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.
Note**: You can easily increase keywords (from 5 to unlimited) by using a filter that you can add in the page editor.
Once you enter the keyword(s) that you’re targeting, Rank Math will automatically:
- Give you an SEO Score from 0-100 for accurate analysis along with colored signals.
- Provide you an option to tag the post as a pillar or cornerstone content
- Analyze the content and suggests the updates/changes that you can make to optimize your content
- Provides your content status (Rating and Errors) based on 4 factors:
- Basic SEO (Content Length, Focus Keyword in Title/ Description/ Slug)
- Additional (Keyword density, image alt text, inbound/outbound links)
- Title Readability (Usage of number, power word, sentiments, focus keyword)
- Content Readability (Table of Contents, short paragraphs, rich media)
Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO only lets you optimize your content for 1 keyword (or upto 5 if you’re a Premium User). You can get ‘related keyphrase’ ideas if you integrate your Semrush account (paid) with Yoast SEO plugin.
Based on the target keyword(s) you’ve entered, Yoast SEO automatically:
- Give you a current SEO status in colored signals- Good, Ok, Bad (less specific)
- Provide you an option to tag the post as a pillar or cornerstone content
- Analyze your content, highlight the improvement areas (by clicking on the “eye” icon) and suggest changes in terms of:
- SEO Analysis (Keyword density, image alt text, inbound/outbound links, Content Length, Focus Keyword in Title/ Description/ Slug)
- Readability Analysis (Flesch Reading Ease, Passive Voice, transition words, paragraph length
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Preview Snippet Editor
Since, meta tags are responsible for what users actually see on search engine results. Therefore, WordPress SEO Plugins allows you to easily customize or automatically assign meta title tag and meta description tag to every webpage.
Rank Math as well as Yoast SEO has a separate section for Meta Tag Automation settings in their dashboard. Both the teams have taken a deep dive into snippet boxes and provide fully customizable options to configure the site’s titles.
Features include:
- Tag separator in titles
- Automatically capitalize titles
- Automatic Meta Title and Description tag settings for posts, pages, attachments, archives, tags, categories, custom layout, etc.
But there are some slight differences between these two WP SEO giants when it comes to customization on individual posts/pages for social media.
Note**: This is the important feature that helps you optimize your post to look nicer on social media. But, most of the people don’t use it so make sure you are using this functionality.
Rank Math:
Rank Math allows users to preview and edit the search engine and social-media snippet for Free. Not only this, but Rank Math also allows you to set up the dedicated (thumbnail) Featured Image for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. You can optimize your snippet settings by overlaying an icon or change of the card type for Twitter.
Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO allows you to access the Google snippet for Free but to preview the social media snippet you need to upgrade to their premium plan. Like Rank Math, Yoast SEO doesn’t even allow you to change the card type for social media display.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: SEO Analysis and Audit
SEO Analysis and SEO Audit are part of website optimization, as on a regular basis there may be some aspects of a website that may obstruct your SEO efforts. In-built Analyzer in WordPress will help you give a crystal-clear idea about the scope of improvements from the SEO syllabi.
SEO Audit includes the on-site, off-site, technical, local and global SEO status. It performs a comprehensive analysis for rigorous checks that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic and recommends ideas to fix the issues/errors.
Rank Math:
With just 1-Click, Rank Math provides you a site-wide SEO Audit and Analysis right into your WP dashboard. The SEO Analyzer in RM not only gives you an overall SEO score but also provides insights from the warnings and failed tests. You get detailed technical insight so that you can make the fixes on priority to improve the website’s SEO.
Rank Math provides the SEO Status and recommendations by dividing its sections into:
- Priority (Automatic Updates)
- Basic SEO (Keywords, Meta tags, H1/H2 headings, image alt atr, permalink structure, etc)
- Advanced SEO (Snippet, Canonicalization, OG meta, schema, sitemap, robots.txt etc)
- Performance (page size, response time, CSS/JS minification, page requests)
- Security (Plugins and theme visibility, HTTPS, safe browsing)
Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO doesn’t have an inbuilt SEO auditing or analysis feature. It only provides a content analysis tool that helps you optimize the individual pages/posts (as explained in the content analysis section above).
So, Rank Math has an edge over Yoast in this category too.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Schema Markups (Structured Data)
Schema markups help search engines to understand your content better and even attracts the users to click on your content. Schema integration displays your site with additional information in the search result pages including rich snippets, articles, FAQs, featured section, local listings, and more.
Even Google recommends to use structured data on your paid advertisement (Google AdWords) for better reach and user attraction. It increases your overall CTR as well, thus ultimately helping in generating leads, sales, or conversions.
Rank Math:
Rank Math SEO Plugin has an in-built feature for schema markups and allows you to easily add the structured metadata to individual web-pages directly from the block editor. It allows you to choose the rich snippet type in 13 different types such as articles, video, recipe, course, service, etc. Additionally, you get easy access to add SEO-friendly HowTo schemas, Local business listing schema, FAQ schema and add knowledge graph metadata.
Rank Math’s Advanced Custom Schema Generator (Rank Math Pro) takes full control of how you add schema markups to your posts and pages (with RM’s Custom Schema Builder and templates). In Rank Math Pro (worth purchasing), you can even import ready-made schema from other sites to beat your competitors.
Interesting…right?
Get Rank Math Pro Now! (30-day money back guarantee)
Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO provide a very basic in-built schema markup feature and completely skips on it’s customization. You need to install another plugin for structured data (may still not be able to provide features like Rank Math). I was using Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP along with Yoast SEO earlier.
Don’t you think installing a single plugin that handles both your Search Engine Optimization and Schema requirements is better than installing two separate plugins and increasing the loading size?
Rank Math gets an advantage to be considered better from Yoast SEO from this category too.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: External Link Manager
Now and then, you keep publishing articles or other types of content regularly that include plenty of external links on your site. It is very common that you manually assign “nofollow” tags to certain outbound links that you don’t want to pass authority from your site. And, manually assign “dofollow” tags to the website that is worthy of association.
Note that**. If you don’t set “nofollow” tags to the not-useful links, then it’d impact your site’s SEO performance badly.
To manage external links in bulk, WordPress SEO plugins provide you an easy way to assign a nofollow tag to every external link.
Rank Math:
Rank Math can automatically no-follow all the external links (in the form of text as well as images) to save your page authority. Not only this, you also get an option to add or exclude “nofollow attribute” for the link to the domains in the list and open external links to the new tab.
Yoast SEO:
Again, Yoast SEO lacks even this feature to automatically bulk edit the “nofollow” tags. You need to manually add nofollow to your editor or HTML that would take a hell alot of time spending to assign this tag individually to your outbound links.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: SEO Performance (Analytics, Keywords and Rank Tracker)
If you are not using any analytics tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, the WordPress SEO plugin also helps you track your overall optimization and performance in the integration with Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
Not let’s start by looking at the contrast between these two best WordPress SEO Plugins: Rank Math and Yoast SEO in terms of performance.
Rank Math:
This feature is accessible in Rank Math’s Pro version that pulls data from Google Analytics and Search Console. In the free version, Rank Math only gives you an overview of the site analytics.
The Site Analytics benefits that you get from Rank Math:
- Detailed Insights on whether your content is doing better or worse including clicks, impressions, and click-through rates for your site’s top-performing keywords.
- Helps you track top-5-winning and losing keywords, sitemap status, and indexing issues (search engine errors)
- Keyword and Rank Tracker (search engine positions) to keep an eye on the website’s performance against preset keywords
- Keep track of your website’s rankings over the last few weeks/months to know exactly if the SEO Techniques are working for you or not
- Get to know each and every keyword your post is ranking for so that you can rewrite your content further to improve rankings.
Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO doesn’t provide any such insights or data from it’s dashboard interface. You need to go to your tracking software (Google or any other tool) traditionally to keep a track on your rankings and traffic.
Rank Math vs Yoast: ImageSEO, VideoSEO, NewsSEO & LocalSEO
Just like we optimize articles/web pages with keywords to rank them higher on search results. Similarly, to get traffic on other content types like Images, Videos, Business, News, and Online Store from search engines, on-page optimization is required.
WordPress SEO Plugin helps you get prerequisite in-built SEO features so that you get all your content types ranked-higher.
Let’s kick off by looking at the major differences in Rank Math and Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin one-by-one:
Image SEO:
Optimizing images on your website allows search engine crawlers to understand its purpose properly and helps improve your image rankings even further. Rank Math allows you to choose whether to automatically add missing alt and title attribute in images.
You should always add an alt tag to your images manually so that you can let search engines understand what the image is actually about and if you missed it, a plugin will help you.
Yoast SEO doesn’t have this feature to add missing alt or title attributes automatically. So, along with the Yoast SEO plugin you need to install another plugin to use this feature.
Suggestion**: You should redirect the attachments to the root pages (original post) where it belongs because WordPress creates a separate webpage for every image you upload.
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO let you redirect the website images to the root pages.
Video SEO:
YouTube (Video searches) has its own algorithms that decide what videos will rank in search engines. To make videos getting featured in video snippets, you’ll need to do proper keyword research and Video SEO.
Rank Math (Pro) is fully compatible with the video sitemap guidelines set by Google and helps you submit your video content to Google for indexation. With 1-click, RM appends all your videos with metadata that helps to index your videos faster and receive more search volume.
To optimize videos in Yoast SEO, you need to add a Yoast SEO extension (Premium features) to start ranking better for your videos.
You can add a Video Schema to your content for Free option in Rank Math. If you want to get it’s premium functionality, you can get Rank Math Pro at $59 for 1 year (unlimited sites) whereas Yoast VideoSEO costs you $69 for 1 site (+ you need to add Yoast SEO extension).
News SEO:
News sites receive a lot of free traffic by getting listed on Google news.
Rank Math (Pro) submit your website on Google News by using the in-built News Sitemap feature. Like Yoast video SEO, you need to add a Premium extension for NewsSEO.
Local SEO:
Best SEO Plugins for WordPress can help your business rank higher in local search results along with proper metadata, Google Maps, address, contact information, opening/closing hours.
Rank Math SEO Plugin provides you their rich-snippet Local SEO Optimization support. Not only this, Rank Math allows you to rank with locally search keywords for different locations with multiple local business locations support. Rank Math’s built-in contact information shortcode helps you keep your contact information updated with proper schema on any page.
Like Yoast VideoSEO and NewsSEO, you need to add a Premium Yoast extension for LocalSEO to get better search results in local search for all local SEO related features.
Note**: If you purchase Rank Math Pro, then you get all it’s Pro Features in its all-in-one Freemium WordPress SEO Plugin ($59) for unlimited websites but, for different features in Yoast you need to purchase it separately i.e. Yoast Premium ($89), Yoast VideoSEO ($69), Yoast NewsSEO($69) and Yoast LocalSEO($69) for 1 site.
Winner- Rank Math
Based on the comparison on On-Page Optimization, we can analyze that Rank Math provides intruitive features with customization in every category to improve your site's SEO for Free. Both beginners and pro users can access Rank Math to improve their rankings.
Comparison Table on On-Page Considerations of WordPress SEO Plugins
Optimizations and improvements related to crawling your site, indexing your content and improving site’s search engine visibility is Technical SEO.
Like On-Page optimization, Technical optimizations are equally important for your website to have a search engine presence. So, the Best WordPress SEO Plugin should also have features to optimize the critical SEO factors to roll configuration technically.
Let’s roll on to technical optimization considerations:
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Site Speed
Google has announced that “Core Web Vitals” will become a ranking signal from May 2021, that combines existing page-experience related signals. Therefore, we need to check each and every plugin we are using to make sure that it is compatible with these signals and is not responsible for heavy page requests or loading speed.
The test results in terms of plugin overview for both Rank Math and Yoast SEO are as follows:
From the above insights, we can see that Rank Math is a lightweight plugin with fewer PHP requests, faster speed, and extra modern-SEO features in comparison with Yoast SEO. It installs fewer files on your WordPress dashboard and also has fewer lines of code.
Yoast SEO cannot in fact match its performance although having a fewer number of features. It has a larger plugin size that adds bulk to your website.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap acts as a directory as it lists all the website’s important pages to ensure that search engines can find and crawl them all. Search engines navigate your site using bots and web crawlers. Google bots can even miss some of your web content if you don’t create (update) sitemaps for your site.
It’s a simple formula: “The easier it is for search engines to crawl your website, the higher you’ll rank”. So, if you are finding issues with ranking- don’t forget to check your sitemap if it’s updated.
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO WordPress plugins generate the sitemap of your website automatically and offers great flexibility. The sitemap URL may be slightly different when switching between the plugins (Yoast SEO, Rank Math, Jetpack, etc) however, this will not affect your SEO results negatively.
With Rank Math and Yoast SEO plugins, users have the ability to customize sitemaps, remove category types in bulk, and ‘noindex’ certain pages.
Overall, Rank Math provides more features in XML Sitemap in comparison with Yoast SEO (both works similarly)
SEO Tip: You should update your sitemap within Google Search Console on a regular basis. It is also beneficial to add your sitemap to the bottom of your robots.txt file.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: 404 Monitoring (Broken Link Checker)
First of all, getting traffic on any website is not an easy job. Now, what if your users are landing on the 404 or broken link?
It’s annoying. Right?
So, for a smoother user experience, you should properly delete such 404 pages from your site (as well as Google) and regularly check for 404- Not Found pages.
Rank Math SEO plugin for WordPress lets you monitor 404 errors in two modes- Simple and Advanced. The simple mode only tracks 404 errors, but the advanced mode captures the error page, referring page, time of the error, and even the user agent. The 404 Manager tool in Rank Math not only detects such broken link errors but also lets you redirect wrong URLs to the right ones.
Yoast SEO doesn’t offer 404 monitoring support but it easily redirects old URLs to new ones that got stuck on a 404 Not Found page in its premium version.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Redirection Manager
As studied in the above section, when a user experiences a website with a “Page Not Found” error, then it hampers the site badly in terms of SEO as well.
Since, Rank Math redirects such 404 pages automatically to the right URLs for free whereas you need to pay for this feature in Yoast SEO.
Now, let’s dive deep about what other features Rank Math provides in Redirection Manager.
Rank Math offers smart, automatic and advanced redirects for Free. You can:
- Add or remove redirects in advanced bulk edit options
- Manage redirects in advanced redirection manager to even cloak affiliate links and control link-juice
- Redirect your attachments to a post or page of your choice to give an extra boost in the search engine result pages.
- Redirect Broken links to the new URLs automatically (configuring it in settings)
- 1-Click import Yoast data/Redirection plugin data to Rank Math (when switching plugins)
- Automatically create a redirect when you change URLs.
- Setup custom 301, 302, 307, 410 or 451 redirection type and create automatic behaviors like a default 404 redirect to Homepage
- Automatically sync redirections to your .htaccess file for even faster redirects
- Allow plugin for a choice of redirection type like a 301 redirect (permanent) or 302 redirect (temporary)
Yoast SEO Premium doesn’t even have all the above-mentioned features.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Control Robots Meta and Robots.txt Editor
Best WordPress Plugins for SEO gives you complete control over your robots meta on how to crawl and index an individual page in webmasters. The Robots.txt file tells search engines about which page you want them to avoid crawling and indexing. Let’s start a comparison between both the SEO plugins to see which among them allows you to control robots meta and edit robots.txt files.
Rank Math allows you to control robots meta on all posts, pages or custom post types by both bulk setting as well as overriding them individually.
This way you have maximum-control that Google can index and noindex. Not only this, With Rank Math you can create and update your robots.txt file in your WP dashboard to automatically help a site index better.
Yoast SEO manages this technical stuff in the background and does not provide any control in your hands.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: GSC Integration (Webmaster Verification)
SEO Plugins identify the technical SEO issues and provide the valuable information right within WordPress with the Google Search Console Integration. Webmaster verification in the plugin helps you to verify the ownership of your website and automatically index (Bing) the post once it’s published.
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO enable you to easily integrate with Google Search Console. User experience in Rank Math is superior and easy whereas UX with Yoast SEO is more basic.
Additionally, Rank Math pulls necessary data directly from the search console such as keywords, clicks, impressions, average positions, etc) and provides an interface in the dashboard itself.
Yoast SEO provides very limited information (pretty useless) with no clear interface in the dashboard to access the data directly.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Breadcrumbs Settings
Breadcrumbs help in easy navigation of a website and help search engines understand your content hierarchy. By enabling breadcrumbs on your website, you may see a slight increase in traffic from search engines.
Breadcrumbs symbols are highly customizable in both the SEO Plugins for WordPress: Rank Math and Yoast SEO. In both the plugins, breadcrumbs output JSON-LD data in the source code as it is the most reliable method of implementing breadcrumbs for rich snippets.
It matches your website theme and makes it visually appealing along with getting more users on your site organically. By enabling the Breadcrumbs function, it’ll provide you a lot of options to customize based on your site requirement like a separate character, prefix breadcrumb path, etc.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Open Graph Tag Optimization
If you create content on your website, I’m sure that you are sharing it across your social media too. I’ve come across many posts on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn that the thumbnail is either broken or not optimized.
There’s only one reason why it happens.. That is.. either OpenGraph tags are missing on your site or there’s an issue with OpenGraph Tag optimization. Since adding the tags manually for non-technical folks might be difficult. So, SEO plugins provide you in-built features to optimize its open graph appearance.
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO Plugins automate this functionality for you. Rank Math Pro allows you to even add the branded watermark on your social images automatically for the thumbnail/ featured images you set for a post or web page.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Canonical URL
Canonical URL saves your website from duplicate content issues by informing the search engine crawlers which URL needs to prioritize for the main page.
Rank Math and Yoast SEO, both the WordPress SEO Plugins, allows you to insert the canonical URL for a post that is similar to a post you already have on the site.
Rank Math provides you the insights for the duplicate content error whereas Yoast SEO doesn’t have this feature.
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: WooCommerce SEO
WooCommerce SEO plugin helps you create an online store on your site. You get multiple features with this eCommerce extension like creating product listings, adding payment getaways, product reviews, etc.
Rank Math simplifies the entire Technical SEO process for your WooCommerce online store. It lets you optimize your WooCommerce pages for Free with it’s built-in support so that your product information can rank high on search engines. You can also add metadata and Product Schema with the help of this SEO plugin.
Yoast SEO works the same way as Rank Math for WooCommerce SEO. The only difference is that you’ll have to buy the premium Yoast WooCommerce SEO to unlock the WooCommerce Optimization.
Winner- Rank Math
Based on the comparison on Technical Optimization, we can analyze that Rank Math provides a ton lots of features to improve your site's technical errors. Important features like Redirection, 404 monitor, control over Robots data are very important to manage. Yoast provides these features in it's premium plan. Rank Math provides it for free. So, Rank Math is the winner.
Comparison Table on Technical Considerations of WordPress SEO Plugins
PRICING
To help you make a more informed decision regarding which plugin works better for your business, we are going to throw some light on the pricing strategies of both the WordPress SEO plugins.
Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO are available for free at WordPress.org.
Since, Rank Math is new in the market, it has come with the freemium pricing strategy by giving you “More in less“.
Rank Math
Currently, Rank Math offers two plans for its premium version along with the “launch offer”:
- Pro – $59 (use it on unlimited personal websites and track up to 500 keywords)
- Business – $199 (use it on unlimited client websites and track up to 10,000 keywords)
Yoast SEO
There are two types of premium offerings for Yoast SEO.
First, there’s the core premium plugin, which gets you access to features like multiple keyword analysis, internal link suggestions, and more. The Yoast Premium costs $89 for use on a single site (you can get discounts for multi-site licenses)
Second, there are four premium Yoast extensions for specific types of SEO:
- Video SEO for WordPress – $69 for a single site.
- Local SEO for WordPress – $69 for a single site.
- News SEO for WordPress – $69 for a single site.
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO – $69 for a single site.
Overall, Rank Math’s premium version is more affordable than Yoast SEO for three reasons:
- Rank Math’s top-level prices are lower than Yoast SEO (though that might change).
- Rank Math’s premium plan supports unlimited websites, while Yoast SEO charges based on 1 or multiple site
- Rank Math has a single premium plan with all it’s features, while Yoast SEO has multiple premium extensions for different features
Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Which is better?
Rank Math is better as it has more features than Yoast + Yoast SEO Premium.
Most key features are highlighted in my Yoast vs. Rank Math comparison, also, you can check this table if you want an in-depth look at how each one’s features stack up.
With Rank Math, you’ll be able to:
- Generate highly-customized schema markups
- Leverage advanced custom fields
- Monitor 404 errors and broken links
- Go deeper into your analysis by targeting multiple keywords
- Gain full control over your redirects (manually and automatically)
- Create custom XML sitemaps
- Optimize your site for different devices
- And more….
FAQs on Rank Math Vs Yoast SEO Plugins
Both the SEO plugins are highly powerful with the best user experience. But, as Rank Math offers more features for free, so it is the first preference of any WordPress users.
There are tons of SEO plugins in the market. But Rank Math, Yoast SEO, and All-in-One SEO plugins are the most trusted, easy to use, and popular among us.
The effectiveness and efficiency of these two SEO plugins are superb. No one can say that the first one is better than the second and vice versa. But, Rank Math offers some fascinating features in its free plan that you can not get in Yoast SEO free version. Moreover, the paid plans of Rank Math are cheaper than Yoast premium.
Since Rank Math existed in 2018, so having doubt about its authenticity is obvious. But it has built its trust in the eyes of all, i.e., WordPress, search engines, and website owners. Hence you should not be doubtful about its safety. Rank Math is 100% safe and bonafide just like Yoast.
Yoast was established in 2010 and officially recommended by WordPress.org, which has the maximum number of downloads (5M+). Yoast SEO is also an integrated partnership with the world's biggest SEO software company Semrush. So, Yoast gives you trusted recommendations and verified data to its users.
Final Words:
In this article, we’ve compared Rank Math vs Yoast SEO in detail and looked at their optimization options in terms of general, on-page and technical considerations.
In short:
#Yoast SEO is a right choice for beginners as it will help them write better posts and optimize content for a focus keyword.
#Rank Math is a clear winner for beginner as well as SEO specialists who need to go deeper into analytics and overall website optimization.
If you like our detailed comparison, do not forget it to share with your readers too as “Sharing is Caring 🙂“
Please leave a comment below for “Which SEO plugin will you prefer for your website- Rank Math or Yoast SEO?”
Finally, if you have any queries or suggestions on Rank Math vs Yoast SEO comparison, then feel free to ask us in the comment section.
