SEO can be scary at times.
Unless, of course, you’re an SEO Pro like Ashley.
Sure, WordPress is designed to be SEO-friendly, but there are still plenty of technical tasks to perform if you want to keep your site in Google’s good books.
Imagine if you had an SEO assistant to offer a few hints and tips. Someone to give you a gentle nudge now and then or a pointer in the right direction?
Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any friendly SEO-bots, but I do know of a plugin that might help.
So if you’d like some assistance optimizing your content, managing your links and making your site more search-friendly, then you’re in the right place.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at SEOPressor; the next best thing to a personal SEO assistant.
SEOPressor is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you complete control of your WordPress SEO.
Since SEOPressor launched back in 2010, it has developed into one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. Today, it powers more than 217K unique domains and 23 million WordPress pages worldwide.
We’ll circle back on these as we step through some of the features of the plugin.
Most of these options refer to sitewide Technical SEO settings that you’ll need to configure first.
Later on we’ll look at some specific content optimization, but first, let’s get the plugin setup.
Disclaimer: the SEO scores on some of the following screenshots look shocking. That’s because we installed SEOPressor on a brand new WordPress site without any content or pre-configuration for the purpose of this review.
At the top the dashboard there’s an average health score and news feed. Underneath are the eight options we saw previously in the side menu.
The Site Audit contains a couple of panels.
Score – the average SEO score of all the content on your website.
Health – the average SEO health of your website.
Underneath the scorecard, you can see the top 3 errors and alerts, with options to view more or fix individual items.
You can improve your average SEO Score and Health by addressing each of the errors and alerts.
The Sitewide SEO settings cover three areas that affect the whole of your WordPress site.
Here’s where you can create your XML sitemap so that the Google robots can understand the structure of your website.
Pro Tip: Read more about No-Follow Links for SEO in this post.
Your homepage is arguably the most important page of your website. But it’s not so easy to optimize it for Google & Co.
SEOPressor lets you configure the homepage like you would for your blog posts.
Use this panel to set your Page Title, Page Description, Canonical URL, 301 Redirect URL, and Robot Rules.
Title Tag – defines the title of your page and displays on the search engine’s results page.
Meta Description – describes your content and is also displayed in the search results.
Canonical URL – prevents duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred URL of a web page.
301 Redirect URL – redirects your visitors to another URL when they land on a particular page.
Robot Rules – directs Google’s website crawlers how to crawl and index your site. You can read more about Robot Rules here.
By assigning your site’s title, image, and description in SEOPressor’s Open Graph settings, you can control your website link appearance on Facebook.
As per Facebook, these settings make sure your website link displays the correct information and an image on Twitter.
The On-Page Analysis functionality in SEOPressor analyzes your posts and pages, and suggests improvements on how to improve your SEO score.
When you create a new post in WordPress, SEOPressor is ready and waiting for your input.
At the top, you have tabs for Score, Meta, Social, and Schema.
In this example, I’ll show you how the score goes from zero to hero as you complete the fields.
I’ve used a previous post from Mad Lemmings – ActiveCampaign vs MailChimp – and saved the post as a draft.
SQ Density: 2.30% – tells you if your content is semantically related to your keywords.
But there’s room for improvement, as you would expect after a first draft.
These are suggestions based on SEOPressor’s evaluation algorithm built from analyzing millions of web pages.
Some tips are obvious; e.g. Add keyword(s) in your meta description.
But others try to prevent you from over-optimizing your content; e.g. Reduce the usage of keywords in anchored link. Using too many keywords in anchored link may be treated as unnatural optimization.
You can address each of these suggestions to optimize your content and then recalculate your SEO Score.
Some of these LSI keyword suggestions aren’t appropriate.
For example, you wouldn’t use activecampaign vs convertkit in a comparison of activecampaign vs mailchimp.
It wouldn’t make sense unless you were linking to another post you’d written.
So, remember these are suggestions. You still need to engage your brain!
You can choose whether to use one, both, or neither of these on your content.
The schema markup options add rich snippets to help your content stand out in the search engine results.
You could buy a separate plugin for schema markup, but SEOPressor includes it already.
How much would you pay for a virtual assistant to keep tabs on your Technical and On-Page SEO? I’m sure it would cost more than $9 per month.
Yes, that’s right. SEOPressor is available via a single subscription plan of $9 per month.
You can use it on multiple domains, and it includes lifetime updates and support.
If you’ve always used other SEO plugins like Yoast or All-In-One SEO, then perhaps you should consider trying SEOPressor.
You can use it alongside them or import your current settings from them. SEOPressor is compatible with ‘almost’ all other SEO plugins.
There’s no doubt that SEOPressor is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress.
The user interface is easy-to-navigate with everything laid out in a logical way. The settings panels are clearly labeled, and there are additional tooltips to explain particular fields.
And if you’re still unsure about a topic then you can dip into their online tutorials and support.
The On-Page optimization suggestions are also terrific and will help you produce top-ranking content.
Overall, SEOPressor provides a superb mix of features to help you improve and manage your SEO.
David Hartshorne is a freelance writer helping solopreneurs and small business owners build their online presence through friendly, engaging, and shareable web content. When he’s not writing about WordPress and the latest digital marketing tools, you’ll find him chilling with a thriller in Spain.