We all know that WordPress already provides some inbuilt SEO features like URL, metadata, etc. But is this enough for your SEO tasks? No. And that is why there are SEO plugins available that you can use to further optimize your content.
When it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress, there are quite a few available in the market. For instance, all in one SEO plugin, Squirrly SEO, SEO press, and many more. But out of all, these two names always stand out, they are Rankmath and Yoast SEO plugin.
Sometimes it might become quite difficult for a beginner to choose a plugin between them as it works pretty much the same.
In this article, we are going to do a detailed comparison between the RankMath vs Yoast SEO plugin. And we hope that this article helps you to select a plugin for your On-page SEO.
But before we start, we should know how SEO plugins help WordPress websites.
Table of Contents
How does an SEO plugin help a WordPress website?
SEO is more than just installing a plugin. There is so much more to search engine optimization. Starting from keyword research, competitor research, the performance of the website, and many more. Installing any of these plugins not going to rocket up your traffic.
These plugins only guide you in your content creation and optimization process. The basic guidelines like SEO title, meta description, keyword density and distribution, readability, image alt text, length of your content, and many more. Basically, SEO plugins help you in your On-page SEO and make your content ready for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
Besides all these basic guidelines it also helps to create essential files like robot.txt, sitemap.xml, which are very essential for indexing a website properly in the search console.
Some of the typical tasks of an SEO plugin are:
- Generating a Sitemap
- Providing instructions in the robot.txt
- Giving search console instructions on which content/Urls to crawl
- Manage your redirects
- Analyze your site and give SEO recommendation for action
Important– None of these solutions is going to blow your website traffic. It is your own responsibility- what you do with those recommendations, how you write content, and configure the plugin.
Yoast SEO Introduction
When it comes to SEO plugins, Yoast is always on top of the list. It has more than 5 million active installations. And that makes it the most reliable SEO plugin.
Since its inception in 2010, Yoast has helped millions of websites across the globe. It does everything in its power to please the admin and the search engine crawlers. Its dedicated team of developers, testers, and SEO experts does their best to improve its performance with every new version.
Yoast is available in two versions free and premium. The free version of the plugin is enough for a beginner while the premium version can give you some more extra features. You can download the free version of Yoast from the wordpress repository.
Functions of Yoast SEO
As we already mention that Yoast is available in both free and premium versions. While the free version of the plugin works fine, but as a premium user, you can add a few additional functions and reduce the need for extra plugins. Here is an overview:
Core features of Yoast SEO Plugin
- The keyword Analysis
- Readability analysis
- Snippets preview for both Mobile and Desktop
- Add Metadata
- Create XML sitemaps
- Breadcrumbs
- Canonical URL to avoid duplicate contents
Premium Features
- Social preview
- Insight tool for focused keywords/keyphrase
- Optimization for synonyms and related keywords
- Internal linking suggestions and many more
Pros and Cons of using Yoast SEO
One of the best things about Yoast is that it is completely beginner-friendly. And also very easy to set up too. The plugin is also compatible with other themes and plugins as well.
You will get regular updates for the plugin. The support team responds promptly to your requests, however, the premium users have absolute priority here. So if you’re a free version user then you might have to wait a little longer for your request.
Many developers often criticize the plugin by saying that the code is overloaded with too many functions. And this can lead to complications, vulnerabilities in the security of your site, or slow the loading speed.
RankMath Introduction
Rankmath is another popular search engine optimization(SEO) plugin for wordpress. Compared to Yoast, Rankmath is quite new to the market. It was developed by ‘MyThemeShop’ an Indian origin company. Currently, it has more than 400,000 active installations. The developers of the plugin claim that Rankmath is the swiss army knife of SEO tools for WordPress. And also the reviews of the plugin are positive.
Functions of RankMath
The plugin is free to use. But the developers admit that lately, we will receive a premium version as well. But the existing function will remain free to use.
The plugin already has all the SEO relevant settings included in it. So now we have to see what new features they are going to integrate into it. Here is an overview:
Some Features of RankMath:
- Easy to set up
- Clean and simple user interface
- Lightweight
- Great support
- Bulk edit title and descriptions
- Inbuild schema
Pros and Cons of using Yoast SEO
A free SEO plugin with very good support. It responds to your request within 24 hours. You will also find both a forum and a Facebook group where you can ask your questions. The service is quite better than any other free SEO plugins. Besides the support, the interface of the plugin is very easy to understand and sophisticated.
The disadvantage of the plugin includes the lack of transparency about the developers or the providers of the plugin. And it also reports about the creation of fake reviews on WordPress.
Another thing is that you can migrate from Yoast SEO plugin to Rankmath, but not from RankMath to Yoast, there are no such settings for this.
Now when we are done with our introductions of both the plugins, let start our comparison.
Comparison between Rankmath and Yoast SEO Plugin
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – Set up Configuration
Setup is the first process for any software before use. So let’s compare their setup configurations first.
You can install both the plugins from the wordpress respiratory. Installing and activation parts of both the plugins are similar to any other plugins. After activation, you can see both the plugins create a unique section in your wordpress admin sidebar.
Yoast SEO
To configure Yoast with your site, click on the installation wizard. It will provide you with an 8 steps setup wizard where you have to do the basic settings like site type, organization type, search engine visibility, authors option, title setting, etc. To make the installation process easier, Yoast also provides a video guide during the setup process. Which might be quite helpful for the beginners.
RankMath
Rankmath, on the other hand, is simple and clean. After the installation, it will give you a 5 steps setup wizard. First, you need to create an account either via Google, Facebook, or mail. But you can also skip that process for now as well. After that, you need to add your site name, search console details, sitemap configurations, advance optimization, and confirmation of the setting. Once you are done with your pre-setup, you can then go for more advanced settings.
In terms of Setup configuration, both the plugins provide a great user experience. However, RankMath provides more options like search console, sitemap, and SEO optimization options, which helps in automating some of your SEO tasks like making external links no-follow, redirect attachment pages. So that’s why the wizard of rank math is preferable than Yoast SEO
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – User Interface
The user interface of any software is the most crucial thing. A clean, simple, and feature-rich but straightforward user-interface appear to be more helpful for the users. So let’s compare both the interfaces.
Yoast SEO
When it comes to the interface of Yoast SEO, it isn’t up to the mark. Although you can perform all the configurations. All the essential settings are neatly organized under well-defined categories. But not under one tab. And that might confuse the beginners.
RankMath
On the other hand, RankMath, which provides a simple and clean dashboard. Where you can easily enable and disable primary functions with just one click. All the information related to the different features is described inside the box along with its status. As compared to Yoast, RankMath provides a visually attractive interface which not just looks good but also provides great user experiences as well.
Both plugins provide useful configurations for users. But the Rankmath dashboard or interface is cleaner and easy to understand than Yoast.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – keyword Assigning
Keyword Assigning is an essential part of an SEO tool. Without assigning your focus keyword/keyphrase you can not optimize your page or post for a set of keywords.
Seo plugins help you to populate your focus keywords, write title and meta description, set up the permalink by adding your keyword. Basically it takes care of all vital things related to your On-Page SEO.
Both the plugin allows you to assign your keywords and add all the vital information and apply different methods to show how your content is optimized based on your assigned keyword/keyphrase.
Yoast SEO
If you are using the free version of Yoast, it will allow you to assign a maximum one keyword to your content. You can optimize multiple keywords by assigning the keywords one at a time. Otherwise, you can upgrade to the premium plan, which allows you to optimize your content for multiple keywords at the same time.
Once you assign your Keywords it will guide you through what you need to add more in your content, your readability score, Google preview, and how well the optimization process is going on and many more.
Yoast represents the optimization level as green, orange, red, Basically good, average, and critical respectively.
The premium version of Yoast also analyzes the different forms of your keyphrase, like the plural form and past tenses. It can also analyze different languages- English, French, German, and Spanish.
RankMath
Unlike Yoast, Rankmath allows you to assign a maximum of 5 keywords for optimizing. But to activate this feature, you will need to sign up with RankMath, which is entirely free.
Like Yoast, Rankmath also provides guidance on how to properly write content and make it targeted and optimized for that specific keyword/keyphrase. The guidance of both the plugins is almost similar, but RankMath gives you an optimization score from 0-100 digit instead of lights. Which we felt more satisfying. If your score is more than 80 you can see the box turned green. Optimize your content until it turns green. The more you can score the better it is for your SEO.
Moreover, if you sign up with RankMath then it will give keyword suggestions. Once you start typing in the focus keyword textbox, it will start giving you keyword suggestions immediately.
In terms of Keyword Assigning both the plugin works really well. But the scoring system of RankMath is more satisfying to me than Yoast. And it also gives you related Keyword suggestions as well whereas Yoast lacks this feature. But Yoast can optimize the content for related keyphrases of the primary keyword/keyphrase, which you have to do manually in Rankmath.
Both the plugins here work quite well in their relative space. So choose the one that you are more comfortable with.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – Performance Comparison
I’m not a tech geek, so it will be quite difficult for me to compare their performance technically.
But RankMath claims itself to be very lightweight, fast, and well coded, and Yoast is almost 1.5x larger than them.
And on the other hand, Yoast in their new version introduces a feature called “indexable” which they claim to improve the performance of your site and make it faster.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – Pricing
Talking about the price, RankMath is absolutely free to use. But the developers of the plugin claim that we will see a premium version lately. In the case of Yoast, it has both the versions, free as well as paid. The free version of the plugin works quite well, but if you need some advanced features, you can upgrade to the premium version.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – Schema Integration
Schema is very helpful for any website. It helps to increase the click-through rate of your article on the search results. It lets you enable the feature snippets, star ratings, defining post format, and much more.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is compatible with Schema.org, but it has no inbuilt feature to add schema. You need to install an add-on separately as it entirely skips the schema parts.
RankMath
On the other side, RankMath comes with full sehema.org configuration. You can see the rich-snippets tab either on the right-hand side or at the bottom of the page or post.
It is always good to have all the settings inside your SEO plugin rather than installing a separate plugin. Since the schema is an essential part of SEO, so it’s important to have this setting inside your primary SEO plugin. So in terms of schema integration, we choose RankMath over Yoast.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – Search Console
Search Console is a tool that helps you to track data of your site indexing, keyword performance, and many more.
Integrating the search console with RankMath is quite easy. All you need to do is to give your Gmail address and verify it so that it can fetch all search console data in your WordPress dashboard.
Yoast also allows you to integrate the search console. But it doesn’t provide any interface where you can access all the data of your search console.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – XML Sitemap
A sitemap is a very essential part of every website when it comes to indexing. Without a sitemap, your website can not be fetched by search crawlers. It’s important to have a sitemap generator on your site, and it continuously pings the update of the website to search engines.
Both RankMath and Yoast SEO plugin generates sitemaps for your website automatically. But the URL of the sitemap will be different for each plugin, however, that doesn’t have any impact on your site. Moreover, in both the plugins you can generate custom sitemaps as well.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – WooCommerce SEO
WooCommerce is a popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress. This plugin alone can convert your entire site into a complete online store. You can add products, create listings, configure payment gateway, track your revenue, check stock and many more can be easily managed with this plugin.
Both RankMath and Yoast SEO plugin supports WooCommerce functionality and integrates easily with the plugin. After integrating it starts fetching the metadata of products so it can directly start appearing in the search results.
The integration of WooCommerce in Yoast comes with the premium version, whereas RankMath provides it for free.
So if you are looking for a free option you can use RankMath.
RankMath vs Yoast SEO – Support
In the case of Yoast, if you are a user of a premium version then will you get premium quality support 24*7. But if you are a free user, you can check their guide, it contains almost all the information.
On the other hand, RankMath provides 24*7 service to all its customers. On top of that, they also have a Facebook community where you can ask for help.
Yoast SEO vs RankMath- which one you should choose?
From the above comparison, we can see both the plugins are very good with their features. But being free RankMath is providing more features than Yoast. And some of the RankMath features are not even available in Yoast. While a few of them are available only in the premium version.
Our take- if you are using the premium version of Yoast, then there is no need to switch to RankMath. The premium version already provides you almost all the features of RankMath. And for the rest of the features, you can use any third-party tools as well.
However, if you are using the free version of Yoast, then you can definitely switch to RankMath, as it provides a lot more features than Yoast.
I hope this comparison between Rankmath vs Yoast SEO helps you to choose a suitable plugin for your website.
And if this article helps you to learn something new, then please share it.
Thank You😃…
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