Home » Review » [Case-Study] Easy WP SEO Review – How Efficient it is?

[Case-Study] Easy WP SEO Review – How Efficient it is?

Palla Sridhar

April 3, 2015

WordPress and SEO go together. Tools like Easy WP SEO indicate a score of on-site page-optimization. The On-Page SEO score is a representative of collection of various on-site factors.

These include title tag, meta tags, heading tags like H1, H2, H3, Content of first and last 100 words, readability, primary keyword, keyword density, whether title contains keyword, whether title contains atleast 3 words, whether permalink contains the keyword, open graph meta tag, whether H1 tag contains keyword, whether content contains atleast 500 words and whether content has 0.01 to 1.00% keyword density and so on. So just like any other tool, Easy WP SEO also follows it’s own brand set of rules.

What is the Worth of Easy WP  SEO plugin?

But how do we check its efficiency? Whether the premium tool which sells for $17 on Warrior Forum, is it really that good? Will it be useful in ranking our pages higher? Does it contribute to our SEO effort? Are its ranking signals in par with Google? Does it follow white-hat techniques?

To answer all these questions, I bought this tool and successfully applied to one of my WordPress sites. The site had 27 posts to date. The blog is earning an average of $5 per day or $150 per month. The website is in the health niche. Most of the content is NOT completely unique and re-written. But main emphasis is made on on-site SEO and does not contain much backlinks. The site PR is also zero.

About my Niche Site and Easy WP SEO

The below is the list of 27 posts with On-Page SEO Score from Easy WP Seo plugin.  I have sorted them on the basis of number of views which is coming from another WordPress plugin. I also collected information from Google Analytics about the same website for the last 2 months. i.e from Feb 2015 to Mar 2015.

The on-site scores from easy-wp-seo-plugin for a health niche site

This case-study showed an interesting conclusion.

Analysis of Top-posts using Easy WP SEO Plugin

According to WP- Post Views plugin, the number 1 post has 80k page views. The On-Page SEO Score was 90% and was highlighted in green. When I checked into its inner details, I found the following on-site parameters for this post.

There were no over-optimization warnings. The keyword density was 0.03%. There were no secondary keywords. In this tool, there are 4 tabs. Analysis, Keywords, Links and Content. Since we have completed updating the post, we are interested only in the Analysis and Keywords part. The Analysis tab is further sub-divided into On-Page, Readability, Duplicate and Speed. The On-Page tab is further divided into Title, URL, Meta, Heading and Content. The title contains keyword, atleast 3 words and up to 66 characters. The permalink contains the keyword. The description meta tag doesn’t contain keyword, contains up to 160 characters and open meta tag is found. The H1 tag contains the keyword. The content contains at least 500 words and has between 0.01 to 1.03% keyword density.

From the Readibility score, the content is standard with an average grade level of 7 and is found to be understanding by 12 to 13 year olds. Coming to the social score, facebook total score was 7 with shares accounting for 6 and likes 1. The highest score was found to be 3954 with an average of 850. The Google+ score was 0, twitter score was 1, stumble upon score was 0. The corresponding average scores stood at 33, 54, 1 respectively.

What age readers can read this post – derived from readability statistics of easy-wp-seo plugin

I was mostly impressed by this tool, because it provided some LSI keywords. My top post had 22 LSI 1-word keywords, 11- 2 word keywords, 9 – 3 word keywords and 4  – 4 word keywords. There was only 1 internal link connected to one of the site’s posts. There were no videos.

Top 10 posts statistics using On-Site Score as a Index

Out of all the 27 posts, 10 of them had red color. According to the plugin developer, a red color indicates a bad on-site SEO score. So indirectly we can say that, there were 17 good posts. Out of the top 10 posts, there were 3 posts that had bad on-site SEO score. The top 10 posts had a minimum of 4000+ page views.

Comparison with Google Analytics Data

When I compared the traffic statistics from Google Analytics for the last 2 months, it showed a different picture. Leaving the home page aside, I analyzed the top 9 posts.  Here also the top post was the same as that produced by Wp-posts views plugin. But out of the 9, there were 4 posts that had bad on-site SEO score. One even had a paltry score of 33%.

GA data of health niche site for the last 2 month showing pagviews and unique page views

Conclusion

So as a broad perspective we can say that, if the on-site score is green, the chances for better traffic stood at between 60 to 70%, from this case-study. Also having a score of 90% or greater is more beneficial as found from the top 3 posts.