Rank Math vs Yoast SEO – Which SEO Plugin is Better?
If you manage your blog or website with WordPress, you are probably considering how to optimize it for search engines. Taking this step will help you gain an advantage over your competitors.
The most common way to do this is to integrate third-party WordPress SEO plugins. This gives you control over your blog or website SEO. Among the many options available on WordPress are two big players; “Yoast SEO” and “Rank Math”.
You are on this page because you must have considered the two plugins while looking for a suitable SEO plugin for your website. And you may be finding it difficult to pick an option because of the numerous positive reviews and devoted users they both have.
Therefore, this post will help you to decide by comparing two popular WordPress SEO plugins.
Content:
- Yoast SEO Overview
- Rank Math Overview
- Is Rank Math Better than Yoast?
- Rank Math vs Yoast – Features Comparison
- Rank Math vs Yoast – Ease of Setup
- Handling SEO?
- User Interface and User Experience
- Rank Math vs Yoast – Pricing Structure
- Conclusion
Yoast SEO Plugin Overview
Yoast SEO is a popular SEO plugin for WordPress-powered sites. We can attribute this popularity to its developers’ relentless effort in adding powerful features that help you to rank your web pages.
It is suitable for any self-hosted WordPress website, whether you are running a blog or an eCommerce store. It offers both a free and premium option. Its free plan has most of the useful features to make your website optimized for SEO. However, you have limited control over automation and cannot analyze multiple keywords.
You can set targeted keywords and track their performance, add optimized titles and meta-descriptions to your web pages, manage site maps, and perform many other useful functions offered by Yoast.
Rank Math SEO Plugin Overview
Rank math is an SEO plugin that helps you create SEO-optimized content and web pages with the help of AI. It does this by ensuring your website contents follow SEO best practices.
What makes the rank math SEO plugin exceptional is that it offers more useful features in its free plan than other plugins do. It also offers a more robust approach to SEO.
Some important features offered by Rank math are that it is easy to use, and it integrates with google analytics to analyze search data for better suggestions. It also supports schema markups for rich snippets, and it is highly customizable.
Over time, plugins such as AIO SEO, and Yoast have dominated the WordPress SEO space. But since the release of Rank math in 2018, its impressive performance has made it acquire a huge fanbase.
It has over a million active installations and a 4.9-star rating on the plugin’s directory. You couldn’t agree more that this is a worthy competition with such an impressive performance.
Rank Math vs Yoast – Which Plugin is Better?
This is a rather tricky question to answer. Both Rank math and Yoast SEO offer excellent SEO optimization features for your website. Although Rank math offers more free features, you may not find every one of those features useful.
In the end, deciding which is better can only be determined by your needs. You can consider the features they both offer and how they handle SEO. You should also consider your budget and SEO needs.
We will help you to decide by comparing their features, SEO practice, user experience, and pricing.
Features Comparison – Rank Math or Yoast SEO?
In this section, we consider the free and premium features offered by both Rank math and Yoast. We also consider if their pro version is worth it.
Yoast SEO Free Features
The free version of Yoast SEO is ideal if you run a small business website, and you can easily keep track of its contents. The following features are included in the free version:
- Canonical URL and meta tags.
- Support one focus keyword.
- Sitemaps for search engines to understand your website structures.
- Templates for SEO title and meta-description.
- Schema.org integration for rich search results.
- Control how breadcrumbs appear on your website.
- Data management for faster load speed.
- SEO analysis for website contents.
- Readability analysis for website contents.
- Supports 19 languages.
- Google preview to see how your content will appear in search results.
- Include innovative schema blocks to display your how-to’s and FAQ content directly to users in search results.
- Help with cornerstone contents and internal linking to optimize your site structure.
- Helps to translate your website content to structured data when necessary.
- It includes a role manager to manage your team.
The major limitation with the free version is that you have limited control over automation. You have to manually keep track of your website contents, including outdated content, and track best-performing keywords.
Also, you can only rank your content with one keyword. But you can go beyond these limitations by upgrading to the Yoast premium version.
Rank Math Free Features
Whether you are managing a small blog or a complex website, the free features offered by Rank math should be sufficient. You only need the pro version if you require more integrations. The free features are as follows:
- An easy-to-follow setup wizard.
- It integrates 16 plus Google schema markup types to optimize your content in search results.
- You can optimize your website content with unlimited keywords.
- With content AI, you can write SEO-optimized and engaging content with the help of Artificial Intelligence.
- Google search console integrations to display important information right on your website.
- You can track how your keywords rank on Google.
- Easily Integrate google analytics with your website for keyword analysis.
- Integrate with the LSI keyword tool to give you different variations of your focused keywords.
- Easily analyze your site’s SEO performance with a couple of clicks.
- You can test your website SEO with the Rank math 30 detailed SEO test.
- You can set up and manage page redirection at scale.
- Supports SEO for local businesses.
- Provides Schema.org SEO optimized bread crumbs (Theme independent).
- Monitor and fix 404 errors for a better user experience.
- Deep content analysis for on-page SEO.
- Suggests contents for internal linking.
- Manage and assign roles to team members.
- Supports WordPress multisite.
- Automatic keyword suggestion from Google.
- Integrates with page builders such as Elementor and Divi.
- Add AMP-friendly schema markups and meta descriptions to Google web stories.
- Advanced and Customizable SEO for WooCommerce.
- Bing and Yandex instant indexing.
- XML Sitemap.
- Easily import SEO settings from other plugins. For example, switching from Yoast to Rank math.
Rank math offers you everything you need to make your website functional in the free version. This involves automation and integration with essential third-party apps. The only limitation is that you can only use it on a single site
Yoast SEO Premium Features
Below are the exclusive features offered by Yoast when you upgrade to the pro version.
- Enjoy email support.
- Unlimited main keywords.
- Expand Yoast SEO with its range of extensions, including WooCommerce SEO, Local SEO, and video SEO.
- Internal linking blocks.
- Social appearance template and social media posts preview.
- Insights into your main keywords.
- Get your website content optimized for related content and synonyms.
- Optimize your content to be more natural with different verb forms.
- Get internal linking suggestions.
- WooCommerce SEO support.
- Filter posts that have no link pointing to them.
- SEO Workflow to make optimizing your site easier.
- Automatically create redirects for deleted posts. You can also manually create and manage redirects.
- Automatically redirects from 404 “Not found” pages.
- Intelligent word form recognition with Yoast SEO keyword analysis to prevent over-optimization.
- Connect with Zapier to easily share your content to over 2000 destinations.
So with the Yoast pro version, you have much more control over your website SEO.
Is Yoast SEO Pro Worth It?
After comparing the free features with the premium features, deciding if upgrading to premium is worth it depends on your use case. If the features offered in the free features are sufficient for your SEO needs, you may not need the pro version.
But you may want to evaluate the performance of the free features, in comparison to other plugins before you upgrade to the pro version.
Rank Math Premium Features
In addition to the exclusive features offered in the free version of Rank math SEO, there are other benefits you can enjoy by upgrading to the pro version. Listed below are the benefits.
- Advanced feature for Google Analytics Integration.
- Track your keyword rank on Google. (Up to 50,000)
- Up to 600 free content AI credits.
- Full reports on Google index status.
- Advanced schema generator.
- Email reports for SEO performance.
- White label Email reports for SEO performance that you can send to your clients.
- Import Schema from any website.
- Speakable schema markup for voice assistance.
- Integrate with Google trends right inside your dashboard.
- Sitemaps for Google News SEO.
- Sitemaps for Google SEO for video.
- Advanced Image SEO.
- Advanced local SEO with multi-locations.
- Advance SEO for WooCommerce.
- Supports SEO for Easy Digital Downloads.
- Advanced filter for posts.
- Supports 6 additional types of schema.
- Automatically detect video for Google video schema.
- Supports up to 500 client sites.
- Frequently fetch google data (3 days intervals).
- Unlimited days for google data preservation.
- Weekly Email reports.
- Manage clients.
- Track the top 5 winning and losing keywords.
- Track the top 5 winning and losing posts.
- Advanced overview for SEO audit.
- Check the ranking keywords for each post.
- Track keyword position for the past 12 months.
- Add custom Schema with HTML or JSON+LD
- Schema validation with Google.
- Build your Schema.
- Add multiple Schemas (unlimited).
- Supports more than 840 Schema types.
- Automatically implement Schema.
- Get included in google dataset schema.
- Add facts to your schema.
- Add a carousel to the schema. Etc.
These are some of the features you enjoy if you switch to Rank Math pro. You can further check their website for the complete list.
Is Rank Math Pro Worth it?
Given the extensive features offered by Rank math in its pro version, we believe it to be a worthy option for your SEO needs regardless of what they are.
They also offer a flexible and affordable pricing structure that you can choose from depending on your budget and needs. We, however, suggest that you play around with a free account to understand how it works before deciding to upgrade.
Ease of Setup – Yoast vs Rank Math
An important point to consider when deciding on the best SEO option for your blog is the ease of setup. The easier it is to set up the plugin, the faster you are at getting started with your SEO optimizations. Also, if this is your first time, you shouldn’t need the help of a WordPress expert to help set up the plugin.
This section compares the ease of setup between Yoast and Rank Math.
Yoast SEO Plugin – Ease of Setup
Yoast SEO provides you with an Installation Workout to get you started as fast as possible. After installing and activating the plugin, log in to your admin dashboard and go to Yoast >> Tools.
On the Tools page, scroll down till you see the option “First-time SEO configuration”. Then select the “Yoast SEO configuration Workout” link from the information provided.
The link takes you to the Yoast SEO workout, where you can easily set up your site by following the on-screen instruction. To get started, you will need to select the Start Workout option.
You are then taken through a five-step process to set up your website SEO. The steps involve an automatic SEO data optimization; setting up your organization’s name, uploading your logo, and site tagline.
You also have the option of setting up your social profile, opting to share your data with Yoast, and signing up for the Yoast newsletter.
Once you move through these steps, your site should be set up for SEO. If you are using the premium version of the plugin, you can continue to “THE CORNERSTONE APPROACH”. There, you can concentrate on ranking specific, highly important articles. You can also go to the “ORPHANED CONTENTS” to link internal contents and make them easier for Google to find.
That is how easy it is to start your SEO experience with Yoast.
Rank Math Ease of Setup
After installation and setup, you will be taken directly to a setup wizard. First, you can connect your Rank math account. If you haven’t created an account, you can do so by going to the Rank Math website.
Go ahead and click Connect Your Account to continue.
You are then taken to the login page where you can log in using the account information that was sent to your email address when you signed up. Once you connect your Rank math account to your website, you are taken to the Rank math wizard where you can begin to set up your site in six easy steps.
Depending on your needs and plan, you can choose the Easy mode, where everything is pre-configured. You can also choose the advanced mode, where you can customize the setup. And if you are using the pro plan, you can select the Custom mode where you can upload a custom setting file.
Once done, click on the Start Wizard button to continue.
The next step is to import your settings from other SEO plugins on your website to save time. You can also skip this step. Thereafter, you can connect your google search console and analytics in a couple of clicks.
The last two steps involve enabling Sitemaps for your website by flipping on the necessary switches and optimizing your posts by asking Rank math to automatically add nofollow attributes to external links. Once you are done with this step, your site is set up for SEO.
While the setup process has more steps than Yoasts’, most actions to be taken are automatically set up. In conclusion, we believe both Rank math and Yoast have an easy-to-set-up process that even a novice can find easy to follow.
Rank Math vs Yoast – How do they handle SEO?
The most important point to consider while choosing between Rank math and Yoast is their search engine optimizer feature. In this section, we are going to consider the key SEO features they both offered and how they affect your website ranking.
How does Yoast handle SEO?
Yoast SEO pack helps you to add a canonical tag to your webpage URL, a feature that lets search engines know that the content is original. Also, it helps you to add meta tags to your web page contents by providing you with a meta box. This way, web users can understand your content.
It also helps you to create Sitemaps for Google to understand the structure of your site and integrates with schema.org. This markup helps your website to display rich data in search results, thereby making it appealing to web users. Also, to reduce bounce rate, Yoast helps you to set up breadcrumbs.
But the most prominent tool Yoast gives you to optimize your website for search engines is its content analyzer. With this tool, you can add focus keyphrases, and optimize your website content for these keyphrases.
This way, you can decide what you want your website content to rank for. Yoast also helps you to link internal content, which can increase your conversion rate and transaction revenue.
Those are the main ways Yoast SEO helps you to optimize your website for search engines.
How does Rank Math handle SEO?
Rank math helps you to optimize your website for search engines by integrating with google schema markup to display rich content in search results, thereby making your content appealing to web users. It also helps you to include unlimited keywords in your content. That way, your page contents can rank for your desired keywords.
An outstanding feature that Rank math offers to help you with SEO is Content AI. This tool helps you to write SEO-optimized content by providing you with useful suggestions while you type.
It also integrates LSI keyword tools that help you with multiple variations of your focused keyword. This way, you are more sure of keeping users engaged while reading your content, leading to a reduction in bounce rate.
Further, Rank math gives you the option to overlay images or gifs over social media icons. This serves as a click magnet and increases page views and is a great feature for social media optimization.
Rank math also offers you a smart redirect manager that automatically redirects visitors from broken pages. This helps improve the user experience on your website.
It also helps you to display SEO-optimized breadcrumbs for improved user experience which helps to reduce bounce rate.
Rank math further provides tools to increase page views by suggesting content for internal linking. And to prevent you from losing visitors, it automatically scans and fixes 404 error pages.
Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math approach SEO differently. Your choice of preference should depend on your SEO needs. You can also test their performance by using the free version before upgrading to premium.
But if you run a large business website, and you want some automation with your SEO, then Rank math will work better for you.
User Interface and Experience – Rank Math vs Yoast
Next on our Rank math vs Yoast SEO comparison points is the user interface and experience. In this section, we are going to compare how easy it is to customize and use the features offered by both Rank math and Yoast SEO.
Yoast SEO Interface
Yoast SEO offers you a clean and simple user interface that is both visually appealing and doesn’t add strain to your eyes. Its dashboard uses cards to place essential sections in places that are easily accessible.
Its “Features” user interface (UI) is minimally designed and is spacious enough to make it easy to locate items. It provides a simple button that can be clicked to turn on/off features.
Its Integration UI is likewise easy to use.
Additionally, it has an intuitive Webmaster tools UI that provides features for search console integrations.
To sum up, Yoast offers a satisfactory user experience. You can navigate to any section of the plugin by hovering your mouse over its logo, from where you can select an option from the drop-down menu. And if you need help, you can easily access the support button from any page of the plugin.
Rank Math Interface
Rank math equally offers you a clean and intuitive UI. The essential modules are placed evenly apart from each other to create a simple block of cards.
It also has an easy interface for analysis overview, which shows you your website’s SEO performance.
Its analytic dashboard is likewise intuitively designed to give you easy access to essential analytics tools.
The tool’s interface is equally designed to give you easy access to every useful tool to manage and customize the plugin.
In short, this plugin was built for a delightful user experience. You can easily navigate through the pages and tools you need, and learning to use them is quite an easy task. If you need help, you can hover over the plugin tab and select the “Help and Support” option from the lists.
In conclusion, we think both Yoast SEO and Rank math has an impressive user interface and user experience.
Pricing Structure – Rank Math or Yoast?
The last point we are to compare is the pricing structure. Sure enough, before you consider upgrading to any pro version of your choice of SEO plugin, you need to consider your revenue.
Also, you will want to be sure that you are getting back much more value from the service you are paying money for. That is why we advise that you try out the free version to gauge its performance.
Our comparison so far should have given you a general idea of which SEO plugin you should use between Yoast SEO and Rank math. Their pricing structure can further help you to decide, judging by your budget.
Yoast SEO Premium – Pricing Structure
Yoast SEO offers two premium pricing structures that offer features that are not included in the free version. One starts at USD 99/Year, and the other at USD 229/Year. So let’s compare the features offered in both pricing structures.
YOAST SEO PREMIUM PLUGIN (USD 99/YEAR)
With this plan, you can:
- Optimize your website with unlimited keywords.
- Filter dead links.
- Get Facebook and Twitter Sharing previews.
- Use Internal link suggestions and content quality overview when you write.
- Get full access to Yoast SEO Academy.
PLUGIN SUBSCRIPTIONS (USD 229/YEAR)
You enjoy the following benefits when you subscribe to Yoast plugins.
- Complete access to 5 essential Yoast plugins.
- Full access to every Yoast online training course.
- 24/7 support and updates for the year.
Yoast’s pricing structure is simply defined. You can either choose the premium plan which offers you every benefit Yoast SEO has to offer, or the subscription plan which offers you more service from Yoast at a discount.
Rank Math Premium Pricing Structure
Rank math, on the other hand, offers three tiers of pricing in its pro version. They include the Pro, the Business, and the Agency plan. They likewise offer advanced features that are not included in the free version.
THE PRO PLAN (USD 59/YEAR)
This plan offers you the following benefits.
- Supports unlimited personal websites (including WordPress multisite).
- 15 Content AI Credits (Free).
- Track up to 500 Keywords.
- Includes a powerful Schema Generator.
- 24/7 customer support.
THE BUSINESS PLAN (USD 199/YEAR)
The business plan offers you the following benefits.
- Support up to 100 clients’ websites.
- Up to 125 content AI credits (Free).
- Track up to 10,000 Keywords.
- A powerful Schema Generator.
- 24/7 priority customer support service.
THE AGENCY PLAN (USD 499/YEAR)
You enjoy the following benefits with the agency plan.
- Support up to 500 client websites.
- Up to 600 free content AI credits.
- Up to 50,000 keyword tracking.
- A powerful Schema Generator.
- 24/7 priority customer support.
Rank math offers you a flexible pricing structure that gives you the option to choose a plan according to your needs. This way, you won’t be paying beyond what you use. You can select the pro plan if you are an individual or blogger. The business plan if you are a small business or freelancer, and the agency plan if you are an Agency.
In summary, Rank math has a more flexible pricing structure when compared to Yoast.
Conclusion – Rank Math vs Yoast SEO
To sum up, Rank math and Yoast SEO are two popular SEO plugins that offer unique tools to optimize your WordPress site for search engines. It can be difficult deciding a suitable SEO plugin for your website out of the two, given their impressive performance.
This post helps you to decide by comparing important points to consider while choosing a suitable plugin for WordPress SEO on your website.
We have compared the features offered by the two plugins, including free and paid features. The comparison includes how easy they are to set up and how they approach SEO. We also compared their interface design, user experience, and pricing structure.
We hope that our comparison has helped you to decide on the most suitable SEO plugin for your WordPress website between Rank math and Yoast.
In case you have any questions or suggestions, you can drop them in the comment section below. You may also be interested in our definitive guide to SEO in WordPress.
