Is Rank Math plugin better than Yoast? [Comparison between 2 best WordPress SEO plugins] 

How are you optimizing your website content for traffic, leads, and sales? I bet you are either using Rank Math or Yoast – these two are some of the most popular right now. But people often ask me, “is Rank Math plugin better than Yoast?“

First of all, let’s agree that you can’t do the search engine optimization process manually because you might never get it if you aren’t an SEO expert. However, with the right SEO tools, you are halfway there.

I know Yoast has been in the market for a long time and integrated with other third-party tools and popular plugins. But the new kid on the block is about to take over the SEO space.

Guess what?

It has a wide range of cool features. So, I thought you might want to check out all about it before making a decision.

Let’s dive right in.

What does Yoast SEO do?

Yoast is a WordPress plugin, which you can download and install right inside your WordPress dashboard and helps you to optimize your site for search engine traffic.

It does this by analyzing your content against your chosen targeted keyword, checks out for keyword density, allows you to add Meta descriptions, give keyword suggestions, and suggests relevant fixes to help in driving organic traffic to that specific piece of content.

What is Rank Math plugin?  

It’s the same as Yoast – only that it comes with its set of features. Some people have coined the name, “the Swiss army knife of WordPress SEO.”

It was started in New Delhi, India and now has over 500,000 users. It has grown in popularity over the years. It might not be the most popular SEO plugin, but it’s definitely one plugin that people like since it offers lots of free features, which other SEO tools charge a fee.

They are now competing with Yoast as the best SEO plugins. By reading this article, you will know exactly which one to go for.

Is Rank Math plugin better than Yoast: Let’s analyze their features

To better understand the differences between the two tools, let’s look at what each of them can do to determine their scores rating.

They both have a set of free and premium features that perform different functions. However, you will come to realize that Yoast has placed a lot of essential features in the pro plan, something that Rank Math gives for free.

Let’s analyze each of their key features:

Focus Keyword Analysis

Yoast

With the free plan, you can analyze only one single keyword. Then, just input the keyword into the search bar and the tool will give you suggestions based on the single keyword density, how well you have used the keyword in the title, and other search engine optimization factors.

Rank Math

Rank Math SEO has the same feature as Yoast. However, it allows you to add more than one keyword though. That’s different from Yoast, which allows only one keyword.  

Google Search Console verification

By connecting your site with Google Search Console, you are more likely able to track the visitors landing on your site, the devices they are using, time spent on your site, and a whole lot of data via Google Analytics.

Yoast

With Yoast, you can easily do that. Just follow a few steps to set it up and connect your Google Analytics.

Rank Math

Connect your site with Google Search Console to have greater control, submit sitemaps, and view all the data inside your WordPress dashboard.

XML Sitemap

Do you have a sitemap on your website? If you don’t, then you are missing out on one of the key SEO features. A sitemap helps to direct the search engine spiders when they crawl your site.

Yoast

Yoast helps you to generate an XML sitemap to help in indexing. Without it, Google crawlers might never fetch your content for search. 

Rank Math

You can create a customized sitemap different from your current WordPress one and allow search engines to crawl your site easily.

Set SEO Title Contents and Meta Description

Yoast

Yoast allows you to optimize your title around your target keywords. It also allows you to add a Meta description that appears in search results.

By optimizing your title and description around your target keyword, you will more likely get an increase in traffic.

Rank Math

Rank Math SEO is also among one of the best content analysis tools, which works the same way as Yoast. You can also create templates to ease the process. 

Cornerstone Content to Bring External Links

You can easily tell Yoast that a particular blog post or content is the most authoritative one among all your blog posts. This allows the tool to direct most internal links to the blog posts and reference them.

When editing your blog post, there is a section down in the Yoast section, which allows you to indicate whether it’s a cornerstone piece or not.

Link counter

Yoast

This feature allows you as the content creator to master the number of internal links in your content. This is essential when it comes to improving your SEO score. You don’t want to stuff your website content with lots of links, broken links or have fewer links. Note that the tools offer internal link suggestions to premium users. 

Rank Math

Rank Math SEO has the same feature. It gives you control and allows you to find out the number of internal and external links redirecting traffic to your site.

Bread Crumbs for a Great User Experience

Yoast

Yoast also allows you to add bread crumbs to your site easily. These are a type of tags that help to guide search engine spiders when crawling your site.

Rank Math

You can add bread crumbs to your site with ease

Set Social Media Descriptions

Are you on Twitter? I’m sure you sometimes click on links that appear in your newsfeed. You also need that social traffic.

Yoast

So instead of merely socializing there, why not tap into some of that Facebook and Twitter traffic. With Yoast, you can easily set Facebook and Twitter descriptions and add an image for your social profiles.

Rank Math

You can easily control the text and images on your Twitter and Facebook and ensure you optimize them for social traffic.

WooCommerce SEO tool

Yoast

Suppose you are creating content for your WooCommerce products. In that case, the tool allows you to create good search engine optimized titles and descriptions for your products and other pages on your wooCommerce website.

Rank Math

You can set optimized product and WooCommerce shop descriptions around the keywords that will most likely improve your SEO score and draw buyers into your site.

Content Schema Type 

Yoast

It’s also a key SEO feature. Yoast can customize schemas type for each individual piece of content in your site; this helps rank your site.

Rank Math

It allows you to control the schema markup of each individual piece of content and set up one for the whole site.  

Other Free Rank Math Features

Rank Math SEO has a set of other free additional features to boost its scores. Features that Yoast doesn’t. Some of the features include:

• Monitoring 404 errors and redirecting them to other pages
• Image SEO option
• Creating and managing 301 and 302 redirects (the redirect manager is in Yoast pro plan)
• Local SEO (you are limited to one location in the free plan)

Yoast Premium Features

Yoast has lots of feature in the Here is a list of its premium additional features:

Internal linking suggestions

You know how internal linking is critical towards SEO success. Do you do this manually? Well, it must be a tiring task right there, going through every blog post and identifying which word to tie with a particular blog post.

Yoast can give you internal link suggestions with a premium plan and links the words with a single click. How cool is that?

Redirect manager

If you want to manage all your 301 and 302 redirects, you better do it most effectively and efficiently. Nothing does that better than having a Yoast premium plan. The tool allows you to manage all the redirects with ease.

Add multiple keywords versions

With the free plan, you were only allowed to undertake one keyword analysis. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t work well with a long-form blog post having several secondary keywords.

With the premium plan, though, you will focus on your primary keyword and a few secondary ones. 

Internal link block

I know you are used to manually add blocks that contain internal links when creating blog posts. That’s not the case with the pro plan. You will do this with ease. With a few clicks, the tool will automatically add blocks that contain relevant links. That improves content readability. 

Rank Math Premium Features

Rank Math SEO has a set of comprehensive extra features in its premium version. In addition, you will have access to the following:  

• Google video SEO sitemap
• Google news SEO sitemap
• Google AdSense earning history
• Google Trends integrations
• Keyword rank tracking over 12 months
• Add watermark to social media images
• Multiple locations for local SEO

If you will use any of the above extra features, then Rank Math is good for you. Notice that most of its features are in the free plan.

Best in Users Performance 

Let’s see which tool is the best in terms of performance

SEO performance

This is the overall idea of having any of the tools here. It’s to help you optimize your website content for traffic, which will bring in leads and sales for your business. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, if a tool helps you to draw in traffic, better take it.

Before you make the SEO analysis comparison, you need to know that your SEO performance will be wholly dependent on how well you optimize your content. So, don’t think that by switching from Yoast to Rank Math, your blog will rank in a matter of time.

No.

However, since Rank Math SEO has many free features, you can easily do a lot before thinking about the premium version.

On the other hand, Yoast has several essential features hidden in its pro plan. Therefore, unless you sign up for one of their premium plans, you may never experience the full WordPress SEO benefits. 

Thus the winner here is Rank Math SEO.

Number of PHP requests

You see, one of the aspects that can hinder higher rankings on Google is if your site loads slower than molasses in January. Therefore, you will need to consider fast loading speeds to rank up.

One thing that can bring about slow speeds is the number of PHP requests made to the server, which hosts your site. If you have many files on your website, the number of requests tends to be high.

Between Yoast and Rank Math plugins, Rank Math SEO plugin is smaller. In fact, Rank Math is three times smaller than Yoast.

That means it won’t slow down your site as Yoast would. These might be more minor differences, but they mean a lot when it comes to rankings.

XML sitemap integration

You already understand the essence of a sitemap in the crawl ability of your site. The easier it is for the spiders to crawl your site, the faster it will rank; you don’t want Google to leave out some of your content pages, do you?

Rank Math generates a custom sitemap automatically for the whole site and individual images sitemap if you need it.

Yoast does the same. However, I found out that it’s easier to customize a sitemap using Rank Math than Yoast.

How to Setup Both of These Plugins for SEO   

Which SEO plugin has a quick setup process?

If a plugin is easier to set up and use, it’s easy to get all the functionalities up and running in a couple of hours.

How to set up Rank Math and apply the right settings 

It’s pretty easy to set up Rank Math with the setup wizards. If you want to do basic settings and avoid wasting time, you can do that easily. The tool also has a good user interface and options for advanced users settings right there in your dashboard.

The steps in the wizard are easy to follow. Like installing other software, you just press a few buttons and have it on your site. You can then proceed to fill in a few aspects of your business and settings.

Once set, go to any of your blog posts, click edit, and scroll to the bottom of the page. You should find Rank Math SEO functionalities there. Here you have complete control over all the target keywords, check the keyword density, and perform many other WordPress SEO functionalities.

The configuration wizard will also help you to integrate the tool with other applications such as Google Analytics and generate your sitemap to allow Google to begin crawling your site.

How to set up Yoast 

Just like Rank Math, it’s not hard setting up Yoast either. It’s right there in your WordPress dashboard. If you scroll down, you will most likely find the plugin among the menu options.

There are eight steps to getting it done and get a fully functional Yoast plugin. In fact, the company even has a demo video in the knowledge base to walk you through it. This is useful especially for newbies who have to pay a web developer to do it for them.

You can disable the following advanced options using the configuration wizard:

• Admin bar menu
• Text-link counter
• XML sitemaps
• Readability analysis

Once you do some basic settings, you can proceed to more critical ones like site indexing, console integration and optimization leveraging the setup wizards. It will take some time before you see results, though. So, be patient and maintain consistency. 

What I like about Rank Math SEO Plugin

There are a lot of things why I would suggest Rank Math to anybody. First are the free features, which aren’t available with any other WordPress SEO plugin. Second, they give some features such as the 301 and 301 redirects for free, features which Yoast charges.

They also have a great user experience since it is simple to use their features. The dashboard is simple and straightforward, as well. And if you ask about the support team’s responsiveness, I can say that they are pretty fast.

They also have an active online forum and an active Facebook group.

What I don’t like About the Tool

There are a few things that you may not like about Rank Math, as well. First is transparency issues; no one knows the developers behind the plugin. I believe they can do better work by bringing this to light, but as long as the plugin’s functionalities are top-notch, many people don’t bother to ask this.

There is also a lot of positivity inside their Facebook group. They will tell you to migrate from Yoast to Rank Math easily but don’t have an option of transferring from Rank Math to Yoast.

What do you think of that?

I believe there should be that freedom. Choose either Rank Math or Yoast depending on your needs.

What I Like About Yoast SEO Plugin

When you do a thorough SEO analysis, the current version of Yoast is also an excellent WordPress SEO plugin. I like the fact that it can integrate well with WordPress sites, themes, and other plugins. The plugin is the most popular, having been in existence for over ten years.

Apart from the frequent updates, Yoast has a dynamic support team, which can respond to your requests any time of the day. 

What I Don’t Like About Yoast  

I don’t like the fact that they have a lot of features hidden in the premium version. The features could lure customers into paying, but it doesn’t make sense if Rank Math can provide the same features for free.

They also have fewer features than Rank Math and are overloaded with too many functions, which can confuse newbies.

Let’s Talk About Their Pricing Comparison

How much do you need to part with if you are to go for any of their premium plans?

Well, let’s take a look at each of the tools:

How much is Yoast SEO Premium?

Here is a screenshot

As you can see, it comes with one plan. It costs $89 per year.

It comes bundled with a lot of other plugins and courses. Here are some of them:

• Video SEO for WordPress plugin
• Local SEO for WordPress plugin
• News SEO for WordPress plugin
• Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin
• SEO copywriting training
• Unlimited Keywords research training
• All-around SEO pack training
• Site structure training
• Technical SEO training
• Free SEO training: SEO for beginners
• Free Yoast SEO pack for WordPress plugin training

The SEO comes with 24 hours support and access for lifetime updates.

Rank Math SEO Pricing 

Apart from the free plan, Rank Math also has two pricing plans. Check it out below. It’s geared to either individual site owners or businesses.  

Pro plan

The first plan is the pro plan. It will cost you $59 per year, down from $129 per year. That’s about $4.92 per month.

The plan comes with boundless features that are not in the free plan. Here is the list:

• Unlimited personal websites
• Track 500 Keywords (wished they could have unlimited keywords tracking, right?)
• Powerful Schema Generator
• 24/7 Support

See?

It’s a whole lot better than Yoast,. And the fact that you can track up to 500 keywords is also encouraging in your SEO efforts.

The Business plan

The second plan is the business plan. It will cost you $199 per year, down from $429 per year exclusive of VAT.

You will have access to the following features apart from the ones in the free plan:

Support for client websites

Track 10,000 Keywords

Powerful Schema Generator

24/7 Priority Support

The plan renews for the same price and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

So, depending on your business needs, choose any of the plans.

Which Tool Wins?  

This will depend on you –the user. Which needs do you have? Do you want a tool that can give you most of the features in the free plan or one that limits some of them but also offers many courses in its premium plan?

I would go with Rank Math. It’s the one I use right now on this site. The tool has proven to be the best for me. It can work for you as a business owner, too.

If you are still asking if Rank Math is better than Yoast, reread the whole guide. I’m sure you will decide by the time you are here reading this line. 

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