SEO with Wordpress (Yoast and RankMath)

Lots of people with websites or looking to get one have come across WordPress, one of the best content management system currently. One of the many very important questions these people ask is if WordPress is good for SEO. WordPress has earned a reputation to offer a firm SEO foundation. So the answer to the main question is Yes.

To offer the best SEO, WordPress utilises several plugins.

Various SEO plugins are available, but some are more prominent than the others. For some time Yoast SEO has been the most popular plugin for SEO optimisation of WordPress sites but a new competitor has emerged in the past few years. The plugin Rank Math is actually gaining popularity and has a huge community behind it.

Let's consider the two plugins and maybe we can get extremely useful points from the top WordPress SEO plugins.

Yoast SEO

This plugin has Over 5 million WordPress sites using it since its launch in 2010 making it the most used SEO plugin. The company, based in the Netherlands, offers great support to the development of WordPress. They are very committed and participate in WordPress conferences as sponsors, speakers, and contributors.

Yoast SEO comes in free and premium versions. The free version is considerably useful but the premium version allows you to have added functions that eliminate the need for additional plugins.

The plugin comes with an easy setup. You can easily customise it to your preferences thanks to its user-friendly nature.

YoastSEO free features are;

• Set SEO titles/meta descriptions to develop templates that apply to content automatically as well as allow manual adjusting of SEO titles/descriptions for individual parts of your content.
• XML Sitemap to create an XML Sitemap more customisable than what the detailed WordPress allows
• Focus keyword analysis to enable one focus and analyse content optimisation for that keyword
• Search Console
• Sitewide schema that adds sitewide schema markup
• Content schema type that sets a custom schema type for individual parts of your content.
• Set social media descriptions
• Basic WooCommerce to set title/descriptions of products and online stores
• Cornerstone content that enables optimisation of pages and gets them more internal links by marking them as "cornerstone"
• Breadcrumbs for sites
• Link Counter to determine the number of internal links in the content

The premium features are;

• Redirect manager that build and manage 301 and 302 redirects
• Related Keyphrases
• Multiple focus keywords
• Internal link suggestions to allow suggestions of other content on a site to link to
• Internal link blocks that provide automatic blocking that allows only relevant links

Rank Math

The second popular WordPress we are looking at is Rank Math. Although it has been in development for a couple of years, Rank Math was launched towards the end of 2018. It has achieved a feat of acquiring more than 500,000 WordPress websites in the little time it has been available.

Rank Math setup is also pretty easy.

Rank Math free features include;

• SEO titles/meta descriptions
• Social Media descriptions
• Focus keyword analysis (free version also supports multiple keywords)
• XML Sitemap
• Structured data/schema
• Search Console
• Internal link suggestions
• Google Analytics
• Basic WooCommerce SEO
• Local SEO and knowledge Graph
• Image SEO
• Link Counter
• Breadcrumbs
• 404 Monitor
• Redirections

The paid version has the following premium features;

• Unique Keyword rank tracking for sites keyword rankings and performance
• Google News SEO sitemap
• Google Video SEO sitemap
• Google Trends integration
• Multiple locations for local SEO
• Over 20 more predefined schema types
• Google AdSense earning history
• Automatically watermark social media images

Rank Math is quite flexible since it allows you to disable any feature you are not using

Takeaway

While the intention of this guide was not to compare the two but give an insight into two very effective and popular WordPress SEO plugins, it is worth noting that they vary just a little bit.

Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math are great and offer somewhat similar performance.

Rank Math, although somehow new to the scene offers powerful free tools. It nevertheless, needs immediate fixing of bugs that come with any new plugin. Rank Math seems to suit those with small budgets but need powerful tools.

You might also want to take advantage of the fact that Rank Math in general has competitive prices for its premium versions when compared to Yoast SEO.

When it comes to security concerns, users prefer Yoast SEO to Rank Math since it has been available for a longer period therefore more trustworthy.

At times you might find it hard to use a WordPress SEO plugin or even pick the one that suits your needs and budgets. Do not stress because our specialists can offer just the kind of help you need with SEO plugins to ensure you get most out of your website.