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Rank Math SEO – move over Yoast

Rank Math SEO

Relatively new to the market but currently racking up over 1.1 million users, Rank Math means business when it comes to taking the top spot of WordPress search engine optimisation. 

For a long time now, Yoast has been the go-to SEO plugin for WordPress websites with over 5 million active installations. It’s notoriously free to download and install but offers many premium versions or upgrades that cost the user to make improvements. Rank Math, launching in 2018, is here to disrupt the SEO marketplace offering many of Yoast’s premium features entirely free which is where they have won a great deal of their popularity in a short space of time. They also paid versions, but many of their complimentary features are all you might need to get things up and running. Here’s a list of just some of the included features from their website:  

So, besides cost, how do they really compare? Let’s take a look through the main elements.

Both Rank Math and Yoast have helpful ‘get started’ wizards for those venturing into the world of SEO for the first time with integrated videos and step-by-step instructions. However, the SEO ‘bread and butter’ undoubtedly comes from keywords, the most vital part of any digital strategy and already Rank Math offers an option to analyse up to five keywords for free whereas Yoast only offers one. Rank Math provides a ranking system of 0-100 on the quality of your keywords with a green colour code if you go above 80 whereas Yoast provides a traffic light system from red to green which is slightly less specific. Both plugins allow you to analyse the readability score but Rank Math prompts you review whether you have used your keywords enough throughout your website page. Both provide a suggestion list but Rank Math’s suggestions pop up immediately if you start typing the words giving it a strong usability edge.

In general, Rank Math boasts a simple-to-use interface highlighting tips and recommending changes to you in real-time alongside editing a post. Yoast does this too but the difference being that Rank Math uses an AI assistant to generate suggestions so the user knows exactly what to write. 

What about analytics? Rank Math’s Pro version offers analytics from Google Search Console and drills down into every post’s metrics offering red or green arrows to show if they have increased or decreased, great for a quick glance at your content. Nifty!

One of the most popular features of Rank Math that we’ve found on forums is the automatic function of adding alt and title tags to images. Rank Math will take these details from the filename saving SEO specialists a lot of time editing images when uploading a new post. Yoast doesn’t provide this feature and it’s causing quite the stir among plugin pros! 

When it comes to user reviews, WordPress.org holds the following for each plugin:

  • Yoast – 4.8 out of 5 stars – 27,425 reviews
  • Rank Math – 4.9 out of 5 stars – 4,106 reviews

So whilst Rank Math has a better score, Yoast has the benefit of being top dog since 2010 and racks up a lot more user reviews. We’re interested to continue monitoring these reviews as time passes by. 

So, overall, which is the best plugin? Maybe time will tell but Rank Math has grown so fast, it’s set to take over as one of the most preferred plugins on the market. Maybe it’s about time Yoast had a worthy rival to shake things up a bit! If you want to find out more or do your own comparison, you can find out more about each plugin on their websites – Yoast or Rank Math. 

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