Most WordPress themes you will find on the market today are SEO-friendly. However, templates alone cannot speed up the SEO process of a website. This is why some companies have designed WordPress plugins exclusively dedicated to SEO. The natural referencing of websites created with WordPress is becoming easier and easier thanks to these specific tools.
Yoast SEO is undoubtedly the best-known and most-used plugin by professionals. But apparent alternatives can validly replace this extension. With the evident growth of artificial intelligence, other extensions are emerging and trying to stand out. This is the case of Squirrly SEO, a WordPress SEO extension that puts AI at the service of SEO. Let’s explore this very promising plugin
Overview Of The Squirrly SEO WordPress Plugin
The Squirrly SEO WordPress plugin is a complete SEO suite with the particularity of being powered by artificial intelligence. According to the developers who use it, it is a tool that allows you to optimize all the web pages of a WordPress site for search engines. Squirrly SEO has more than 600 SEO features, all pre-configured when installed.
The main advantage of this SEO suite lies in its ability to assist developers during the creation or optimization of pages. Squirrly SEO provides a virtual assistant who can audit your WordPress site and advise you to improve its positioning in the SERPs.
The Benefits That The Squirrly SEO WordPress Plugin Offers To Users
If you are an SEO professional, you probably know how complicated finding an all-in-one tool can be. Using this SEO suite has several advantages. Squirrly SEO will assist you in keyword research, content analysis, optimization, and other SEO-related actions. You can even use Squirrly SEO to track your SERP rankings without using any external tracking tools available on the market.
A Free Plugin
Most plugins dedicated to natural referencing are tools that come in a single paid version. Yoast SEO, All-in-one SEO, and other tools are exceptions to this rule. They are free and offer paid features. The Squirrly SEO WordPress plugin is also free. But it also offers a paid version, which you can do without. Launched in 2012 by a French company, it is regularly updated to comply with new natural referencing rules.
Today, Squirrly SEO has a lot of followers. There are more and more users of this plugin. Moreover, a recent survey shows more than 200,000 sites worldwide use it. Although the reviews are mixed, the Squirrly SEO plugin remains a better solution than Yoast SEO for many professional developers.
The Features Of The Squirrly SEO WordPress Plugin In Detail
In addition to its virtual assistant, the Squirrly SEO WordPress extension has several other features intended to support users in optimizing their pages. We present some of them to you in detail.
SEO Audit
With the Squirrly plugin, you can do a complete SEO audit. After careful analysis, The plugin monitors your content’s various necessary settings and gives you an overall performance score. More concretely, to audit your site or each of your editorial content, the tool takes six areas into account:
- Blogging;
- Traffic;
- SEO;
- Social media ;
- Authority ;
- Connections.
Squirrly SEO, therefore, checks your content’s optimization level via the SEO Live Assistant score. The WordPress plugin then contains the traffic each page receives individually. LimitingThe tool also considers checking the volume of shares on social media. When it comes to SEO specifically, the plugin contains over 20 metrics.
These metrics influence ranking (titles, tags, loading speed, etc.). On the other hand, Squirrly SEO also controls backlinks and internal networking via the MOZ platform. Finally, the plugin checks the authority of the pages using one of the most potent SEO auditing platforms, Semrush. The result obtained at the end is relatively well-detailed. You get all the positives, but you’ll also get areas for improvement. This way, you will put all the chances on your side and improve your online presence.
Google Ranking
Squirrly is also an SEO ranking tool. It will help you find the average position of your website in the Google search engine for any keyword. The Google Rankings feature uses data from two sources: Google Search Console and an internal Squirrly tool. With Google Search Console, the WordPress plugin provides your ranking results over 30 days via its “Google Rankings” feature. On the other hand, with Squirrly’s internal tool (boosted by AI), the results are more precise.
This tool uses the Google API directly, with almost daily refreshes. Regardless of your chosen source, the result will always show you the article associated with each keyword, its past best, and its current ranking. This lets you compare rankings to prevent possible indexing problems and positioning drops.
Furthermore, if the tool notices a drop in Google ranking, a red label automatically indicates the number of places lost. However, you can know whether this fall is temporary or lasting. Depending on the depth of the ranking drop, you will determine if your article deserves SEO optimization work.
The “Google Rankings” feature is part of the CLOUD services of the Squirrly SEO WordPress plugin. With the free version of the plugin, you can gain access by linking your Google Search Console account. But you need to upgrade to the premium version to use the internal Google ranking tool.
Importing Data
If you want to replace a WordPress SEO plugin in production on your website with Squirrly, you can do so very quickly. Thanks to its integrated import tool, you can import all the configured data from your usual tool. This feature is available with the hottest SEO plugins: Yoast, SEOpress, RankMath, All-in-One SEO, Platinum SEO Pack, SEO Title Tag, etc.
Take, for example, the case of the Yoast SEO plugin. With this extension, so as not to lose all your optimization and natural referencing work, you can import the following data:
- Titles;
- Description Open Graph;
- Focus Keyword;
- Description ;
- Open Graph Media;
- Open Graph Title;
- NoFollow;
- NoIndex ;
- 301 redirect;
- Twitter Card Description;
- Twitter card title;
- The main category, etc.
So you won’t have to do all the SEO work from the beginning. Just transition to Squirrly SEO, and all critical data will be transferred. However, to take advantage of the extension, you need to run each piece of content through SEO Live Assistant to apply the optimization recommendations.
Keyword Search Functionality
Keyword research is one of the main features of SEO plugins. With the Squirrly SEO extension, you can use this service for free for three keywords per month. But if you use the paid version of the tool, you can search up to 300 keywords per month. On top of that, the search functionality is much more in-depth. Each keyword will appear in 50 occurrences.
The principle of the search functionality offered by the Squirrly WordPress extension is quite simple. Your goal is to position each article on a series of keywords. To do this, enter any keyword and start searching. The virtual assistant will then offer you a list of variations of this request. The variations offered are keywords that Internet users generally use in search engines.
The Squirrly WordPress Plugin Briefcase
After using the search tool to find the keywords that interest you, you only have to add them to the extension case. The briefcase is a space where you can store requests deemed relevant. So, this is where you can find the referring keywords for your site. In the suitcase, the SEO can classify the queries by labeling them by category. In addition, Squirrly SEO will give the Google ranking for each keyword present in the briefcase. To use this feature, you must link your website to Squirrly SEO Cloud, a function part of the tool’s CLOUD services.
A Virtual SEO Assistant For A Quality WordPress Plugin
As previously highlighted, Squirrly SEO’s primary tool is its Live Assistant. If you’re used to using the classic Rank Math and Yoast, you probably already know how SEO assistants work. The particularity of Squirrly SEO is that it offers analysis results that differ from competitors. Furthermore, it is a WordPress extension with a relatively different philosophy from other natural referencing plugins.
That said, it must be recognized that the purpose and the principle are the same. Squirrly SEO first allows you to search for a query on which you will position the content you create. Then, its virtual assistant scans it to recommend improvements you could make to optimize it.
Recommendations From The SEO Assistant
Some recommendations are classic: keywords, meta descriptions, titles, word counts, etc. However, there are other recommendations specific to Squirrly SEO’s use of AI. Generally speaking, the suggestions you can have with the plugin’s SEO virtual assistant concern the following points:
- Request with at least two words;
- Presence of the target query in the page URL;
- Presence of the primary keyword in the title of the article;
- The density of the query in the content;
- Over Optimization of the article;
- Bold keyword;
- Pulls Google-friendly;
- Difference between article title and slug;
- Ease of reading the content (article sufficiently ventilated);
- Presence of the primary keyword in the ALT tags of the article images, etc.
If you obtain a score of 100, your article is perfectly optimized. The probability that it will rank well in the SERPs is then high. The recommended score with Squirrly SEO is 75/100. If you get under 75, you must follow all the tool’s recommendations to optimize it as best as possible.
Customizing Meta Tags And JSON-LD
Boosted by generative artificial intelligence, Squirrly’s virtual assistant also offers you a dialog box at the end of each article. The latter suggests personalizing your different meta tags: Description and Title. These are the tags that will appear in Google search results. In other words, the assistant’s AI suggests Google snippets to improve the article’s ranking in the SERPs. At the same time, if the snippets offered do not seem relevant to you, you can constantly personalize them.
Furthermore, the Squirrly SEO WordPress extension allows you to define the different JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) settings separately. The advantage of JSON-LD is that it offers a reasonably efficient way to create readable data that supports search results. It’s also worth noting that with Squirrly SEO you can change how shares on Twitter and Facebook will appear.
Thanks to AI, you can also manage your content’s visibility by Google indexing robots. The WordPress plugin also allows you to control your website’s page authority submission and sitemap. You, therefore, no longer need to install another plugin to manage the indexing of your pages.
Squirrly SEO: Our Opinion
The Squirrly SEO WordPress extension can validly replace the indisputable Yoast, RankMath, All-in-One SEO, etc. It offers several services to help developers, integrators, and SEOs position sites well on search engines. Apart from the mentioned features, Squirrly SEO also offers advanced Facebook Pixel options for e-commerce and WooCommerce options. This proves it is a quality tool that can only benefit the sites.
But the main advantage of this extension remains its “Live SEO Assistant.” It is a service that uses artificial intelligence to help users optimize their content for search engines. Note, however, that the SEO suite provides valuable features even in its free version. But to fully benefit from the plugin’s power, opting for paid Squirrly SEO is better. And you, have you already tried this WordPress extension to boost your natural referencing? Please let us know about your experience with Squirrly SEO.
