The WordPress ecosystem is alive, thriving, and continuously expanding to this day. Developers have created, or are developing, a plugin for everything someone might consider using. One of the most valuable things to a small business owner is their SEO, so there’s a huge need for a great plugin to manage those website microservices.
SEO is “search engine optimization,” optimizing a website to rank higher in all search engines. Why? Well, if your site ranks high and loads quickly, people are more likely to visit it. Once they’re there, they might buy something, which is why dot com stands for commerce!
So many different plugins are available, so what is the best SEO Plugin for WordPress in 2022? The answers are Yoast SEO and RankMath, and let us explain why these SEO plugins are considered the best.
Search, Cheer, and Yoast
The Yoast SEO Plugin is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your site for search engines. In addition, it checks your content for errors and provides tips on how to improve your website. The plugin was first developed by Joost de Valk and released in 2007. He started developing this plugin because he wanted to give people an easy way to fix their websites’ SEO problems.
The plugin programmatically analyzes the page’s content and offers tips on how to improve it. It also checks the page for common errors that might prevent it from ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs). Yoast also provides several more unique tools that we’ll discuss below.
Yoast’s Tools for Site Owners
Yoast provides various tools for site owners to improve their site’s SEO.
Yoast’s Tools for Site Owners:
- Yoast SEO for WordPress — The Yoast SEO Plugin is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. The plugin makes sure your site meets the highest technical SEO standards. It also gives you the tools to optimize your content for SEO and overall readability.
- Yoast Local SEO — More and more customers are looking for local businesses, and you must find ways to increase the visibility of your business. This includes various options, such as social media advertising, PPC, etc. A higher ranking in local search results is of the utmost importance. Are you not on top of their search results? Then you’re losing customers to the competition in your area.
- Yoast News SEO — Aim for that top spot in Google’s news carousel with our rewritten way of adding relevant schema data like NewsArticle to your articles.
- Yoast Video SEO — The Yoast Video SEO plugin helps drive search traffic to videos on your website. It automates technical SEO for videos to improve their performance and findability!
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO Plugin — WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce solution in the world and works brilliantly with Yoast SEO. If you’re serious about selling and competing online, the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin can unlock extra tools, features, and SEO for your WooCommerce store.
All of these tools are best in class, but they aren’t the only tools available.
Customizing Your Yoast
You can customize the plugin by editing the options in the Yoast settings panel on WordPress. Like other plugins, it has many different options that allow you to customize your site for success. The configure your Yoast configuration, find the “Y” symbol labeled “SEO” on your left navigation sidebar. Clicking this will allow you to “Open the configuration wizard.” From here, you’ll navigate the many options like:
- Environment
- Site Type
- Company or Person
- Social Profiles
- Post-type visibility
- Multiple author management
- Google search console registration
- Page title settings
After working through these setup steps, you’ll still be able to make numerous custom changes as your needs require. To access and configure advanced Yoast SEO settings, go to your Dashboard and “Enable” the “Advanced Settings Pages.” You’ll have many more menu options on your left navigation sidebar beneath SEO.
RankMath, the alternative
Yoast SEO isn’t the only WordPress plugin that’s out to help you with your website’s search engine optimization.
“Rank Math” calls itself the “Best Free WordPress SEO Plugin” and states that it’s built with performance in mind; that’s great because a common criticism of Yoast is that it’s heavy and can slow down the site.
If Yoast SEO has been the leading SEO plugin since the inception of WordPress, RankMath is relatively a newcomer. But don’t be fooled, this “new” plugin aims at being a serious alternative, and its rapidly growing fan base is the best proof of its popularity.
Which are the main differences between Yoast SEO and RankMath? Both have similar approaches to SEO on WordPress, but RankMath offers a great diversity of features in its free version:
– SEO titles/meta descriptions, with templates and manual adjustments.- Social media descriptions and images for Facebook and Twitter.- Focus keyword analysis (RankMath supports multiple keywords)- XML sitemaps- Structured Scheme Schema- Integration with the Search Console- Local SEO and Knowledge Graph- Image SEO- Internal link suggestions- Breadcrumbs- Redirections- 404 monitor- Link counter- Basic WooCommerce SEO
If you choose to go with a free plugin, then RankMath looks packed with more features than Yoast SEO.
What about premium versions? RankMath also offers premium features, such as multi-local optimization, social media watermark, more pre-defined schema types. Both premium versions from Yoast SEO and RankMath are pretty much aligned in terms of features.
One major final difference is the ability of RankMath to develop new features. Recently, this plugin has started offering AI writing or content suggestions, which should speed the content writing process.
Other SEO plugins for WordPress
“WP Meta SEO” is fantastic for mature projects with features like bulk editing all website meta on a single view, bulk editing image file names, and even bulk editing SEO link titles.
Finally, there’s “All in one SEO,” which touts its performative toolkit wizard as the best property setup WordPress SEO without hiring an SEO expert.
Conclusion
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. It audits content, programmatically generates tags, and provides you with helpful tips on how to improve your website’s rankings. In addition, it provides you with information on how to improve your website’s rankings, tells you whether your content is optimized for search engines, and gives you a grade depending on how well it’s optimized.
The flexibility of WordPress makes it the perfect platform to have a powerful SEO. If you’re looking to increase your SEO though, keep in mind that a plugin is no miracle. The best way to improve your SEO is to have a clean, fast and SEO-friendly WordPress website.
We’re more than happy to help you get and maintain smooth WordPress websites for your clients. Simply get in touch with us, and we’ll help you straight away.
