10 Things To Know About All in One SEO Pack Pro vs. Free

The All in One SEO Pack Pro is one of the top WordPress plugins to help boost your website’s search engine optimization efforts. With more than two million active installations, the free All in One SEO plugin is the second most popular in its class, behind Yoast SEO. WPBeginner.com calls this “the most beginner-friendly and comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin on the market.”

But what makes it a favorite for WordPress users? Is it worth getting the paid version? Here we’ll answer your questions by comparing All in One SEO Pack Pro features with the features included in its free version.

What’s included in both the free and paid versions of All in One SEO?

SEO Audit Checklist

One of the main features of this plugin is the SEO Audit Checklist which scans the overall SEO health of your website in just a few minutes. The result is an overall site score out of 100 possible points and breaks down the items into Critical Issues, Recommended Improvements, and Good Results. You’ll know right away what needs your attention and make necessary changes.

In the first part of the SEO Audit Checklist are Basic SEO items that verify things like, Meta titles and descriptions, images, links, and headers meet SEO best practices.

The second part checks off more advanced practices like schema.org tags, canonicalization, robot.txt files, and more. Lastly, the SEO Audit checks the performance of your websites, such as speed and file sizes.

TruSEO On-Page Analysis

When optimizing a page or post for a focus keyword, or multiple keywords, there are numerous factors to keep in mind. The All in One SEO plugin takes all of the guesswork out by providing an in-depth analysis, ensuring that your content hits all the marks.

For one, SEO is not just about keyword density, although that is one crucial factor. But the location of the keywords matters too. TruSEO will check that the keyword is found in the titles, descriptions, URL, and at least one header in the content. Not only that, but this tool allows you to easily create or change meta titles and descriptions and preview how they will appear on Google or social media posts.

WooCommerce Support

Before making an online purchase, 87% of consumers will first do their research. Finding out information on a product online is one of the many reasons they will choose to shop online instead of in-store. This means if you want to make a sale online, you have to make sure you can be easily found.

All in One SEO was made for your eCommerce website. You can easily tag your products with the correct categories, descriptions, and more. This plugin gives you the ability to set sitewide defaults for similar items or individually optimize each product.

We’ll talk about Advanced WooCommerce SEO Support available in the premium version later on.

Social Media Integrations

All in One SEO helps grow traffic to your site with social media integrations in two different ways.

First, in the Social Networks section of the plugin, you can enter the URLs of your social profiles. This allows All in One SEO to tell search engines like Google which profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more are associated with your brand. This is important because social media profiles often show up in search results.

Second, All in One SEO has a social preview tool that gives you control of what a post looks like when shared on social media. We’ve all seen it before. You post a link to an article, but the image thumbnail doesn’t show up, or the wrong title appears. Through this plugin, you can adjust the settings to tell Facebook what the title should be and what image should be used and preview it before sharing.

XML Sitemap Generator

Search engines discover new or updated content on your website through internal links. But, this isn’t always the most efficient or accurate way to do so. Enter sitemaps. In short, an XML sitemap is a roadmap of your website created specifically for search engine access when looking for new content.

All in One SEO Pack Pro comes with an XML sitemap generator, making crawling your website easy for search engine bots. All the information is broken down into a list of links and separated into categories. Additionally, then each one is notated with the date it was last updated. For example, a site selling widgets might have a separate sitemap for all their pages, one for their posts and one for their products. This helps search engines understand how it all works together.

The premium version, All in One SEO Pack Pro, takes it one step further with video and news Sitemaps, which we will talk about in just a moment.

What are extra features offered in All in One SEO Pack Pro?

Optimizing Taxonomies

If you are new to SEO or WordPress, you might be wondering what taxonomies are. Simply put, taxonomies are the ways content is organized on your website. This is achieved in WordPress in two ways: Categories, which are like big bucket topics of your posts and pages, and the second is Tags, which act like labels that are focused on specific issues within categories.

In the Search Appearance section, All in One SEO Pack Pro gives you the ability to optimize these taxonomies for search engines, just as you would for a webpage or blog post. Let’s say you run a food blog. One of the blog categories might be, “kid-friendly recipes.” You can enter SEO meta titles and descriptions for search engine bots to crawl so your category can be found.

Video & News Sitemaps

As we mentioned earlier, sitemaps help search engines find new or updated content on your website. With All in One SEO Pack Pro’s Video or News Sitemap features you can generate these similar maps specifically for videos or news articles in just a few clicks.

Video Sitemaps inform Google that this content contains videos and News Sitemaps for news articles. This is important for Google to know to create rich snippets on a search engine results page. Research shows that users are more likely to click on a rich snippet result than the standard text results.

Advanced WooCommerce Support

Also mentioned above is All in One SEO’s advanced support for WooCommerce. The upgrade gives you the ability to write SEO meta titles and descriptions for product categories, product pages, and more.  For example, if you are selling board games on your website, you might have a category called “strategy games” where all your strategy-related products are. From here, you can write meta title and meta description the same way you would a blog post.

Once Google understands that this is an eCommerce search result, you can rank in their shopping section.

Local SEO

Local search is still one of the most common ways users do online research when shopping. According to Hubspot, 72% of consumers who perform a local search visit a store within 5 miles of their current location. Before visiting a physical store, they want to know if they carry the products they are looking for, where the store is located, and business hours, among other things.

All in One SEO Pack Pro comes with a Local SEO Module to boost rankings for local businesses. With absolutely no coding needed, you can set up your local business schema by entering some basic information. Details like your business address, hours of operation, photos inside the store, the type of business, and price range.

The local business schema is data structured to help search engines identify your website information as a local business. It can be displayed in the search results as text or the business carousel. Additionally, you can rank on the results page if a user searches Google Maps.

Image SEO

Visual Search is one of the top marketing trends to look out for this year. This means people can find your website through images online, making image optimization more critical than ever.

All in One SEO Pack Pro’s Image SEO module gives you the ability to do a bulk update of title attributes and alt texts for images on your website. This is especially helpful if you have a lot of existing content that has yet to be optimized for search engines.

Is it worth upgrading to All in One SEO Pack Pro?

We understand that every business is different, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO. So, if you’re on the fence,  consider the following to inform your final decision on upgrading to All in One SEO Pack Pro:

• Multimedia Content: If you use a good amount of images and videos throughout your website, upgrading would be especially beneficial. The Video Sitemaps and Image SEO features can be deployed so your website can be found through rich snippets and visual searches.
• eCommerce: If you are selling products online, we know it can be a lot to manage. You aren’t just posting products, but different variations of each product (Color, size, etc.) Upgrading for advanced WooCommerce support will give you an extra hand.
• Local Business: Even if you don’t sell products online, upgrading will improve your Local SEO. If consumers can find you online and do some research, they are more likely to walk into your store.

The free version of All in One SEO will get you on the right path. But to boost your SEO efforts and get ahead of your competitors, the All in One SEO Pack Pro version is worth the investment.