Yoast vs. Rank Math : SEO comparison

SEO is essential for attracting customers to your website. Although good content is fundamental to this, there are several technical optimizations to your website that will go a long way to improving your SEO scores. If you run your site on WordPress, it is quite important to use good plugins to assist with your SEO. In this post, we explore Rank Math — a newcomer to the WordPress SEO world and also contrast it with Yoast, a leader in this space.

Introduction to SEO

Does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) really matter? Is SEO important for every business? If you are someone with those questions, then this article is for you. Undoubtedly, SEO improves the overall visibility of your website by making it easy for the search engines to find and understand the content on your website. Having the right SEO strategy can help in attracting customer traffic to your website as well as grow your sales.

What are the key elements that contribute to a good SEO strategy? Many website owners find SEO intimidating and scary because of its complex nature. This is especially true because the search engines like Google constantly change their algorithms for ranking website content. That said, creating quality content is the best way to rank your pages within the search results. However, a lot of other technical factors such as on-site optimization, off-site authority building and site performance come into play when facilitating an effective SEO process. It is for this, you need good tools on your website to implement and enhance your SEO strategy.

If you are building a new site or redesigning an existing one, you might also be interested in how to relaunch your site without messing up your SEO

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SEO for WordPress Websites

Are you someone who has hosted your website on WordPress? Then you would need an excellent plugin that can help you in making your site search engine-friendly. Yoast SEO is the premier WordPress plugin for SEO that is super powerful. For many it is the “go-to” SEO plugin as it is easily understandable and makes SEO simple for a non SEO-savvy.

Though Yoast has been in the market for a very long time with an established user base of over 5 million active installations, there is a new player in the market that is rapidly growing. Rank Math is the new tool in the SEO domain that has emerged as a successful alternative to Yoast SEO upgrade.

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What is Rank Math? 

Rank Math is the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin for WordPress that assists you in optimizing the content on the website to receive maximum traffic. It also offers built-in suggestions or recommendations for your content based on widely-accepted best practices. You can easily customize essential SEO settings, control which pages are indexable and decide how you want your website to appear in search results, with Structured data.

We feel that in comparison to Yoast SEO, it is:

• Faster
• Easier
• More intuitive

Yoast vs. Rank Math

Most users, who are using or already used Rank Math, believe that it is a sheer alternative to Yoast SEO, which is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, and a tough competitor too. Yoast SEO offers several features but with some limitations. The premium version of Yoast comes with more and enhanced features needed for a website. Unlike Yoast, Rank Math provides all the features available in the premium version of Yoast SEO and more, in its free version. Let’s have a quick look at those:

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User Interface

The User Interface (UI) is the most crucial part of any software tool. A clean and user-friendly interface makes it super easy for users to follow. When it comes to UI, Yoast SEO focuses mainly on the functionality than its modular design. There’s no doubt people love the amazing features; however, you can not ignore the not so appealing UI.

Rank Math offers a clean and well-organized UI that is visually attractive. Also, the features on the UI are very simple to manage, i.e., you can easily turn them on and off as and when required. The modern UI of Rank Math has not only got a new modular design but also enhances the end-user experience. When considering the “easy-to-use” interface, Rank Math UI is the best bet.

XML sitemaps

A sitemap is a crucial part when it comes to indexing your website. Without a sitemap, Google’s crawler cannot fetch your site. Hence, it is mandatory to have a sitemap generator on your site, which continuously pings the update of the website to major search engines.

While both Yoast SEO and Rank Math plugins generate the sitemap of your website automatically, the URL of the sitemap differs, which has a negligible impact on the search rankings. In both plugins, generating a custom sitemap is achievable after respective post types such as news sitemap, image sitemap and others are available on your site.

Google Search Console Integration

Although both Rank Math & Yoast SEO enable integration with Google Search Console, Rank Math makes the job much easier. All you need to do is verify your GMAIL account and select your search console profile. Rank Math will fetch all the associated Search Console Data in your WordPress dashboard. Yoast SEO, when integrated with a Search Console, provides very minimal information with an unclean dashboard and site performance analysis.

Open Graph Support and Search Engine Verification

Rank Math supports the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. It helps to add Open Graph metadata to all your posts in a visual way. Rank Math allows verification of your website with various search engines and multiple social networks effortlessly.

SEO Scoring

The SEO scoring system in the Yoast plugin has red/yellow/green smiley faces, which help in the content analysis (SEO and readability). The three colours indicate how well the site is optimized, i.e., bad, okay, and good respectively. Rank Math offers a more sophisticated scoring system that is easily understandable to a newbie. It provides you with a score in exact numbers from 0 to 100. You can improve your SEO score by comparing each of the SEO points.

Breadcrumbs

The highly customizable breadcrumbs function in Rank Math helps you in navigating your website easier. While enabling this, you can also choose several options like separator character, whether you want to display homepage breadcrumb or not, setting up the homepage label, and others. You can also customize the breadcrumb symbol matching with your website theme.

Images

Do you want to add ALT tags to your images automatically? Rank Math provides automated Image SEO where you can automatically add the ALT and Title attributes to all your images.  

Focus Keyword Assignment

Every page on the website is assigned a focus keyword or a series of focus keywords as primary targets to rank in google. In both Yoast SEO and Rank Math plugins, you’ll find a focus keyphrase input field for on-page SEO recommendations. Without it, both the plugins cannot evaluate the content on the page and provide further feedback on how to improve the content for better optimization.

The free version of Yoast SEO allows you to assign one target keyword per page, whereas, in Rank Math, there is  flexibility to choose up to 5 keywords. One needs to register on to the website for this and Rank Math will provide both the necessary content and SEO recommendations for primary and supplementary keywords. This feature, however, is available only in the premium version of Yoast SEO, unlike Rank Math.

Optimizing five keywords per post or page attracts more traffic than optimizing one keyword. Moreover, Rank Math helps in fetching keyword suggestions right from the google when adding focus keywords. This is a powerful way to not only discover related keywords but also use them as focus keywords to optimize the post or page.

WooCommerce SEO Tools

Yet another feature that is available in Yoast SEO’s premium version and Rank Math’s free version is the WooCommerce SEO. This WooCommerce plugin helps you create an online store for your site with multiple features like creating listings, adding payment gateways, adding products and others. Rank Math also lets you optimize your WooCommerce pages, which means your product details can now rank on search engines.

Pricing

This is another major topic of discussion that will help the users make an informed decision in choosing the winner. Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math plugins follow a different pricing strategy. While Rank Math is entirely free, Yoast SEO has both free and premium packages. There are limited features in the free plan and to access all the premium features, one has to purchase the Yoast SEO Premium for $89

Site-wide analysis

It gives total site-wide analysis with just single click:

The analysis results are displayed in graphs with the details as shown below.

Summary

Both plugins — Yoast and Rank Math — offer similar functionality with different levels of features. Rank Math does very well on its easy-to-use interface and a very comprehensive setup wizard. Rank Math’s free version offers all the essential features required for optimizing SEO and is almost equivalent to Yoast’s paid version. If you are already using Yoast SEO and are planning to switch to Rank Math, needless to say, Rank Math makes this transition seamlessly possible.

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