The Best WordPress SEO Plugin face-off: Rank Math Vs Yoast SEO, how do these two amazing SEO tools compare? Which is better? Who is the SEO plugins champion? And why should you care?
Every business with an online presence has one ultimate goal to rank high on search engines. And I’m sure you are reading this article to achieve the same goal.
But it isn’t that easy. Right!
With an increase in content competition on search engines (like Google); ranking factors and updates are screwing up every marketer, blogger, business, etc. Google uses different algorithms to rank the blogs and to get traction, there are many tactics that you can employ to get higher ranks.
Fortunately, here is where WordPress SEO plugins come in the role play.
Why do you need an SEO Plugin?
An SEO Plugin helps you optimize your website and content for search engines (especially On-Page Optimization and Technical Practices). With an easy-to-use interface, an SEO Plugin gives you various tips, recommendations, and your current SEO status with which you can improve your website/web pages. They help you optimize your content by highlighting the problem areas to improve your on-page SEO.
Now, there are so many such WordPress SEO plugins around. But, Rank Math and Yoast SEO are the most popular ones.
Quick Introduction:
Yoast SEO founded in Oct 2010, is the largest player in this space with more than 5 million active installs. It is a “grand-parent” with older SEO formulae and features in WordPress History.
Whereas, Rank Math founded in late 2018, is a fast-rising “youngster” in the market with over 800,000+ active installs till now that has come with the features (according to Core Google Updates) to automate the SEO of your site and optimize to get your blog ranked higher in search results.
Our aim in this article is to provide an in-depth review of these WordPress SEO plugin giants and industry leaders. Our team has taken a monumental effort to pull off the comparison from two fierce competitors- Rank Math and Yoast SEO. We looked under the hood and searched the nooks and crannies to find out which plugin is better. And to answer the question:
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO [2023]: Which WordPress SEO plugin should you use?
So, let’s get started with the “virtual battle” between Rank Math and Yoast SEO
Why did I switch from Yoast SEO to Rank Math?
Since 2017, I have been entrenched in the SEO world with one and only WordPress plugin- Yoast.
In 2020, I came across Rank Math which creates a perfect foundation for your On-Page and Technical SEO. Moreover, providing a wide range of free features in one plugin including Yoast Premium.
So, I thought of giving it a try!
Guess what?
I am highly satisfied with Rank Math for the reasons:
- Using RM cleared out a lot of plugins like Redirection, Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP, Auto Image Alt Text, and Nofollow for external link [improves website speed]
- Lightweight plugin (almost half the size of Yoast) with fewer PHP requests, fast-speed and modern SEO-features
- Rich Snippets & Schema Markup Support
- Multiple focus keywords and LSI suggestions
- Getting more for less money (additional functionalities)
Rank Math has worked great for me as well as for my clients. You can also try it risk-free as migration to Rank Math is Easy 1-Click Import from Yoast/All-in-One SEO/SEOPress
Head-on-Head Comparison between Rank Math and Yoast SEO
Let’s examine the differences between the two excellent WP plugins and see which SEO plugin works best for your business!
Note**: Both are amazing SEO tools. Based on your requirements, you can choose one.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Popularity
Let’s start this Rank Math vs Yoast SEO comparison with the popularity of these two WordPress SEO Plugins.
To check the popularity, I am using Google Trends and the result was as per my expectations.
According to Google trends, Popularity for RankMath is escalating.
So which is the more popular WordPress SEO plugin for 2023?
You can see that YoastSEO has a declining trend in popularity while it’s the most downloadable plugin in WordPress History whereas Rank Math who has entered the market two years back is on a rising trend and may take over Yoast in the not-so-far future.
Winner- Draw
As per the current Google Trends status, there’s a draw between the two. One is on the higher graph because of its presence for 11 years and another is a rising star in a new market. So, it is difficult to predict the winner from this data.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Poll and Thread results from Social Media
After checking the popularity of Rank Math and Yoast SEO on Google Trends, We decided to confirm it manually by doing research on social media- Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Quora.
So, the team went through polls, discussions, posts, and comments from marketers and bloggers. And collected some screenshots of what they are talking about the two WP SEO Plugins.
The result was as expected…
Here are the polls and some reviews from Facebook and Twitter where people are discussing which plugin is working best for them. (Must read all the reviews, comments and threads)
After checking the above screenshots, you can understand which is the best WordPress SEO tool.
I collected some more Rank Math vs Yoast SEO thread results from social media. I hope that it’ll help you decide which is the best WP SEO Plugin.
We can clearly analyze that due to intuitive features in Rank Math, people are preferring Rank Math over Yoast SEO.
Winner- Rank Math
Rank Math is the winner because you can see in the above discussions, polls, and threads that a maximum of them selects Rank Math between the two WordPress Optimization Plugins.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Installation and Setup Process
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO welcome you with a step-by-step easy onboarding process with important settings. Both these plugins are pretty user-friendly too.
Basically, this category comes down to a personal preference in terms of which one seems even better to you based on your requirements.
Rank Math:
When you launch RM for the first time, it opens with a Setup Wizard for you to connect a free account to unlock all the features and help you configure the important basic features.
If you’ve already installed any popular SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO, then, Rank Math will automatically detect the SEO plugin your site is running. It’ll offer a quick-easy migration to simply import your current SEO settings without needing to update your old blogs or going through all the settings again.
Don’t worry**: You are not going to lose any SEO performance by making this switch and you can always switch back to your old plugins (by simply removing RM and reactivating the previous plugins). I recommend that till the time you set up the plugin and check it through your end completely, do not delete Yoast or any other plugin you’re replacing 🙂
In the Rank Math setup wizard, you can configure:
- Website Name/Type/Logo (for search engines and social media)
- Connect Google (Search Console, Analytics, AdSense) with Rank Math (If you want to integrate)
- XML Sitemaps settings
- Basic settings like noindex empty category and tag archives.
- Automate SEO tasks like nofollow external links, redirect attachment pages
- Setup Advanced features like 404 monitoring, redirection, role manager, schema markup settings
Once you finish the setup wizard, you can enable or disable each module and configure the modules from it’s dashboard manager. And also, make optimizations with its modern SEO-features.
Yoast SEO:
Just like Rank Math, Yoast SEO also provides an easy-to-setup configuration wizard. The wizard doesn’t open automatically, you just need to launch it from the WP toolbar.
In the Yoast SEO setup wizard, you can configure:
- Keep the site out of the Index of search engines or not
- Website Name/Type/Logo/Social Profiles (for structured data to work properly)
- Basic sitewide schema data (search engine visibility and multiple authors)
- SEO title settings
Once you finish the setup wizard, Yoast SEO detects any serious problem/issue with your site. Like Rank Math, Yoast also lets you enable or disable features with a module approach in its Features Tab and integrates well for webmaster tools verification.
We can see that the setup configuration for Rank Math and Yoast SEO Plugin is very easy to install and configure. But, Rank Math allows immediate optimization for major settings and provides a detailed setup process in the setup wizard itself whereas Yoast SEO has very basic settings in the configuration wizard.
Winner- Rank Math
Rank Math wins in this category as it provides much more options for beginners and advanced users to keep the site up running with schema markups, redirection etc.
Comparison Table on General Considerations of WordPress SEO Plugins
In this section, we’ll compare the features related to On-Page SEO for the two best WordPress SEO Plugins.
We all know that On-Page SEO is the “heart” of Search Engine Optimization. Without optimized web pages, Google is going to “ignore” your site no matter how many times you are trying to impress it.
So, let’s take both of these amazing SEO plugins for an intense appraisal. And find out which is the best WordPress Plugin for On-Page SEO.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Keyword and Content Analysis
Keyword and Content optimization go hand-in-hand. Meta tags, keywords, content optimization, inbound/outbound links, and image alt tags are some of the key factors of an on-page SEO sphere. Now, we’ll take a closer look at the user interface of these plugins for day-to-day actions to set up optimization for an individual post or page.
Since both the plugins support this functionality, therefore, you can add the keyword(s) that you’re targeting and the plugin will analyze your overall content to let you know how well-versed and optimized it is. Not only this, the plugin also suggests various changes to make your content even better.
Rank Math:
Rank Math integrates into the block editor completely at it’s sidebar. The best thing I like about RM is that it lets you optimize your post for up to 5 focus keywords (at a time) to attract unlimited traffic for FREE (unlike Yoast that allows only 1 focus keyword). Additionally, if you don’t have multiple/LSI keywords in the mind, Rank Math suggests related keywords from Google.
