A novel planar plasmonic metamaterial for electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light characteristic is presented in this paper, which consists of nanoring and nanorod compound structures. Two bright modes in the metamaterial are induced by the electric dipole resonance inside nanoring and nanorod, respectively. The coupling between two bright modes introduces transparency window and large group index. By adjusting the geometric parameters of metamaterial structure, the transmittance of EIT window at 385 THz is about 60%, and the corresponding group index and Q factor can reach up to 1.2 × 10³ and 97, respectively, which has an important application in slow-light device, active plasmonic switch, SERS and optical sensing.