Yoast vs Rank Math – Which One Would Be Your Best Bet
With 5+ million active installations Yoast has become the most popular and most used SEO plugin for WordPress. This statistic proofs that it performs really good and people really love using this plugin.
But what about its competitors? Do they really so much lag behind that nobody talks about those plugins as the competitors of Yoast?
No, some people already have started to talk about the Yoast’s alternatives. We were also excited about the investigation and have tested a few more SEO plugins to see the real difference.
However, we’ve found Rank Math as the top competitor of Yoast and in this article today we are going to tell you about our findings from these two best SEO Plugins in 2019.
User Interface
If you concern about the UI of and the ease of use, you will get satisfactory experience using both plugins. Of course, you find all the options organized under well-defined categories.
If modern look and design are your things, you will love Rank Math over Yoast surely. Yoast UI seems a bit plain and boring to us. However, in terms of usability, you will feel both pretty handy and useful to use.
Keyword Integration
One of the vital parts of SEO is the integration of keywords in the contents. If you cannot integrate keywords in your content properly, you will not get your desired ranking on the search engines. However, as the SEO plugins make our SEO job easy, we took extra time to find out the real performance of these two plugins in terms of integration and optimization of keywords.
Yoast has been excellent at optimizing from the beginning. You can optimize your content for a single keyword for free. If you need multiple keyword integration in your content, you need to use the premium version.
However, Rank Math takes the cake here at this point. You can optimize your content for up to 5 focus keywords for absolutely free! More than that, if you are short of keyword ideas and have only a keyword in your mind, Rank Math can continuously suggest different related long-tail keywords which we have liked pretty much.
But keep in mind that those suggested keywords will not provide any insights like search volume, competition, etc.
The bottom lines here are, Yoast has a good sense of keyword integration in your content. It will suggest the optimization almost like a human (Rank Math does that also and it seems more clean UI and easy to use over the Yoast SEO). But we found the in-built functionality better in Rank Math. And multiple keyword integration and generating keyword ideas are always a plus for Rank Math.
Image And Video SEO
You can do your SEO job easily by adding alt tags and relevant meta descriptions to your videos and images. Both plugins offer you SEO functionalities with various settings for image files. In terms of Video SEO, you can add Video Rich Snippets, which is a really good option to boost your overall traffic inflow. You can find many more advanced Video SEO functionalities in Yoast also, but all of those are opened to use for the premium users only.
Content Analysis
One of the best abilities of a WordPress SEO plugin is the ability to analyze content directly from the WordPress post editor. After having done with the recommendations, the changes will definitely influence your SEO score.
That being said, the Yoast SEO plugin does the mind-blowing job here. It handles this SEO feature in a qualitative sense. After the analyze, it provides a report telling if the content optimization is good or bad in a very simple form.
However, Rank Math also handles the feature correctly and it gives your content a score from 1 to 100, which we think much clearer to understand how well your content is optimized.
On of that, both the plugins provide very clear and detailed recommendations. With that, you can make your content better and more optimized.
SEO Audit Tool
SEO Audit Tool is essential to get the full insight on your website’s overall SEO score and you can take necessary steps according to that. The audit report tells you details about the issues you need to improve and show you which areas you have got all right.
Rank Math has a dedicated SEO Audit Tool which you can find integrated into your WordPress dashboard just after installing the plugin. However, do not expect audit data like you get from a premium third party SEO audit tool like SEMRush, but the data you will get from the rank math SEO Audit Tool will be actionable and insightful.
On the other hand, it is a regret Yoast has no feature like that. You need to use a third-party service to audit your website if you are a Yoast SEO user.
External Link Manager
It is a good SEO practice not to put nofollow tags to external outbound links in your content. This is important to restrict the web crawlers associate your website’s SEO score with the link target.
You can easily put a nofollow tag in your content with the hyperlink in HTML format. But if coding is not your thing, you can assign every outbound external link as nofollow directly from the Rank Math setup wizard.
Unfortunately, Yoast SEO does not have this feature also.
XML Sitemap
Search engines and web crawlers can read and navigate all your different posts and pages through XML sitemaps and index them on the search engine database. Without it, some of your posts cannot be indexed by the bots and as a result, those posts or pages will never show up on the SERPs.
A few years back, generating an XML sitemap was not too easy. In recent days, you can easily generate your Website’s XML sitemaps with just a few clicks and customize that also. Both the Yoast SEO and Rank Math have the option to create XML sitemaps just with a couple of clicks. And it will also allow you to submit that on the search engines.
Schema Markup
Both the Rank Math and the Yoast SEO have different types of schema markup. Here’s a quick overview:
Support
Yoast SEO only provides support for its premium customers. For free customers, they have made a knowledge base and FAQ on their websites. Yoast has proven itself extremely reliable over the past few years with their support and services.
However, Rank Math is entirely different here. Although it is a new kid on the block and has few bugs and issues, you might get happy with their support team from MyThemeShop. Their support is really helpful and active 24×7 to resolve all your issues.
Performance Comparision
In terms of performance, Rank Math did a better job in our test result. Rank Math’s code is efficient and precise which makes it 1.5x lite and fast than Yoast. Here’s the quick list of our result:
The Bottom Line
If you already a Yoast Premium user, you are having great advantages you can get from an SEO plugin. So, you may keep using this and can give a try with Rank Math when your license period will expire.
If you are using Yoast SEO free version, you will be highly benefited by moving on to Rank Math from Yoast. Besides, Rank Math has better UI and is also beginner-friendly than the Yoast. We, really appreciate what Rank Math is providing without taking any penny from you.
