Stuart Neal
Director of Operations at Nextgen Marketing
We have worked with Vitalli and his team for well over a year now and will continue to do so in the future.
Having the confidence in an agency that allowed us to scale up and down development resources, as and when needed, has really made a positive difference to our agency.
Home / Blog / WordPress / Best SEO Plugins for WordPress in 2026
As an agency owner I believe that choosing between SEO plugins is not as important as choosing right SEO partner or agency. I have worked with many of them and with top 5 on the market that most of readers want to know about.
Yes – SEO plugins controls vital markup on the page and really simplifies life for SEO agencies, their clients and developers. I don’t believe I see any website without SEO plugin in the last 5 years. Each website has at least installed plugin ( not configured, but installed)
SEO plugins right now are really SEO bundles. There is plugin for redirects, there is plugin for sitemaps, there is plugin for schema and then there are bundle plugins having all SEO tools and features under 1 roof:
and many more, but everything is important for SEO.
My default recommendation for agencies is always Yoast SEO – just because I’m very used to it, it’s leader on the market y number of installations and most teams know how to work with it: Devs, SEO teams, Marketing teams etc.
If you have agency license for Yoast SEO Premium I see no points of switching into competitors, but if you want paid features for free – Rank Math is a great plugin that wins new agencies with his extended feature list.
Maybe he’ll protect them as part of paid plan, when win the race of website installations from Yoast – but now – they’re free.
Important note that it does not mean you can have them – it’s just Yoast does not have them and you’d install one more plugin to use it.
Will you use it? I don’t know and you won’t know until you test what your needs are. From tech perspective devs can do whatever with both of them.
This will be an untypical comparison because I’ll try to find limits and issues we’ve encountered when using plugins
For me it’s honorable mention. I don’t like the interface as much – a lot of clients and agencies feel it’s not the best so even when it’s quite popular plugin I won’t be looking into something different when Yoast and Rank Math exists. If we’re connected on linkedin – please DM me why you use this over alternatives.
Great plugin, some agencies prefer it over Yoast, but I remember one client come with the Rank Math Pro and was very pissed that plugin can’t analyze content from ACF Fields – I think it was Flexible Fields setup, not the basic temaplates.
Most of our agency builds are custom themes powered by ACF and Yoast has a glue plugin for ACF, it has extention for multilingual websites, for eCommerce website – I’d say it’s limitless plugin, but that won’t be true.
For example, free version does not track 404 issues and rediects – you’ll use plugin like redirection for that and that’s our basic SEO setup for all websites.
Yoast SEO + Redirection plugin.
In my opinion – pick what you like and what solves your tasks. I’m still a Yoast person and don’t have strong facts to switch even this website to another SEO plugin, so my recommendations are like this
Beginners / simple blogs – Yoast
Agencies / multi-client projects – YoastWooCommerce / eCommerce stores – YoastLarge content-heavy websites – Yoast
I think AI features added like MCP connection into WP core will help all agencies to use SEO plugins at their max. And still recommend Yoast 🙂
