content.
You can also inspect any URL on your website. Add it to the field at the top of Google Search Console to see if the web page is indexed. You can click a button to request indexing.
More importantly, Google Search Console shows you how your website content’s been performing in search results. Specifically, the Search Console Insights page provides
- Your most popular blog posts
- Total clicks for the month
- Which web pages grew the most in traffic
Search Console Insights also shows which search queries are responsible for the most click-throughs to your website.
So, who is Google Search Console for? Every website owner should have a Google Search Console account. It’s indispensable for sitemap submission and website monitoring.
Google Search Console Features:
- Click and search term metrics
- Alerts for sitemap errors or manual penalties
- Insights into content performance
Google Search Console Pricing: Free
SmashBalloon
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 website 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.
SmashBalloon is fast and easy to use.
SmashBalloon Features:
- Boost SEO and CTR with embedded social content
- Increase conversions with social media testimonials
- Display multiple feeds
SmashBalloon Pricing: Starts at $49/year per plugin.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a website audit tool for intermediate-level or advanced webmasters and do-it-yourselfers. It’s a website crawler that analyzes your website’s URLs to find SEO issues that could affect user experience or ranking.
Screaming Frog provides dozens of metrics including:
- Duplicate content, including in title tags or meta descriptions
- A complete list of internal and external links on your website
- Identification of broken links and security issues
This tool integrates with Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to deliver in-depth analysis of page-level performance issues.
Website designers and professional marketers use Screaming Frog to analyze website structure. And it’s often used by website project managers when migrating a website to a new platform.
Screaming Frog Features:
- Integration with Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs
- Website architecture visualization
- Structured data validation
- Hreflang attribute auditing
Screaming Frog Pricing: Starts at free.
Clearscope
Clearscope helps you plan and create useful content that gets more traffic.
You start by adding a target keyword to Clearscope, which runs a report on it.
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 a blog post that is better organized, more helpful, and more comprehensive than your competitors’.
We think this tool is a good fit for professional content teams that need to scale.
Clearscope Features:
- Reveals themes present in top-ranking content on a given topic
- Displays searcher questions related to a keyword
- Content grading (up to “A++”)
Clearscope Pricing: Starts at $170/month
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is AI-based software for planning and creating high quality 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.
MarketMuse is a good choice for content teams that need to scale. However, solopreneurs and bloggers can benefit from the free tier.
MarketMuse Features:
- Keyword difficulty score based on your existing website content
- Keyword research that supports topical authority strategies
- Competitive content analysis
- ChatGPT integration
MarketMuse Pricing: Starts at $149/month for 1 user. Free version supports 1 user, 10 queries/month, and limited page-level insights.