Rank Math vs Yoast SEO – 2023

Rank Math vs Yoast SEO – They are two of the most popular SEO (search engine optimization) tools or plugins for WordPress, with millions of users across the world. Yoast SEO has been around a lot longer than Rank Math, with the former being founded in 2010, 8 years before Rank Math. Although both of these plugins have a lot of features that can help you optimize your website for search engines, there are some advantages that make the newer kid on the block, Rank Math, a better choice over Yoast SEO.

If you’re already up to speed on exactly what these plugins do, we encourage you to move onto the breakdown. For those that don’t, it’s important you understand exactly what these SEO plugins actually do and why they’re helpful.

What do SEO plugins do?

SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast are essential tools for webmasters (ie. you!) who aim to optimize their WordPress sites for search engines like Google. These plugins provide a wide range of features and functionalities that assist in improving your website’s visibility, search engine rankings, and overall organic traffic (traffic from search engines, as opposed to paid or direct traffic).

These plugins essentially have a well thought out checklist of standards your content needs to match, updating it live as you go along.

Title Tags / Meta Descriptions

One of the primary functions of these plugins is to help optimize meta descriptions and title tags, which are crucial elements for search engine results pages (SERPs).

These meta tags provide concise summaries of web page content and play a significant role in attracting clicks from users who perform searches. SEO plugins offer user-friendly interfaces that allow you to easily customize and optimize these meta tags for maximum impact.

Keywords

SEO plugins provide tools to massively enhance your website’s on-page SEO. They can even help you perform keyword research, allowing you to identify relevant keywords that have high search volumes and lower competition.

By strategically incorporating these keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, and anchor text (the clickable text of a link), you can improve your website’s relevance for specific search queries.

Sitemaps

Also and very importantly, these plugins assist in creating and submitting XML sitemaps to search engines. Sitemaps are structured lists of website pages that help search engine crawlers understand the website’s structure and index the content more efficiently.

Essentially these show Google, Bing and other search engines an overview of your whole site, like a menu in a restaurant.

By ensuring that all pages are correctly indexed, you increase your chances of ranking well in organic search results.

Schema

SEO plugins also aid in implementing structured data markup, commonly referred to as Schema. Structured data provides additional context and information to search engines about the content on a webpage, which can improve the visibility of rich snippets in search results.

Rich snippets include additional information like star ratings, reviews, and product prices, enhancing the chances of attracting clicks from users.

Internal Linking

SEO plugins offer features to optimize internal linking, which involves strategically connecting different webpages and/or blog posts within the website.

Internal links help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively, while also providing a clear path for your users to navigate between relevant content.

Canonical URLs

SEO plugins also offer functionalities to handle canonical URLs and redirects. Canonical URLs help prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a webpage when multiple versions exist.

Redirects

SEO plugins also can facilitate redirects, which allow you to redirect users and search engines from outdated or broken links to relevant pages, preserving link equity and maintaining a positive user experience. Without this, your users could get hit with 404’s (page not found), which is terrible for your website’s SEO.

Google Integration

Additionally, these plugins integrate with Google Analytics, allowing you to track and analyze website performance, including organic search traffic, search volume for your keywords, click-through rates (CTR), bounce rate, search terms, usability and other key metrics.

They provide insights and reports that help you assess the effectiveness of your SEO strategies and make data-driven decisions for further optimization.

So to conclude, SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast give you a huge set of tools and features to enhance your website’s SEO. From optimizing meta descriptions and title tags to performing keyword research, creating XML sitemaps and implementing structured data markup these plugins are indispensable for webmasters looking to improve their website’s visibility, rankings, and organic search traffic.

Rank Math vs Yoast SEO – The breakdown

1. Price

This is where the RankMath is in a league of its own. RankMath’s Pro license allows unlimited personal sites for just $59 per year. Yoast SEO on the other hand charges individually for each site and it’s more expensive – $99/£99/€99 per year for a single site. They offer small discounts for multiple licenses but the price is crazy!

Say you have two small sites, your bill for RankMath will be $59 and for Yoast SEO, it’ll be $180.10/£180.10/€180.10

2. User Interface

One of the biggest advantages of Rank Math over Yoast SEO is its user interface. Rank Math simply has a cleaner and more straightforward layout, even for beginners. It’s clean and uncluttered, with all the important parts easily accessible from a single dashboard.

On the other hand, Yoast SEO feels cluttered with a more confusing and louder interface (Brightly coloured smiley faces come to mind). The settings and options are spread out over different tabs and pages, making it more difficult to find the most important parts. The interface feels complicated and could be overwhelming for new users.

3. Features

Rank Math free generally has more features than its free Yoast SEO counterpart, making it a more all-in-one SEO plugin. To name just a couple (of many, many, many) of the features that Rank Math free offers, which Yoast SEO doesn’t, include:

• Redirection manager: Rank Math free has a built-in redirection manager, which you only get in Yoast SEO Premium. This is a vital feature you need on your site. It allows you to redirect old URLs to new ones without losing any traffic or search engine rankings.

• Multiple keywords – Rank Math’s free version allows up to 5 keywords, compared to just 1 in Yoast’s free version. To get multiple keywords, you’d need to subscribe to Yoast’s Premium version.

4. Page Load Times

Rank Math is lighter and faster, which means that it won’t slow down your website or affect your page load times as much as Yoast will. Check out the comparison below. The plugin alone is nearly a third of the size! Less size = Faster Web Speeds = Better for SEO. Simple.

5. Better Content Analysis

Rank Math’s content analysis feature is far more comprehensive than Yoast SEO’s. It gives a more in-depth analysis of your content, with a focus on factors like readability, keyword density, and internal linking, all really important features to get to grips with when you’re starting out. Rank Math also provides suggestions on how to improve your content, with actionable tips that are easy to understand and implement.

6. Integrated Google Search Console

Rank Math has integrated Google Search Console, which allows you to see your website’s performance data directly from your WordPress dashboard, without having to go to the console itself. This is vital for tracking your search engine rankings, monitoring your website’s general health, and identifying any problems that may be affecting your visibility in Google search results.

7. Modular Settings

Rank Math has completely modular settings, allowing you toggle on/off any features you want or don’t. This makes it so much easier to get down to the features that you want.

In conclusion, while both Rank Math and Yoast SEO are great SEO plugins for WordPress, Rank Math offers several advantages that make it a better choice for most users. With its better user interface, more features, faster page load times, better content analysis, integrated Google Search Console, and better customer support and finally not to mention the significant price difference, Rank Math is the clear winner when it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress in our opinion.