Why Is SEO So Important to Your Blog or Website? 

If you run a blog, a website, or any other site that is not SEO-friendly, you’re certainly missing lots of opportunities to generate traffic and increase conversions. Every successful content is known by its power to generate organic search traffic, and SEO is the best method of improving content performance.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means optimizing your web content to rank better in search engine result pages (SERPs), and it involves several steps, processes, and strategies. It is crucial if you want your site to rank higher in search engines, gain more visibility, and reach a broader audience. 

However, optimizing your WordPress site for search engines involves a series of steps that are not altogether easy, especially for a beginner to SEO. Luckily, there are several SEO WordPress plugins you can use to take your website to the next level, irrespective of your SEO knowledge. 

What Are WordPress Plugins?

WordPress plugins are tools that you can install on your WordPress site to improve its overall look, performance, efficiency, and functionality. They don’t need or require any coding knowledge at all. When used correctly, WordPress plugins can dramatically improve the UX of your site if used correctly.

There are several excellent WordPress plugins specially created to improve the SEO status of your site. However, it is vital to understand that all SEO WordPress plugins are not equal. Some plugins are better than others. One of such best SEO WordPress plugins is the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin.

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What is SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant Plugin?

SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant (SWA) plugin is one of the best on-page SEO WordPress plugins. It provides instant and real-time SEO recommendations for optimizing your content. These recommendations are based on the top 10 webpages’ qualities ranking high for your given keywords on Google in a given location. 

Site owners, bloggers, content professionals, and marketing experts can check in real-time if their text content (or text content of external writers) meet various SEO requirements with just a few clicks.

What Does SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant Plugin Do?

Here is SEMrush SWA plugin does: 

∎ It enables users to connect or register a free SEMrush account.

∎ It enables you to set your target keywords to get useful recommendations for your content.

∎ It enables you to choose a target location and device (desktop or mobile).

∎ It creates an SEO content template.

Explicitly, the SEMrush SWA plugin enables users to do the following:

∎ Check articles/text content overall score: with the SEMrush SWA plugin, users can check the general quality of an article calculated based on metrics, including target keywords, text length, and readability.

∎ Improve upon articles’ readability score: this plugin evaluates your text or article’s readability level based on the recommended Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease score and presents a readability score. Based on this readability score, you’ll receive recommendations for words or sentences that need improvement.

∎ Get information about the target keywords: the SEMrush SWA plugin gives the volume of the target keywords, their difficulty, and other useful recommendations.

∎ Get recommended keywords: based on the target keywords, the SEMrush SWA plugin recommends semantically-related keywords that you should also add to your article or text content.

∎ Check the one of voice: this plugin ensures that your writing is in-line and consistent with the desired level of formality.

∎ Check plagiarism: to avoid plagiarism and enhance originality, this plugin validates that you or your writer have written original content.

∎ Check links: since links (outbound, inbound, and internal) are essential to your SEO ranking, the SEMrush SWA plugin checks all links in your content for possible errors and problems.

Is SEMrush SWA Plugin Free?

The SEMrush SWA plugin is free to download and install in your WordPress blog or website, but you must register an account with SEMrush to use the plugin. The SEMrush account enables you to create an SEO content template. More so, if you want to enjoy the full functionalities of this plugin, you need to subscribe to either the Guru or Business Plan.

The free or Pro Plan allows you to analyze just a document and create only one recommendation based on the document for a lifetime. The Guru, Business, or Enterprise Plan (each plan has different keyword budgets) gives you access to the full power of the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin and SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit. Click here for a trial

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How Effective Is SEMrush SWA Plugin?

The SEMrush SWA plugin is very effective when used correctly and if all recommendations are followed judiciously.

Other SEO WordPress Plugins

Aside from the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin, there are many other powerful and effective SEO-friendly plugins that are easy to install and understand. These SEO WordPress plugins will improve your SEO ranking and generate more traffic to your site or blog.

Here are a few of the best SEO WordPress plugins that will either directly or indirectly improve the SEO outcomes of your site or website:

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is one of the best and most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. A fantastic thing about this SEO-friendly plugin is that it keeps getting better – Yoast SEO is updated frequently to meet up with the latest SEO trends and techniques. 

This SEO tool will scan your posts to give you recommendations on improving them like using a meta description properly, writing to include the target keyword, writing articles with the right number of words, and including alt tags to images.

Yoast also contains several social media tools, an XML sitemap generator, and enables users to edit the .htaccess and robots.txt files. If you run multiple sites, Yoast lets you easily switch between them. Yoast SEO plugin has both the free and paid version.

The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is often recommended because of the useful features it offers, which include:

∎ It provides unique ways of adding SEO titles, tags, and meta descriptions to every webpage and blogpost on your website.

∎ It provides a helpful page analysis.

∎ It offers an automatic generation of an XML sitemap.

∎ It offers an excellent redirect feature.

∎ It allows a seamless connection between your website and Google Search Console.

SEMrush vs. Yoast

Note: SEMrush is not a plugin but an online SEO tool, and is no match for Yoast. However, for this post, the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin is compared with Yoast SEO.

The SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin is undoubtedly an important and valued SEO tool for marketing agencies and SEO consultants. However, the Yoast SEO plugin has become a standard SEO tool used by new and advanced bloggers. 

Both the SEMrush SWA plugin and Yoast SEO plugin should complement each other because each offers some features not found in the other. However, if you need to choose between both plugins, the comparison table below should guide you to choose the better plugin for your requirements.

More explicitly, both WordPress plugins will help you write well-optimized content for your site in terms of SEO score. Both of them will break down the different aspects and factors you need to work on and provide recommendations on optimizing your web content. However, Yoast offers more comprehensive and intuitive on-page SEO optimization features and recommendations than SEMrush. On the other hand, SEMrush SWA performs better than Yoast SEO in keyword researching.

In terms of readability score, both SEMrush SWA and Yoast SEO give useful insight into how readable your post or article is. However, SEMrush is the only tool capable of analyzing your tone and checking for plagiarism.

In terms of keyword research, SEMrush is the only plugin that researches and recommends keywords based on the result from the top 10 webpages ranking high for your target keyword on Google. Yoast SEO, on the other hand, only suggests keywords relevant to your target keywords. This suggested keywords can sometimes be distracting.

In terms of additional features, Yoast SEO plugin offers extra features like auto-creation of an XML map, displaying post previews for social media sharing, 24/7 customer support, etc., which are unavailable on SEMrush.

You need a SEMrush account to use the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin, whereas you don’t need an account to use the free version of Yoast SEO. The free version of the SEMrush SWA plugin carries very limited features as compared to the version of Yoast SEO.

On a final note, the SEMrush SWA plugin is a better keyword research tool, but Yoast SEO is sufficient for a newbie. 

Other SEO plugins for WordPress 2020 include:

∎ All in One Schema Rich Snippets

∎ Broken Link Checker

∎ Rank Math

∎ Rel NoFollow Checkbox

∎ SEO Squirrly

∎ SEOPress

∎ The SEO Framework

∎ WordLift

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Conclusion

I hope this post has enlightened you and given you all the necessary information about SEMrush WordPress plugin and other best SEO plugins to improve your website’s SEO and boost your traffic and sales. If you have any questions as regards the SEMrush WordPress plugin or other SEO WordPress plugins, don’t hesitate to start a free 7 day  trial.