Squirrly SEO Plugin Overview

Categories : SEO

In today’s digital era, establishing a strong online presence is crucial for creative professionals. Whether you are a graphic designer presenting your portfolio or a video animator/editor showcasing your recent works, being discoverable on the web can greatly influence your professional journey. At the core of attaining this visibility lies Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with the SquirrlySEO plugin standing out as a holistic solution designed specifically for WordPress users, catering even to creatives who may not possess deep SEO knowledge. This is the essence of the Squirrly SEO Plugin Overview.

Table of Contents

What Is Squirrly SEO?

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Squirrly SEO is an advanced AI WordPress plugin designed to optimize your website for search engines. It claims to be the top AI WordPress SEO plugin available.

While WordPress is already optimized, SquirrlySEO can further enhance your search engine rankings. This plugin offers a wide range of features, such as schemas to boost visibility in SERPs and integrations with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Moreover, it includes a built-in keyword research tool. With its extensive functionality, Squirrly SEO might seem overwhelming at first, but it aims to be a highly valuable SEO plugin, potentially replacing tools like Yoast SEO and Rank Math SEO.

Therefore, when you build your website, it is crucial to incorporate Squirrly SEO and also essential for improving your SEO strategy and increasing the likelihood of SEO success.

Why SEO Matters for Creatives

For graphic designers and video animators and editors, SEO is not just about driving traffic; it’s about reaching the right audience — potential clients looking for your specific talents. Improved SEO means more than just increased visibility; it translates into more business opportunities, collaborations, and a stronger online presence. Essentially, good SEO practices can turn your website into a 24/7 marketing tool, working tirelessly to showcase your skills to the world.

Let’s Begin Our Squirrly SEO Plugin Overview

Let’s now explore the intriguing part – the features. I have utilized Squirrly SEO on one of my websites and have had extensive experience with it in the past, which enables me to share my insights.

Beginning with the keyword research aspect.

Keyword Research: Discover Keywords Relevant to Your Specific Field

The keyword research tool provided is quite simplistic and offers limited flexibility.

You start by inputting your keyword, whether it’s your main keyword or one related to a specific page, and then Squirrly SEO generates associated keywords for you.

Following this, you have the option to select up to 3 associated keywords and conduct an analysis to receive either 20 or 50 more keywords.

The tool, however, doesn’t readily provide long-tail keywords that are easier to rank for, and there are no filtering options available for the keywords.

Despite occasionally offering unexpected results, this is a rather basic keyword research tool that requires some effort on your part.

While I’ve found better outcomes using Google Search Console for keyword research, I sometimes feed those keywords along with the ones from my focus pages into this tool.

It’s evident that Squirrly SEO has included this as an additional feature since the main emphasis is on optimizing WordPress SEO for your website.

For a more specialized keyword research tool, you may want to explore a low-competition keyword finder.

Enhance Your Posts for Higher Search Visibility

The live assistant is there to guide you through optimizing your blog posts every time you sit down to write.

Displayed on the right side are 14 straightforward SEO checkpoints. While these are quite general, they certainly contribute to crafting a more effective blog post.

For a more comprehensive analysis of your page, consider including it in other focus pages to access a 20-point assessment.

Although the live assistant module provides decent guidance, more detailed insights would be beneficial. In such cases, utilizing focus pages would be more advantageous.

It offers tips on utilizing keywords effectively and their placement, which is fundamental. However, a deeper content analysis and suggestions for relevant NLP terms similar to Frase SEO would be appreciated.

For those new to SEO, the live assistant can be a valuable resource. Yet, it’s crucial not to compromise the quality of your blog post by rigidly adhering to its recommendations.

View the suggestions as just that – suggestions, rather than strict rules to follow.

Additionally, the live assistant can assist in enhancing your posts with images, quotes, or content from your other articles.

Bulk SEO: Optimize Your Posts in Bulk

Although this module doesn’t require much explanation, it’s a remarkably convenient tool that I wanted to highlight.

When dealing with WordPress SEO, managing hundreds or even thousands of pages can be challenging. The bulk SEO module allows you to maintain an organized overview while efficiently optimizing your pages.

With this feature, you can easily adjust meta tags, open graphs (including Twitter), and set the indexability of your posts to keep your WordPress SEO performance at its peak.

Simply select the desired changes by clicking on the respective circle, and make the necessary adjustments.

The functionality is well-refined, demonstrating Squirrly SEO’s commitment to providing a seamlessly running SEO software that serves as a helpful tool rather than an obstacle.

Automate to Save Time with On-Page SEO

Although I haven’t utilized this feature much since setting up Squirrly SEO, it can significantly help in saving time.

This tool automates the configuration of variables and SEO settings for your pages, posts, and more.

With this feature, you can easily adjust titles or meta descriptions for your categories, tags, or even custom post formats.

Any content entered here serves as the default text for these types of posts. However, you can always make individual changes when editing specific posts/pages.

This module is excellent as it encompasses essential elements such as title, description, and open graph settings for social media.

IndexNow: Instantly Index Your Website Content

IndexNow is a tool that allows you to promptly request search engines to crawl your key pages as well as regular content.

This tool comes in handy when you publish new pages, articles, or when you update existing blog posts.

By prompting search engines to re-crawl the pages, you can expect a boost in rankings if the updates have a positive impact.

IndexNow is user-friendly – simply input the URLs and you can request re-crawls in bulk.

While your posts are automatically submitted for indexing when changes are made, you can use this feature to manually submit URLs and ensure they are re-crawled.

Setting Up SEO on Your WordPress Website

Configuring your SEO with Squirrly SEO on your WordPress website is a straightforward process that you can customize to suit your requirements.

Once you have signed up for Squirrly SEO and integrated it with your WordPress site, you will be guided through a setup wizard that covers most of the essential configurations. However, if you wish to make adjustments or ensure everything aligns with your preferences, you can do so here.

There are five main categories of SEO settings that you can modify:

Tweaks & Sitemaps: In this section, you can set up your sitemaps and specify how frequently they should be updated. Remember to add your sitemap to Google Search Console or update the URL if you have used a different SEO plugin previously. Additionally, you can optimize Squirrly by removing front-end CSS, minifying code, and more.
SEO Meta: Here, you can adjust your meta tags settings, such as meta titles and descriptions. These settings are crucial for the live assistant to understand your optimization preferences for titles.
Social Media: Enhance your E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) by adding your Twitter and Facebook profiles and setting up a default image for social media sharing.
Rich Snippets: This section focuses on providing detailed information about yourself or your business, including name, logo, and other relevant details. Squirrly SEO will then ensure this data is displayed as schema on your website.
Connect Tools: This module is dedicated to integrating Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and enabling AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It is highly recommended to at least connect Google Search Console to access valuable data insights.

By following these steps, you can effectively configure your SEO settings to optimize your WordPress website for better visibility and performance.

Focus Pages:: Maximizing the Potential of Your SEO Pages

Focus pages refer to a feature that highlights the most crucial pages deserving extra attention.

These focus pages typically represent those that drive the highest traffic and possibly generate the most revenue, whether through advertising, affiliates, or SaaS models.

Your selected focus pages are regularly assessed against 20 different parameters to ensure they are current and optimized for ranking success.

The 20 parameters encompass:

Ranking Potential
Visibility
Keywords
Strategy
SEO Content
Word Count/Page
Platform Optimization
Snippets
Image SEO
Traffic Quality
Platform Performance
Page Authority
Social Media Signals
Backlinks
Internal Links
External Links
Accuracy
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Impressions
Clicks

Each parameter is evaluated with a green/red status or a numerical value based on your efforts, aiming for all to be in the green range.

Squirrly SEO offers practical advice on enhancing the ranking prospects of your key pages. You can access actionable tips for each parameter by clicking on them, providing valuable insights.

For every aspect, you can conduct research within Squirrly SEO or optimize your content for the targeted keywords with the live assistant to enhance your key pages’ performance.

Pro-tip:
Many metrics are sourced from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. It is advisable to integrate these services early on when utilizing Squirrly SEO.

SEO Audit: 34 SEO Checks

While I usually suggest using the free Ahrefs site audit, this particular site audit offers a unique approach.

With this SEO audit, you can analyze individual pages and receive a tailored plan for each page.

The comprehensive SEO audit by Squirrly SEO covers 34 different aspects, ranging from duplicate descriptions to backlinks, authority, social media presence, and on-page analysis.

In essence, it evaluates six main categories:

Blogging: Focuses on content optimization and the need for keyword optimization.
Traffic: Utilizes Google Analytics data to determine if the page receives sufficient traffic and ranks in the top 10.
SEO: Reviews on-page elements like meta tags, meta descriptions, meta titles, sitemap, and robots.txt.
Social: Assesses shareability of URLs, presence of social sharing buttons, and post sharing metrics.
Links: Analyzes backlinks using Moz data.
Authority: Helps in developing a content strategy to improve page rankings and align marketing efforts by covering topics comprehensively.

This SEO audit has been eye-opening, emphasizing the importance of integrating Google Analytics and Google Search Console to leverage valuable insights.

Monitor Your Google Rankings

This feature is incredibly easy to use, functioning as a ranking tracker. You have the option to manually input keywords, or you can effortlessly sync them from Google Search Console, a highly recommended practice.

Afterward, you will receive a comprehensive overview of all your keywords and pages, showing you where you stand in terms of ranking for each keyword.

Although it is a straightforward tool, it is incredibly powerful in helping you keep track of your SEO progress and ensuring that you maintain a top 10 position in the search rankings.

Having tested it myself, I can confirm its effectiveness. You will receive detailed ranking information including impressions and clicks directly extracted from Google Search Console.

How to Utilize Squirrly SEO

To make the most of Squirrly SEO, begin by installing it on your website and allowing it to integrate. Once installed, I suggest selecting your focus pages and having Squirrly SEO analyze them.

After the analysis is complete, you will have a list of tasks to optimize your focus pages.

I recommend utilizing the schema functionality and conducting keyword research regularly to enhance your SEO strategies.

It’s important to note that there is a learning curve when starting to use Squirrly SEO, so remain patient as it will ultimately be beneficial in the long term.

Pricing for Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO offers straightforward pricing options, allowing you to choose between monthly or yearly subscription plans. There are no free plans available.

The optimal choice is the PRO 2023 plan, which caters to all your SEO requirements by granting complete access to the SEO plugin. This plan is suitable for most users, except for agencies.

Opting for the Agency 2023 plan permits installation of Squirrly on multiple domains. However, this plan does not include access to deep keyword research, top-ranking pages leaderboard, and advanced analytics.

Each plan encompasses more than 650 features, with some offering distinctive functionalities not commonly found in other SEO tools such as Yoast and Rank Math SEO.

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Who Should Use Squirrly SEO?

Squirrly SEO is designed for individuals with a WordPress website who prioritize content quality and search engine rankings.

Among the many SEO plugins available, I consider only two to be excellent choices for WordPress websites:

Squirrly SEO
Rank Math SEO

While Yoast SEO is a popular option, I believe it has lagged behind in comparison.

Squirrly SEO offers valuable assistance in setting up schema, improving E-A-T, and enhancing content quality. Additionally, the plugin provides features for conducting keyword research and integrating with tools like Google Analytics to leverage your data efficiently.

Even if your primary focus is not on search engine rankings or producing extensive content, installing a WordPress SEO plugin like Squirrly SEO can significantly benefit you in the long term.

Pros and Cons of Squirrly SEO for Creatives

Pros:

Entire SEO Lifecycle Management: From keyword research to rank tracking, Squirrly has every aspect of SEO covered.
Gamified Learning Experience: With features like Daily SEO Goals and The Race to the TOP, even SEO novices can quickly learn and apply best practices.
Modes for Beginners and Experts: Whether you’re new to SEO or have been optimizing sites for years, Squirrly tailors its experience to fit your needs.
Real-time SEO Feedback: The SEO Live Assistant feature provides instant feedback on your content directly in the WordPress editor, which is invaluable for ensuring that your blog posts, project descriptions, and portfolio pieces are fully optimized.

Cons:

Premium Version Cost: While Squirrly offers a comprehensive free version, the premium plans, starting at $29.99/month, might be a consideration for freelancers or small studios on tight budgets.
The keyword research is quite basic
Lacks detailed long tail keyword information
Learning Curve: Using this SEO tool may come with a challenging learning process.

Conclusion: Is Squirrly SEO a Good Investment?

Absolutely, investing in Squirrly SEO is worth it considering its wide range of features.

While some may find it slightly expensive, I find the price of $30 for 5 websites to be reasonable. It’s important to consider the significant functionality it offers.

Squirrly SEO’s plugin excels in providing various features, such as keyword research, SEO audits, and more.

Therefore, if you are searching for a WordPress SEO plugin to enhance your search engine rankings, I highly recommend exploring Squirrly SEO.

You can begin with the free plan and then decide to upgrade to the paid plan if you find it beneficial.