Discover which SEO plugin leads the performance race in our Rank Math vs Yoast comparison. Optimize your site with the best.
Rank Math vs Yoast: The SEO Performance Showdown
When it comes to optimizing your WordPress site, choosing the right SEO plugin is crucial. Rank Math and Yoast SEO are two of the most popular plugins in the market, each with its own set of features and performance capabilities. This article delves into a detailed comparison to help you decide which plugin might be the best fit for your SEO needs.
SEO plugins are tools that help you optimize your website for search engines. They guide you in improving your content, suggest how to make your site more search engine friendly, and often provide features for social media integration and performance tracking.
Rank Math: A Feature-Packed Contender
Rank Math, on the other hand, is the WordPress SEO upstart. It was launched in late 2018, though it had been in development for multiple years before that. While the SEO plugin is new, Rank Math comes from an established WordPress development team in MyThemeShop.
Since its launch, Rank Math has rapidly grown in popularity and it now deserves the crown of the second-most popular WordPress SEO plugin*. In under two years, it’s gone from pretty much zero to an active install count of over 500,000 sites, which is impressive for a WordPress plugin. It’s accomplished this growth largely on the back of a lengthy free feature list, as you’ll see below.
Technically, All In One SEO Pack is the second-most popular plugin by active install count at WordPress.org. However, Rank Math definitely has more momentum and has a much higher new download count.
Key Features of Rank Math:
Free Features:
- Set SEO titles/meta descriptions – create templates that automatically apply to content and manually adjust SEO titles/descriptions for individual pieces of content.
- Set social media descriptions – control text and images for Facebook and Twitter.
- Focus keyword analysis (supports multiple keywords) – enter one or more focus keywords and see how optimized your content is for those keywords.
- XML Sitemap – create a more customizable XML sitemap than the default WordPress sitemap feature allows.
- Structured data/schema – set up sitewide schema markup and also control the schema markup for individual pieces of content.
- Search Console – connect your site to Google Search Console to automatically submit sitemaps and view Search Console analytics inside your WordPress dashboard.
- Local SEO and Knowledge Graph – optimize your site for local SEO (only one location for free)
- Image SEO – improve image SEO and automatically set alt and title tags.
- Internal Link suggestions – Rank Math will suggest other content on your site to link to while you’re working in the editor.
- Breadcrumbs – add breadcrumbs to your site.
- Link Counter – count the number of internal and external links in your content.
- Redirections – create and manage 301 and 302 redirects.
- 404 Monitor – monitor your site for 404 errors. You could then redirect common 404 errors to other pages on your site.
- Google Analytics – add the tracking code and view information.
- Basic WooCommerce SEO – set product/shop titles/descriptions.
Premium Features:
- Keyword rank tracking – track your site’s search engine rankings and keyword performance over the past 12 months (pretty unique)
- Google Trends integration
- Google Video SEO sitemap
- Google News SEO sitemap
- Multiple locations for local SEO
- More predefined schema types (20+)
- Google AdSense earning history
- Automatically watermark social media images
One nice thing about Rank Math is that all of these features are modular – so you can easily disable any features that you aren’t planning to use
Yoast SEO: The Veteran Player
Originally launched all the way back in 2010, Yoast SEO is by far the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. It was founded by Joost de Valk, who was an SEO consultant before launching Yoast SEO.
In many ways, Yoast SEO is kind of the “de facto” WordPress SEO plugin. For example, if you read a SEO tutorial, it’s probably going to just assume that you’re using Yoast SEO.
Beyond being the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, it’s also just generally one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time, with over 288 million downloads to date
Key Features of Yoast SEO:
Basic Features:
- Set SEO titles/meta descriptions – create templates that automatically apply to content and manually adjust SEO titles/descriptions for individual pieces of content.
- XML Sitemap – create a more customizable XML sitemap than the detailed WordPress feature allows.
- Focus keyword analysis (only one keyword) – enter one focus keyword and see how optimized your content is for that keyword.
- Sitewide schema – add sitewide schema markup.
- Content schema type – set a custom schema type for individual pieces of content (you can also set a sitewide default).
- Search Console – verify your site with Search Console.
- Set social media descriptions – control text and images for Facebook and Twitter.
- Basic WooCommerce SEO – e.g. set the titles/descriptions for products and shop pages.
- Cornerstone content – mark important pages as “Cornerstone” to help optimize them and get more internal links to them.
- Breadcrumbs – add breadcrumbs to your site.
- Link Counter – count the number of internal links in your content.
Core Premium Features:
- Redirect Manager – create and manage 301 and 302 redirects.
- Internal link suggestions – Yoast SEO will suggest other content on your site to link to.
- Internal link blocks – add a block that automatically includes relevant links instead of manually adding them.
- Multiple focus keywords – analyze your content for multiple focus keywords.
- Related keyphrases – generate related keyphrases based on data from SEMrush.
Yoast SEO also offers other paid add-ons for specific types of SEO. These give you features that are also mostly only available in the premium version of Rank Math, though Rank Math does include some local SEO features in its free version:
- Local SEO – adds structured data for local businesses/Knowledge Graph, enhances your contact page, and supports multiple physical locations.
- Video SEO – get your videos listed in Google Videos and add other video SEO enhancements.
- News SEO – optimize your site for Google News, ping Google when you publish a post, create an XML News sitemap, and more.
- WooCommerce SEO (Advanced) – get access to more WooCommerce SEO features such as social media graph information, a cleaner XML sitemap, and more
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO – Pricing
Rank Math
Currently, Rank Math offers two plans for its premium version:
Pro – $59 – use it on unlimited personal websites and track up to 1,000 keywords.
Business – $199 – use it on unlimited personal and client websites and track up to 20,000 keywords.
These prices are marked as a special “launch offer”. If Rank Math does move to charge the full list price, you would pay:
Pro – $129
Business – $429
It’s hard to tell whether Rank Math really will charge these prices in the future or if this is going to be an evergreen discounting strategy to add urgency
Yoast SEO
There are two types of premium offerings for Yoast SEO.
First off, there’s the core premium plugin, which gets you access to features like multiple keyword analysis, internal link suggestions, and more. The core premium offering costs $99/year for use on a single site – you can also get discounts for multi-site licenses:
Then, there are also four premium extensions for specific types of SEO:
- Video SEO for WordPress – from $79/year for a single site.
- Local SEO for WordPress – from $79/year for a single site.
- News SEO for WordPress – from $79/year for a single site.
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO – from $79/year for a single site.
Yoast also allows you to purchase all 5 plugins for a total of $229/year.
Conclusion
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO offer unique benefits. Rank Math is feature-rich and suitable for those who want detailed control over their SEO settings. Yoast SEO is ideal for users looking for a straightforward, no-nonsense plugin that gets the job done efficiently.
FAQs
1. Is Rank Math or Yoast better for beginners?
Rank Math’s setup wizard makes it beginner-friendly, while Yoast’s simplicity is also appealing to new users.
2. Can I switch from one plugin to the other without losing my SEO settings?
Both plugins offer import/export features to transition without losing your settings.
3. Do these plugins support the latest Google algorithms?
Both plugins are regularly updated to comply with the latest search engine guidelines and algorithms.
4. Is Rank Math Safe?
Because Rank Math is a newer plugin while Yoast SEO has been around for years, some people worry about the safety of Rank Math. Don’t worry! Rank Math still comes from an established WordPress development team (MyThemeShop) and it’s also built up a good reputation in the time that it’s been available.