Bloggers, small business owners, and marketing teams understand the importance of optimizing your website for search engines. With so many different tools available, deciding which one to use can cause headaches.
Fortunately, SEOPress provides simple SEO plugins with all the essential features to optimize your WordPress site. Keep reading to learn what we love—and don’t love—about this unique online tool.
SEOPress: The Good and the Bad
When it comes to WordPress SEO tools and plugins, there’s no shortage of products and services on the market. SEOPress holds its own as a comprehensive solution with several special features like its AI-powered capabilities and fast indexing across multiple search engines.
However, it has a few drawbacks that may make it less than suitable for certain users. But they might not be what you think. Let’s dive deeper.
What SEOPress Is Good At
Comprehensive theme and page builder integration: We know that swapping themes or page builders can be arduous. SEOPress eliminates this difficulty by integrating with all WordPress themes and page builders from the start.
If you use Elementor for your site design, SEOPress has you covered. If you prefer Beaver Builder’s drag-and-drop interface, SEOPress integrates seamlessly no matter your page builder or theme.
This hassle-free integration lets you optimize your site no matter your search engine. Whether you use a popular theme like Divi or opt for a lesser known niche product, you never have to worry about unexpected conflicts. The comprehensive integrations free you to select the best tools while still strengthening your SEO.
AI-powered features: Rather than racking your brain or paying a writer to manually create SEO metadata for every page and post, SEOPress’s integrated OpenAI feature will handle it instantly. Just set your focus keyword and optimized titles and descriptions are produced from the ground up.
When you need to generate lots of SEO metadata for an entire site, there’s also a handy bulk actions feature. Have AI crank out titles and descriptions in a few clicks for every piece of content on your site, custom-tailored to each page’s focus keyword.
Further customization and advanced use cases are possible with WordPress’s command line interface (CLI) with AI. You can create near-unlimited numbers of custom scripts to generate SEO metadata or other content like titles, keywords, and meta descriptions.
With an API key, the leading WordPress SEO plugin taps into AI to eliminate busy work and open new doors for optimizing your site. Free API key credits are provided to new accounts.
Instant indexing: After you hit “publish” on a new blog post or add a hot new product to your online store, you might wonder how long it will take for Google to find it. This is where instant indexing comes in handy on SEOPress.
With these tools, you can ping the search engines directly to say “Hey Google, check this out!” Instead of waiting days or weeks, you can get your latest content indexed in just hours.
SEOPress taps into the power of the Google Indexing API, granting you 200 free queries per day. Just connect your WordPress site, submit a URL, and Google will fetch and index your page almost instantly.
But it’s not just Google. It also integrates with the IndexNow API for both Bing and Yandex, indexing up to 10,000 times per day. Talk about an instant boost in traffic and visibility!
Content analysis tool: SEOPress makes it easy for your website content to attract search traffic and rank higher in results with its easy-to-use content analysis tool.
Run your post through up to 16 different SEO checks to catch issues from improper headings to missing image alt text. Fixing these basic errors helps search engines better understand and index your pages.
The tool also suggests internal links calculated using the TF-IDF method, examining your content to determine the most relevant pages to link from an article.
If you need help finding new content ideas, simply enter a keyword or phrase and SEOPress will instantly display Google’s top 10 suggestions. These new keywords help create fresh, optimized content that targets more specific searches from potential customers.
It acts like an advanced SEO consultant, performing technical analyses and revealing smart ways to improve website content in real time.
Rank and backlink tracking notifications: Staying on top of your keyword rankings is crucial as a website manager, but constantly checking rankings can become tedious.
With SEOPress’s Insights plugin, your keyword rankings are beamed directly to your inbox or Slack channel, allowing you to monitor your site’s rankings automatically with complete control over notifications whether they be daily, weekly, or month by month.
Send notifications to multiple email addresses, so you and your team can stay in the loop on rankings. Receive alerts for all keywords or only those you want to keep close tabs on.
Custom XML and HTML sitemaps: With SEOPress, it takes just a few clicks to set up XML and HTML sitemaps for all your custom post types and taxonomies. This ensures search engines can easily crawl and index all your content without excluding important pages.
SEOPress also enables fast indexing by automatically adding images and YouTube videos into your sitemaps. This provides search engines with even more links leading back to your site, enriching your result pages.
When it comes to HTML sitemaps, SEOPress provides search crawlers with additional entry points and an effortless way to embed them anywhere.
You can define sorting criteria, exclude specific posts, select alternate image sizes, and more. SEOPress lets you optimize sitemaps to suit your site’s unique needs, ensuring that your content will get indexed faster, attract more clicks, and benefit from enhanced SEO.
SEOPress’s Potential Drawbacks
Not for beginners: SEOPress is not for the faint of heart. It offers an impressive range of built-in tools, and they are powerful. However, many of the features that come with its plugins will be unnecessary if you are just getting started with SEO, or websites, for that matter.
SEOPress allows you to edit titles and meta descriptions, target multiple keywords and phrases in a single post, craft rich schema markup, generate XML and HTML sitemaps to assist crawlers, and use powerful APIs to enable features such as instant indexing and Google Console functionality, just to name a few. The depth that SEOPress brings to the game is not for the first-time website user.
For simple WordPress sites with limited SEO needs, it’s best to look elsewhere. Although, despite SEOPress being so feature rich, it does offer a free version that won’t hurt to explore, even as a beginner.
Also, with SEOPress bringing AI functionality right into the WordPress backend, it is sure to help you in a number of ways. But remember, SEO plugins are an excellent tool, but still just a tool. Your SEO strategy matters more.
If you haven’t spent a lot of time optimizing websites to rank on the top SERPs, then you’re going to want to steer clear of SEOPress since it’s not the most beginner-friendly SEO tool we’ve come across. But, for developers and power users, SEOPress will give you plenty of features to stay busy.
Messy customization settings: Once we started exploring the SEOPress customization options, we quickly became overwhelmed—another component that added to it not being user friendly right out of the box.
The settings display a massive dump of information without much organization. As you scroll through the array of toggles and text boxes, you’re bombarded with so many granular configuration choices that it’s hard to know where to begin.
For new users, this lack of structure can be frustrating. You may end up wasting time hunting for the options you need instead of efficiently optimizing your site.
Even though controls like title and meta description, social, and redirection, are separated into individual tabs, the on-page interface is not nearly as intuitive as other SEO tools we’ve tested. Of course, that’s user preference—but, you’ll most likely need to spend some time exploring and getting used to the SEOPress layout to appreciate it.
We hope the developers will consider revamping the layout to create a more user-friendly optimization solution.
Even the initial installation of the SEOPress plugin completely overran our WordPress backend, adding numerous columns to our “Posts” page and distorting the view. You’ll have to make some adjustments to fix the display.
Slow customer service: Testing out SEOPress, we found their support team’s response times and availability to be less than stellar.
Even though SEOPress offers an on-site feature to email a support ticket to its team, the response time can vary. We did have to wait several hours to get a response to our questions, so if you’re in a hurry and need immediate help, you’ll be on your own.
It’s important to note that SEOPress is run by a team out of France, so you’ll have to take into account the time difference when reaching out to them—they handle all tickets as they come in Monday through Friday. Knowing this, we sent them several follow-up queries on a Thursday afternoon (Paris time), and never received a timely response.
Needless to say, you’ll need to search SEOPress’s handy resources and knowledge base if you need a quick answer. If you can’t find a solution on your own, patience will be key when dealing with its support team.
For small business owners or bloggers who are new to search engine optimization, having to wait hours, or even days, for answers to questions, or comb through knowledge bases, could be a dealbreaker.
SEOPress Plans and Pricing
SEOPress offers a comprehensive free plugin for those who are looking to test it out while not having to break the bank. The Free plugin gives you access to plenty of SEO features to learn your way around.
SEOPress also offers two paid plugins: PRO and Insights.
The PRO plugin offers additional premium features like AI functionalities and the ability to use the plugin across unlimited sites. The Insights plugin gives you powerful off-site SEO tools. And SEOPress offers a 14-day money back guarantee if you aren’t happy with your purchase.
For power users running SEO across multiple websites, SEOPress for MainWP is a free add-on that lets you manage all of your SEO for all of your websites in one unified dashboard.
Plus, there’s a bundle option that combines the PRO and Insights options all into one package.
SEOPress Free
The free SEOPress plugin equips you with all the essentials for optimizing your WordPress site’s SEO at zero cost.
With SEOPress Free, you can craft meta titles and meta descriptions for every page and post. These snippets of text appear in search engine results, drawing more visitors to your content.
You can access XML and HTML sitemaps, helping index all your pages automatically. Moreover, SEOPress analytics integrate Google Analytics to track valuable visitor metrics and gain insights on traffic sources, top pages, location, and more.
SEOPress enhances sharing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, all without ads or user data collection.
SEOPress PRO
For $49 per year, you can take your WordPress SEO to the next level. Optimize WooCommerce stores with total control over product titles, descriptions, tags, and more.
Optimize for local SEO by adding business info like addresses and opening hours, helping customers find and visit your locations. Get support for schemas to highlight reviews, events, recipes, and more to stand out in search results.
Access AI-powered automatic content generation at this level, with suggested SEO titles and meta descriptions for your posts and pages.
Power users will enjoy the ability to import and export metadata via CSV at this level, reusing content across sites or making bulk changes in one go. The PRO plan allows this for unlimited sites too!
SEOPress Insights
This $99 per year, per site, plugin allows you to track your keyword rankings, spot trends over time, and monitor your site’s performance with just a few clicks. If you already have an active SEOPress PRO subscription, then you can purchase the Insights plugin and it will only cost you $79 for the year, and cover one site.
The backlink tracker lets you keep tabs on who is linking to your site. Reach out and build relationships with more sites, or disavow toxic links harming your rankings.
At this level, the SEO audit is a clear benefit, scanning your content for thin pages, broken links, and duplicate titles. You’ll learn where to focus your efforts for quick wins and make sure your site architecture is search-engine friendly.
SEOPress Bundle
The SEOPress Bundle is available at $128 per year. This gets you the PRO features and Insights combined for one WordPress site.
Of course, you get access to keywords research, meta title and description templates, schema markup implementation, sitemaps generation, and everything in the PRO plan.
Then you’ve got Insights by your side, delivering the metrics that matter and all the SEO details on performance and progress.
If you want to send your WordPress site’s SEO into overdrive, the SEOPress Bundle has you covered. PRO optimizes, Insights analyzes, and you watch your rankings rise. It’s the power pair your site needs to win at SEO.
Final Thoughts
Overall, SEOPress delivers two feature-rich SEO plugins that have a range of tools to quickly and effectively optimize WordPress sites for ranking higher on Google, Bing, and Yandex. For many bloggers, small businesses, and marketers, SEOPress offers a powerful all-in-one solution that will meet their SEO needs at an affordable price.
However, for those who are just getting started with their website and learning their way around SEO, other SEO tools may be more suitable.
