Squirrly SEO Plugin Review: Is It Really All That Great?

About a month ago, I came across a video by Quicksprout about how to get more traffic from SEO.

It’s a topic that I always love learning more about, and Quicksprout has a good reputation when it comes with giving helpful information on the subject of SEO as a whole.

But as I watched the video and read the article beneath it, I was surprised to find that the SEO plugin they recommended was something called the Squirrly SEO plugin.

Instantly, my curiosity was piqued.

Why this plugin? What was so special about this one that they called it a Must-Have plugin?

I wanted to know. But more than know about it, I wanted to get my hands on it test it out.

I’ve downloaded the plugin, dug into it a bit, and what I found was rather surprising…

SEO by Squirrly: The Plugin for Non-SEO Experts

There are a lot of SEO plugins that can help you optimize your on-page SEO. But Squirrly takes a lot of the hassle out of it all that goes into to that optimization.

Using Squirrly is different than say, WordPress SEO by Yoast; the look, feel, and user experience are like night and day.

Putting the aesthetics of the plugin aside, the way it works is also very different.

I love the idea behind this plugin.

Essentially, this plugin makes it possible for anyone to wrangle on-page and WordPress SEO. Using Squirrly, you can do keyword research inside of the Post Editor, choose the best keyword to target and then optimize your content based on the suggestions given to you by Squirrly.

It even makes sure that you don’t over optimize your content (i.e. keyword stuffing).

After you’ve been using Squirrly for awhile, you can look under Performace Analytics to see how your blogs posts are doing.

From this section you get an overview of your site:

• See what keyword you’re targeting per post/page
• Get a percentage rating for your optimizations to see if you need to improve
• Check your page’s position in Google SERPs
• View a page or post’s monthly traffic
• Check to see if your URL has been indexed or not

Squirrly does more than help you optimize your blog posts. You can use the plugin to run a site SEO audit and optimize your entire site so that it’s 100% SEO ready.

You can:

• Set up canonical URLs
• Add your XML sitemaps to search engines
• Optimize the first page of your site with a title, meta description, and keywords
• Turn on Open Graph for Facebook and Twitter
• Connect Tracking tools like Google Analytics, Facebook and Pinterest.

Other Features of the Squirrly SEO Plugin

One of the features that I really loved about this plugin is all the tutorials that came with it.

Instead of just fumbling around trying to figure out how to get the most out of this plugin, there are quick slideshow tutorials in the backend that walk you through all of the features, what they do, and how to use them.

It’s very handy to a newbie, and it’s not something many plugin authors spend time creating for a free plugin. (Did I mention that this is free?)

There are a few features of the plugin that require upgrading to the Pro version of Squirrly ($19 per month for it), but you can do just about everything you need with the Lite version.

Wrapping It Up

I’ve only had a month to really work with this plugin, but so far, I really like it. There are a few glitches on occasion with the keyword research option not generating, but other than that, I haven’t found anything I don’t like about it.

The biggest feature that really ups the quality of this plugin is the keyword research tool. SEO is a world that confuse many people, including on occasion, some who are SEO consultants.

The Squirrly plugin is a great option for making your site SEO optimized, but only as long as you actually use it. If you haven’t given it a test run yet, I suggest you do. I’d love to hear your opinion about it.