McCrossenSEO™
WordPress SEO Plugin FAQ

Yes. The plugin itself is fully free with no premium tier, no time limit, and no feature gates inside the plugin. You download it once and every on-page SEO fundamental — meta titles and descriptions, JSON-LD schema, XML sitemaps, Open Graph, Twitter cards, robots and canonical controls, redirects, 404 monitoring, bulk editing, and importers from Yoast/RankMath/AIOSEO/SEOPress — works without an account or a credit card. Advanced features like the 59-signal scoring engine and one-click apply come from connecting the plugin to a McCrossen Marketing Platform subscription, but the plugin keeps working as a complete free SEO tool whether you connect or not.

No. McCrossenSEO™ was built to coexist with existing SEO plugins, not fight them. If you already have Yoast or RankMath running, the plugin will detect them and offer to import your existing meta titles, descriptions, focus keywords, redirects, and noindex settings. Once imported you can run McCrossenSEO™ alone, or run it side-by-side during a transition. The output meta tags use standard names so two SEO plugins are never both writing the same tag.

Download the zip from this page, then in your WordPress admin go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip, and click Install Now. Activate it, then visit the new "McCrossenSEO" item in your admin sidebar to walk through initial setup. Total install time is about two minutes. There is no required account creation step and no remote activation — the plugin is fully functional offline as soon as it is activated.

No. The plugin is intentionally complete on its own. A platform subscription unlocks additional capabilities — the 59-signal proprietary scoring engine, one-click apply via the Plugin Bridge, audit-from-editor, AI-generated meta and llms.txt content, and the self-improving weight engine — but you can run a perfectly normal WordPress SEO program with the free plugin alone.

Three things mainly. First, the proprietary scoring engine: the platform crawls each of your pages, scores them across ten weighted signal categories with page-type multipliers, and returns prioritized recommendations. Second, one-click apply: when you accept a recommendation on the platform, the Plugin Bridge pushes the change directly to WordPress within the next 15-minute heartbeat — no copy-paste, no form filling. Third, every applied change is logged with a 30-day rollback so you can revert any single change without restoring a backup. Subscriptions start at $49/month and include credits that cover all of these features plus the rest of the McCrossen Marketing Platform.

llms.txt is an emerging standard that helps AI systems and large language models understand which pages on your site they should reference when answering user questions. The plugin generates a basic llms.txt at the root of your site automatically, listing your published pages and posts in priority order. With a connected platform subscription the file gets richer content — audit-score-weighted, ordered by Search Console traffic, and AI-summarized — but the baseline file generates daily on every install with zero external API calls and zero cost. As more LLM-powered search surfaces emerge, the file becomes more valuable.

Yes. The plugin includes a built-in importer for Yoast SEO, RankMath, All in One SEO, and SEOPress. The importer reads your existing meta titles, descriptions, focus keywords, redirects, and indexing flags from each post and copies them into McCrossenSEO™ post meta. The original plugin's data is left untouched so the import is fully reversible — you can run both plugins in parallel for a few days, verify nothing changed in your search rankings, then deactivate the old one. The importer handles standard post types out of the box and most custom post types automatically.

Yes. WooCommerce product SEO is included in the free plugin: per-product meta titles and descriptions, Open Graph tags, Product JSON-LD schema with brand resolution and stock-aware indexing, sitemap inclusion with out-of-stock product handling, and the same bulk editor that works for posts and pages. There is no separate WooCommerce extension to buy and no premium gate on commerce features.

McCrossenSEO™ requires WordPress 6.2 or later and PHP 8.0 or later. Most managed WordPress hosts have moved to PHP 8.1 or 8.2 by default, so this is rarely a concern. The plugin is tested against the current and previous major WordPress release on every build.

In free standalone mode, no. The plugin runs entirely on your WordPress site and makes no outbound API calls except for sitemap submissions and update checks. When you choose to connect to the McCrossen Marketing Platform, the plugin sends the URLs you ask the platform to audit (so the scoring engine can crawl them) and stores an authenticated connection token. No customer data, post content, or visitor data leaves your site without an explicit action you initiate.

It is a proprietary URL audit system that runs on the McCrossen Marketing Platform. When you request an audit for one of your pages, the platform crawls the URL and scores it across 59 individual signals organized into ten weighted categories: title and meta, heading structure, content quality, internal linking, schema, technical SEO, image optimization, mobile readiness, accessibility, and authority signals. Each signal returns a pass, partial, or fail status with a specific recommendation. Page type (article, product, landing page, etc.) adjusts which signals matter most. The engine self-improves over time as accepted recommendations correlate with ranking outcomes.

When you accept a recommendation in the platform — for example, "rewrite the meta description for /about/" — the platform stores it as a pending apply for your site. Your WordPress site's plugin runs a 15-minute heartbeat that asks the platform if there are any pending applies. When there are, the plugin pulls them down and writes the change to your post meta directly, then reports back the result. You see an "Applied" notification in the platform within a quarter hour of accepting it, with no copy-paste or manual save step required.

Yes. Every applied change goes through a 30-day rollback log. The plugin stores the previous value of every field it overwrites, indexed by the apply event. Inside the WordPress admin you can review every applied change with its before-and-after values and roll back any one of them with a single click. Manual edits made directly in the WordPress editor are also logged into the same rollback system.

Two ways. First, the free plugin alone covers more ground than most paid SEO plugins — full schema, full sitemap, redirects, 404 monitoring, bulk editing, importers, llms.txt, and WooCommerce — without any feature gates inside the plugin. Second, the optional platform connection moves SEO from a "configure your meta tags" tool into a workflow tool: the platform tells you what to fix and applies it for you. Most other SEO plugins put the work of identifying issues entirely on you and your screen. McCrossenSEO™ shifts that to the platform and brings only the action items back to your editor.