Rank Math Vs Yoast SEO: 2 Best SEO Plugins

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With a good WordPress plugin, your website can be optimized to attract thousands of visitors on a daily basis. WordPress plugins play a major role in keeping many WordPress sites afloat, us included (check out our breakdown of plugins here). Think of plugins as the perfect accessory to your outfit (website), it adds functionality as well as style. Trying to get the best SEO plugin for your WordPress site? By now you must have come across the big names in the world of WordPress SEO plugins: Rank Math and Yoast or how some would like to put it Rank Math vs Yoast SEO. Both are great choices, but which is uniquely suited for your exact needs? That’s a question many would like to answer so stay with us for a bit so we can give you the rundown on both these awesome plugins.

Rank Math

Rank Math is considered to be the youngster on the scene for WordPress SEO plugins, launching just 3 years ago in late 2018. Rank Math, however, doesn’t let that hold them back in delivering one of the best experiences possible with SEO. The plugin has become increasingly popular, currently having 930,000+ active installations and growing daily. Like many of its contemporaries, Rank Math has a free and premium version.

Pros and Cons of Rank Math

How to Setup and Use Rank Math

When first installing and activating Rank Math, there is an immediate setup wizard available to guide you. The setup wizard allows you to easily configure the basic SEO rules and settings in order to fully enhance the SEO performance of your site. To ensure that you have access to all the features offered for the free version, it’s recommended to create an account.

The setup wizard allows you to configure some basic features such as:

• Connecting to Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics
• XML Sitemap
• Basic SEO tweaks such as no-indexing empty category and tag archives, and nofollow external links.

Once the initial setup wizard process is completed you will also get the choice to set up the Advance Options.

How to Use Rank Math

Using Rank Math can not possibly be easier than it is now. It’s well known that the user interface of a software product is extremely important and by no means did Rank Math slack off when designing theirs. When creating content in WordPress’s editor, Rank Math is fully integrated in the sidebar allowing you to view the SEO analytics and edit the information with little to no hassle. All that’s needed to open the Rank Math setting is to click the toolbar in the top right corner of the page and you will be good to go. Rank Math’s setting toolbar is made up of tabs that give you access to all the features needed to fully optimize your content for search engines. The tabs include:

• General – allows you to edit snippet, set focus keyword, and view SEO analytics for the content.
• Advanced – allows you to set robots meta such as choosing to index or no index the page.
• Schema – lets you configure schema markup for the page.
• Social – lets you view and edit the thumbnail, title and description of social media posts that will be shared.

Another talking point for the awesomeness of Rank Math’s UI is the modular setup of its dashboard. All the features available on the plugin can be found on the dashboard in modules, giving a brief description of what they do and a toggle to turn them on or off.

Unique Features For Rank Math

Rank Math has a laundry list of useful features that is responsible for the plugin being so popular. The real kicker is that many of these great features are available on the free version, which is definitely one of Rank Math’s unique features Key features on Rank Math are:

• Meta descriptions and titles (free version)
• Social media descriptions (free version)
• Focus keyword analysis (free version)
• XML sitemap (free version)
• Structured schema/data (free version)
• Search console (free version)
• Knowledge graph and local SEO (free version)
• Image SEO (free version)
• Internal link suggestions (free version)
• Breadcrumbs (free version)
• Link counter (free version)
• Redirects (free version)
• 404 monitor (free version)
• Google Analytics (free version)
• Basic and Advanced WooCommerce SEO (free/premium version)
• Google News SEO sitemap (premium version)
• Google Video SEO sitemap (premium version)
• Integration with Google Trends (premium version)

404 Monitor:

This is a unique feature only found on Rank Math, it allows you to manage your website and keep track of 404 errors that have happened. 404 errors can be awful, especially when you are just starting out and need to generate as much traffic as possible. Luckily with Rank Math you can monitor your site and ensure these situations don’t happen. With help from the 404 monitor tool, you will be notified whenever an error occurs, receiving information on the URL used, a number of times a visitor tried to view the page (hits), and the time it happened. Imagine that you are the captain of a ship, how grateful would you be to instantly know when your ship has sprung a leak?

SEO Analysis Tool:

The young buck Rank Math has a tool for comprehensive SEO analytics. It scans your site and gives a report on how to resolve the problems detected. This tool is another positive for Rank Math because its senior Yoast SEO does not provide this function.

Pricing Plan For Rank Math

Pro Plan: This is ideal for individuals and solopreneurs. For just $59 a year you will have access to unlimited personal websites, be able to track 500 keywords, have a powerful schema generator at your disposal, and have 24/7 support. Business Plan: At $199 a year, this plan is perfectly suited for freelancers and business owners. With this plan you will be able to support up to 100 client websites, Track 10,000 keywords, get a powerful schema generator, along with 24/7 priority support. Agency Plan: For $499 a year you can support up to 500 client websites and track 50,000 keywords along with all the other features from the business plan. In most cases it’s not necessary to be a high roller and go for the business or agency plans, the free version is more than enough to cover the basics. We personally started out with the free version and were more than satisfied, as time went on we upgraded to the pro plan and we have never been more pleased.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most popular and frequently used WordPress plugin for SEO, having over 5 million active installations. Tutorials about optimizing a WordPress website’s SEO rankings often assume that you’re using this plugin, so to many people, Yoast is WordPress’s default SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is the big brother when it comes to WordPress SEO plugins, it was first launched back in 2010 and has stood at the top ever since. It can satisfy all your SEO needs with its free and premium versions.

Yoast SEO Pros and Cons

How to Setup and Use Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO also has a setup/configuration wizard. The configuration wizard will walk you through some common setup questions and automatically set up basic features so that the plugin starts working perfectly straight away without any complicated configurations or technical details. To get to the configuration wizard you will have to access it through the Yoast SEO dashboard.

How to Use Yoast SEO

When you’re working in the editor on content, Yoast SEO gives you two ways to set up your SEO information. For the first method, you will get a meta box below the editor and this appears both on the block and classic editors. The second and most recent method will show the SEO information in the editor sidebar when using block editor. Its up to you to decide on which method to use. From personal experience, we prefer to use the sidebar method because it allows us to see all the SEO information easily.

Similar to its junior, Yoast SEO uses a modular approach that lets you view and manage the features. Yoast SEO provides a list of features in the Features tab, so you can choose which ones are relevant to your website. You can toggle them off or on depending on how much functionality you need.

Unique Features For Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO boasts a wide variety of features that have literally taken it to the top ranks of SEO plugins. Some of the key features that have contributed to this plugin’s success are:

• Meta descriptions and SEO titles (free version)
• XML sitemap (free version)
• Focus keyword analysis (free version)
• Sitewide schema (free version)
• Content schema type (free version)
• Search console (free version)
• Social media descriptions (free version)
• Basic WooCommerce SEO (free version)
• Cornerstone content (free version)
• Breadcrumbs (free version)
• Link counter (free version)
• Redirect manager (premium version)
• Internal link suggestion (premium version)
• Internal link blocks (premium version)
• Multiple focus keywords (premium version)
• Related keyphrases (premium version)
• No ads (premium version)
• Support (premium version)
• Elementor integration (premium version)

Readability Analysis

On the web content is king, and having clean and readable content is essential for securing traffic to your site, visitors love it and so do search engines. Yoast SEO has an amazing and unique feature, Readability Analysis that helps you to create simple and easy-to-read content. The content on your site is not just there to fill space. It should be fun and easy for the reader, while also containing all of the necessary information that they need or want about a topic. By creating engaging posts with good writing, you will have a good SEO rank, and the readability analysis tool can help with just that. The readability analysis is not there to dumb down your content, the goal is to make it accessible and easier to understand by both readers and machines. The tool scans your text and gives helpful feedback to improve it, checks sentence and paragraph lengths, adds transition words when needed, and gives your content a Flesch reading ease score.

Payment Plans

Yoast SEO has a premium version that costs $89/year. This particular plan is only valid for one site but licenses for using multiple sites will have an additional cost at a discounted price. Outside of the premium plans, Yoast SEO offers four premium extensions. Each extension is specific to a different type of SEO.

• Video SEO for WordPress – from $69 a year for a single site.
• Local SEO for WordPress – from $69 a year for a single site.
• News SEO for WordPress – from $69 a year for a single site.
• Yoast WooCommerce SEO – from $69 a year for a single site.

Rank Math Vs Yoast SEO: Which is the best plugin for you?

Let’s be clear here, whether it’s Rank Math or Yoast SEO neither of them is a bad choice. Both plugins are powerful and will do wonders to help your site reach the pinnacle of SEO rankings. Yoast SEO and Rank Math are both popular plugins, with 4.9/5 stars on WordPress; however, there is a notable difference in features between them. Rank Math offers more features than Yoast SEO, features such as the 404 Monitor and the SEO Analytics tools are not offered on Yoast SEO at all. Other features such as the Redirect Manager, Internal Link Suggestion, and Multiple Focus Keyword are only offered on Yoast SEO’s premium version while you can get it for free on Rank Math. So, is Rank Math better than Yoast SEO or is Yoast SEO the better option? Who is the winner of this versus battle? It is up to you to decide. Although Rank Math offers more features than Yoast SEO, it may not be the best choice for you. It really all depends on whether or not you think those additional functions will be more beneficial than using a plugin with more years under its belt like Yoast SEO.