SEO Plugins for WordPress are something we’ve talked about previously, indeed we do so on a regular basis. Back in 2014 I wrote an article looking at the best wordpress plugins for seo, I talked about Squirrly at the time after having tried it out and being impressed. Earlier this year as I moved to update the look and feel of SEO Andy I also changed my SEO plugin to Squirrly SEO, moving away from Yoast. The results are increased visitor numbers & my falling in love (slightly) with this seo plugin.
One thing that I should make clear at the outset is that I am not sure Squirrly SEO is for everyone. I haven’t tried it out in multiple environments, just a handful, and whilst I love it I have reservations recommending every site should make the leap.
Why I Love Squirrly SEO for WordPress
I have used a ton of WordPress SEO plugins. The migration routes have always been clumsy and often didn’t work at all – leaving you to re-enter all of your meta data again, for every post & page. Squirrly knows the things need to be simple and easy, their system looks for and uses Yoast’s entries for your Meta Title and Description – awesome!
The initial setup is pretty easy, the “wizard” takes you step by step for implementing everything from sitemaps to JSON-LD for your organisational details (great for Google Knowledge Graph). Pretty much everything in Yoast can be found in Squirrly, this of course includes the Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags & implementation of webmaster tags.
Tip: If you do get stuck at any point go to your dashboard and look out for the video instructions.
Keyword Research Made Easy
Nothing says “this is going to take forever to write” like having to flip between Google searches, twitter feeds, wikipedia, news sources and your article. Squirrly SEO for WordPress has a neat keyword research plugin that pulls up things like the latest news, wikipedia articles, the latest tweets with that key phrase and more besides.
If you like what you see you can insert it directly into your article – this includes images! (it hot links for you may still need to check with the owner for permission!)
The other cool thing is that just like Yoast’s “focus keyword” the keyword you use for research is used throughout the optimisation process, giving you the green light (or not) for how SEO friendly your blog post is.
Obviously, this is unlikely to replace the bulk of keyword research for those of us who like to do our homework, but it is damn handy for a bit of snappy research on inserting relevant information from external sources. It’s a great feature.
Squirrly SEO’s Live Assistant is a little like the “score card” system of Yoast, only much more intuitive to use and less confusing. There is no technical speak about Flesch Reading Scores or anything like that, just simple boxes that light up green when you complete the job.
As the name suggests, this updates live as you type (if it gets stuck just hit the update button to refresh it), so there is no need to save your draft again and again to check if you’ve got the green light to post your article.
Weekly Audits & Ranking for Articles
Squirrly gives you a weekly look at how your site and articles are performing. From the point you optimise an article, or even give it a keyword, Squirrly will look at how the article and website ranks for that terms. Allowing you to ensure your articles are performing in search, but also in social and looking at the article’s authority.
It’s a really neat feature and in itself would make looking at the use of Squirrly worthwhile.
Give Squirrly SEO a Try
If you’ve got a WordPress website and would like to give Squirrly a try you can do so – they have FREE and paid plans available depending on your requirements. Smaller sites that don’t post too often will get along just fine with the free plan.
Click Here to try Squirrly
