Documentation

Installing

From your WordPress admin: Plugins → Add New, search for Impex Rank SEO, then Install and Activate. It appears in your admin menu under that same name.

Manual install: download the zip from the WordPress.org page, then Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.

Requirements: WordPress 5.6 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer. Tested up to WordPress 7.0. No other plugin is required.

First run

The setup wizard opens automatically on activation and takes about two minutes. It asks for four things:

• Site type — whether the site represents an organisation or a person. This decides whether we output Organization or Person schema.
• Site name and logo — used in schema and as the social sharing fallback image.
• Which post types to index — archives, attachment pages and stray taxonomies are usually best excluded.
• Search engine verification codes — optional, and you can add them later.

You can rerun the wizard any time from Impex Rank SEO → Help & Docs, or from the Setup Wizard link on the plugin's row in your Plugins list.

Migrating from another SEO plugin

Go to Impex Rank SEO → Tools and find Import from another SEO plugin. Pick your current plugin, run the import, check a handful of posts, then deactivate the old plugin.

Do not run two SEO plugins at once. You will get duplicate meta tags and conflicting canonical URLs, which is worse than having no SEO plugin at all.

Tools detects which of the two is installed and ticks it in the source list. The import is additive: it never overwrites Impex Rank SEO data you have already entered, and it does not delete anything from the old plugin, so you can roll back by reactivating it.

Migrating from All in One SEO or SEOPress is not automated yet. Tell us if that is what you are on — it moves up the list when people ask.

XML sitemaps

Your sitemap index lives at /impex-sitemap.xml — not WordPress core's /sitemap.xml, which is a separate feature. Individual sitemaps are split per post type and per taxonomy, include images, and are styled with XSL so they are readable in a browser.

Control which post types and taxonomies appear under Impex Rank SEO → Sitemaps. Anything set to noindex is excluded automatically — a page should never be both in your sitemap and blocked from indexing.

Submit /impex-sitemap.xml once in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. After that, IndexNow pings them on publish.

There is also an HTML sitemap for visitors: drop the [impex_html_sitemap] shortcode on any page.

Structured data

We output a single connected JSON-LD @graph rather than separate disconnected blocks, so search engines can follow the relationships between your organisation, the site, the page and its author. It covers Organization or Person, WebSite with a Sitelinks Searchbox, BreadcrumbList, WebPage, Article, Product for WooCommerce, FAQPage and LocalBusiness.

Test a published URL — not a draft preview — in Google's Rich Results Test. Draft previews are noindexed, and we deliberately skip graph output on noindexed pages.

Redirects and the 404 monitor

Every 404 on your site is logged with its referrer and a hit count, under Impex Rank SEO → Redirects & 404. Any logged miss can become a redirect in one click, and changing a post's slug creates the redirect automatically.

Supported types: 301 permanent, 302 temporary, 307, and 410 gone. Regex matching is available for bulk patterns — test it on a single URL first, since a bad pattern can capture more than you intend.

AI writer

The AI writer lives under Impex Rank SEO → AI Writer. It uses your own API key with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini — you add the key under AI Providers, and billing stays between you and that provider. We are not in the middle of the request and never see your content.

The free plugin generates 3 articles per calendar month. The counter resets on the 1st. Removing that cap, and running the topic queue unattended on a schedule, is what the Impex Rank SEO Pro add-on does — see what Pro adds.

Nothing else in the plugin talks to an outside server. The free release makes no calls to us at all.

Activating a Pro licence

Impex Rank SEO Pro is a separate download, not on WordPress.org. It extends the free plugin and does nothing on its own, so keep the free plugin installed and active.

1. Buy a plan on the pricing page, then download the zip from your account.
2. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, upload it, activate.
3. Go to Impex Rank SEO → Licence and paste the key from your purchase email.

After that it updates itself like any other plugin. One key covers the number of sites on your plan; you can free a seat from the Sites list in your account, or with Remove licence on the site itself.

If our licence server is ever unreachable, Pro keeps working: the last confirmed verdict is cached and honoured for 30 days without contact. A firewall or an outage on our side cannot switch off something you paid for.

Troubleshooting