The 5 Best SEO WordPress Themes for 2023

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Ben Sibley

“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”

Traffic.

It’s the lifeblood of every website. And the problem is…

Getting it is so hard! Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. You need to give yourself every advantage you can get when it comes to traffic generation. Let your first competitive edge be the theme you choose.

The WordPress themes below are all highly optimized for the search engines and will set you up to rank well in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If you publish quality content, these themes will provide the fast load times and clean, optimized code.

Keep reading to find our top picks for the best SEO WordPress themes.

You should also check out our content marketing themes, affiliate marketing themes, and themes made for AdSense too.

If you want help planning your articles and post updates, you’ll like my new plugin, Strive Content Calendar. It includes an editorial calendar, post revisions, and much more.

WordPress themes for SEO

If you want an optimized site or a site to sell your own SEO and marketing services, you can’t beat the list below. Each theme here is up-to-date with the latest version of WordPress and is fully responsive. That means they’re mobile-friendly and look amazing on every screen.

Here are my top picks for best SEO WordPress themes for 2024.


  • 1. SmartSEO by Axiom Themes (Themeforest)

    SmartSEO WP theme

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    Theme Description

    The first few themes have been optimized for search engines, but SmartSEO is another theme that is also optimized for selling SEO services.

    SmartSEO has bright and bold colors, simple layouts, and premium features. With the one-click demo install content, you can get a site up and running incredibly quickly. Like some other themes here, SmartSEO comes with the Visual Composer plugin for building totally custom pages.

    Regarding features, this WordPress SEO theme comes with hundreds of fonts from Google Fonts, flexible color customizations, icons from Fontello, landing page options, and lots of shortcodes for highly flexible content.

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  • 2. SEO WP by Lumberman Designs (Themeforest)

    SEO WP

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    Theme Description

    SEO WP is the best-selling theme on Themeforest for SEO and marketing agencies. Not only has it been around for years and collected hundreds of 5-star reviews, but it’s also been updated as recently as 2 months ago. The developers behind this awesome theme have added and optimized so many features it’s now in a class of its own.

    If you recognize SEO WP, it’s because you may have seen it used on other real marketing sites (I know I have). Hopefully, that doesn’t put you off because it’s definitely a testament to its reliability and effectiveness in the real world. The design of SEO WP is solid and the feature set is enormous. This versatile theme could be used for a link building tool, brand marketing service, or analytics company.

    As an online marketer, you’ll love that SEO WP is fast-loading, fully responsive, and simple to customize. As part of the package, you also get 10 premium plugins bundled with SEO WP ($186 value). The add-ons make it an outrageous bargain. You also get all of the images used in the demo sites, so you’ll have content ready-to-go from day 1. When you add in premium icons, a form builder, e-book landing pages, and social sharing forms, the value is just ridiculous. If you have a digital marketing agency, check out SEO WP now.

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  • 3. Schema by MyThemeShop

    Schema - fast WP theme

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    Theme Description

    The Schema theme is built to perform. It’s written with clean, SEO-friendly code that loads fast and helps your site rank higher. As a simple and precisely designed theme, visitors will have no trouble finding and engaging with your content.

    As the name implies, the Schema WordPress theme has integrated Schema.org metadata which means you can get rich snippets in the search engine results pages. Rich snippets get more attention than other elements and getting more eyeballs means more clicks on your search result (more traffic!).

    If you’re looking to publish blog posts or video content, Schema will be an excellent choice. It’s not well-designed for a portfolio or image-based website, but if you’ll be mostly working with text, it’s perfect. In addition to the clean code and design, there are some amazing features for a blog or magazine site.

    Schema has built-in ad management for display ads throughout your site. There’s also a review system that lets editors and visitors alike rate products. Together, you have ample opportunity to monetize and earn from every post you publish. Plus, Schema has all manner of customization settings available in the options panel. The developers at MyThemeShop really thought of everything with Schema.

    We also have a review of the Schema theme with more screenshots and details.

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  • 4. MoneyFlow by MyThemeShop

    MoneyFlow SEO blog theme

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    Theme Description

    MoneyFlow is another SEO-optimized blog theme by MyThemeShop, and it’s gorgeous.

    The call-to-action in the header is a great way to lead visitors to an email offer or other lead generation tool. Right after, you’ll find an interesting layout for featuring your best and latest content. Bloggers will feel right at home with MoneyFlow. If you have a lot of guest publishers or publish frequently, the layouts in MoneyFlow can easily accommodate a high quantity of content.

    The MoneyFlow theme is great for generating traffic and reducing bounce rates. There are so many interesting, attention-getting elements in the design. If you write captivating headlines and select images that pop, there’s no way anyone will resist reading another article.

    With all the search traffic, you’ll want a way to monetize. Luckily, MoneyFlow includes AdSense integration, a review system, and WooCommerce support! By the way, WooCommerce can be used to sell your own products, but it can also be used to create an affiliate store where the product pages link out to vendor sites. Overall, MoneyFlow is an excellent theme optimized to perform in search engines like Google and convert traffic effectively once visitors are on your site.

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  • 5. NewsToday by MyThemeShop

    NewsToday

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    Theme Description

    Want to publish a stream of optimized, SEO content? NewsToday is ready to go.

    This is responsive theme handles large quantities of content exceptionally well. That’s because it has featured post, latest posts, top stories, trending stories, and a breaking news ticker for promoting on-site content. You’ll even notice small touches like the very small menu text in the menu and sidebar allowing more menu items and longer headlines to display comfortably. The visible search bar in the header is a nice addition for making content easier to find too.

    There are plugins like Yoast SEO that can help you to optimize your site by adding an XML sitemap and Open Graph data to your site. That said, NewsToday does a great job of providing you with a platform for a fully optimized WordPress site.

    Due to its adaptable style, Newstoday will be an excellent choice for any site looking to get tons of organic SEO traffic to its pages. That includes blogs, magazines, and news sites. Content-centric sites often live and die by the search engines, so put your site in the hands of an optimized theme like the awesome NewsToday WP template.

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Which SEO theme is right for you?

If you want to publish a content-heavy site like a blog or digital magazine, Schema and MoneyFlow are both very good choices. NewsToday is also a great option although it’s design quality is a bit inferior.

If you’re starting an SEO company and want a theme to help advertise your services then your best option is SEO WP. It’s an attractive and extraordinarily feature-rich theme. With all the bundled plugins, it’s a value that’s hard to beat. If you’re not feeling the design, SmartSEO is a solid alternative.

Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley is a WordPress theme designer & developer, and founder of Compete Themes.