We recently published our list of favourite Drupal modules for 2022, and now we rounded up a new list for you—the top Drupal modules to help your SEO. They are specifically designed to boost your search rankings by guiding you to an SEO-optimized technical structure that helps search engines have a better understanding of your content.
A quick tip before we get to the list: if you want to dig deeper into the topic, check our SEO Best Practices training. It might be just what you need to upskill your SEO knowledge and drive actual results in your organization.
1. Pathauto
This module automatically generates URL and path aliases for various content entities (such as nodes, taxonomy terms, and users) without requiring users to manually add them. This way, you have human-readable, SEO-friendly URL aliases, such as “/category-name/page-title”, instead of an ID-based URL like “/node/123”. Pathauto generates those aliases through a token-based pattern system, which can be easily customized.
2. Redirect
Even if you enable clean aliases using Pathauto, Drupal does not remove the old path. This is a problem for your SEO because if search engines identify the two URLs as duplicates, you can get “sandboxed”. This means you’ll be put on probation and your page ranking will be restricted.
To avoid this, the Redirect module specifies and maintains a canonical redirect path for any content you want. You can redirect requests from one path to another, or to an external URL, using any HTTP redirect status. This way, you prevent visitors from receiving a 404 error if a path changes or is removed, improving your SEO in the process.
3. XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are an easy way for you to inform search engines about which web pages are available for crawling. The XML Sitemap module creates a sitemap that follows the specifications from sitemaps.org, helping search engines crawl your website more efficiently and keep updated results. The module submits your sitemap automatically to search engines on a regular basis and also comes with several submodules that can add sitemap links for content, menu items, taxonomy terms, and user profiles.
4. Schema.org Metatags
Schema.org provides a set of standardized properties that improve your content structure, making your content more readily shareable and visible on search engines and boosting your SEO. The Schema.org Metatag module, automatically generates a JSON-LD code for your page headers, extracting associated data from your content and applying the correct Schema.org properties. These associations are configurable, so you can decide how your content is tagged, depending on what you think is most useful to users.
5. SEO Checklist
The SEO Checklist module uses best practices to create a functional to-do list of modules and remaining tasks, greatly reducing the guesswork in your SEO. It breaks tasks down into functional needs like Title Tags, Paths, Content and more.
A screenshot from a Drupal 8 website using the SEO Checklist module
6. Real-time SEO for Drupal
The Real-time SEO for Drupal module performs a real-time SEO analysis on your webpages, helping you optimize content around your main keywords in a fast, natural way, making it a very handy tool for quick SEO fixes. This module checks elements anyone’s bound to forget, like if your posts are long enough to rank, if you've written a meta description at all, if your metadata contains your main keyword, if you're using headings and subheadings, and so on.
7. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation
Page speed is a direct ranking factor for search engines such as Google, which makes the Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation module a very useful module for your SEO, especially if you’re not using a minifier. AdvAgg improves your website’s front-end performance, helping with your loading times and stability. The performance benefits are achieved by using some of the features found in AdvAgg and its submodules. Also, be sure to do a before-and-after test by using Google's PageSpeed Insights and WebPagetest.org.
8. Scheduler
Auditing and removing outdated content is critical for SEO, which makes the Scheduler module very useful to improve your rankings. As its name suggests, this module schedules node publishing and unpublishing. This allows editors to automate updates in advance instead of having to be on-call to make updates at specific times. Scheduler integrates with the core Content Moderation module via the Scheduler Content Moderation Integration to allow you to schedule changes to the moderation state of content.
👩💻 Check Our List of the Best Drupal Modules for 2022