WordPress SEO Plugins: Why Real-Time and Customized Data Matters

If a cardiologist wanted to see how your heart was doing, they’d hook you up to an EKG to measure your heart rate at rest or during activity.

What a cardiologist wouldn’t do is tell you your heart health based on a study of people like you, without doing an EKG. They need a baseline. And that baseline is the information your unique heart is putting out.

There are a lot of great WordPress SEO plugins out there. And they all function differently. A common theme among many of them is that they base their recommendations (and functionality) on SEO best practices.

Best practices definitely have their place. But you can’t rely solely on them. After a while, your site becomes average and like everyone else’s. Your website and your keywords are as unique as a heartbeat. To have a better chance of ranking on Page 1 of the search results, you need custom SEO advice. And I’ll show you how to get it.

Best Practices Are Great, Except When They’re Not

I’m all for large-scale SEO research studies that produce interesting data on all things SEO. Some studies you may have seen in the past show ranking factors, optimal meta data length, content length correlated to top rankings and so on.

These studies tend to look at a massive amount of search results across all niches and all types of keywords with varying intent. Marketers use these studies as a guiding light.

This data then becomes an SEO truth which many go by. The new best practice then trickles into every corner of the SEO industry, including in-house practices, agencies and WordPress plugins.

Folks, there is a difference between data and wisdom, and assuming that every keyword on the web requires a 1,700-word page to rank is simply crazy.

Study data provides a useful road map. But we can do better.

What’s Missing in Your WordPress SEO Guidance

When it comes to WordPress SEO plugins, there’s no shortage of great ones. You will not likely find everything you need in just one SEO plugin. So the best way to go about using them is to create a custom plugin stack that works for your SEO needs.

As we researched the SEO plugin market before we created our own, we found a gap. Many of the leading plugins base their guidance and features on established best practices and industry data averages.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But we saw an opportunity to help more websites succeed in the search results with an SEO plugin that gave custom SEO advice.

Instead of static recommendations based on generic research, we wanted to give real-time SEO advice based on the top-ranked pages for a keyword.

This is a game-changer. Consider this: Every keyword has a different intent, and that intent biases the algorithm. Since every keyword query has its own intent and thus its own algorithm, there are as many algorithms as there are keywords.

Then you add the bias of RankBrain and an individual’s web history on a query, and the possibilities are endless when ranking webpages. It is almost impossible to hit a home run if you’re just relying on generic best practices.

That is why analytics tools exist — to give you custom data. And that is why we decided to power our Bruce Clay SEO WP plugin with analytics, not just static best practices.

How to Get Custom SEO Advice from Your WordPress SEO Plugin

Real-time analytics powers every aspect of our WordPress SEO plugin. That’s because our plugin is run like software as a service (SaaS) rather than a static WordPress plugin.

It enriches your WordPress workspace with SEO recommendations based on real-time search results and analytics.

Our WordPress SEO plugin uses live connections with:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• SEOToolSet®

So you never need to leave WordPress again to analyze your keywords, competition and performance in real time.

As a result, the optimization advice is customized. This helps you optimize your page to the same level as the top-ranked pages in Google’s search results.

Our WordPress SEO plugin gives you custom SEO advice and performance data such as:

• Target content length
• Readability scores and goals
• Custom meta information advice
• Keyword density and distribution goals
• Mobile usability and speed scores
• Average time on page
• Page views
• Conversions
• Clicks
• Impressions
• Click-through rate
• Content performance by author

Traffic tab in Bruce Clay SEO WP plugin

And by the way, when you subscribe to our SEO plugin, you get full access to all the tools in our SEOToolSet. Since our WordPress SEO plugin is powered in part by the SEOToolSet, you don’t have to leave WordPress to get the benefits of it.

But if you log in to your SEOToolSet, you can take advantage of more SEO tools and reports at no extra charge.

How much do we believe in this technology? Our issued U.S. patent number is 10698961.

Ready to get real-time SEO advice in WordPress? Get your free trial of our WordPress SEO plugin now.

Read more on how the Bruce Clay SEO plugin helps you with:

• Keyword optimization
• Avoiding duplicate content
• Custom SEO advice per keyword
• Tracking your content performance

Bruce Clay is founder and president of Bruce Clay Inc., a global digital marketing firm providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media marketing, SEO-friendly web architecture, and SEO tools and education. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.