UpCity vs. Yoast

UpCity is well suited for agencies or freelancers that want a defined process to help market for clients or small companies wanting to be found online. It's especially helpful for someone not that knowledgeable on SEO. As long as they follow the checklist, their site has a great chance at increased traffic. I find it's not as useful for companies and agencies that already has a process in place and a set criteria for marketing. If you've been in the business for a while and already know what you're doing, the checklist may not be as valuable.

Incentivized

For quick WordPress installations and configurations, Yoast is fast to set up and helps guide you through the common configuration options. It tries to be helpful whether you are coming at things from a technical or non-technical background. The emphasis on white hat SEO topics like improved content, keywords, descriptions, and titles is really appreciated by someone like me who doesn't utilize gray and black hat SEO tactics.

If you are an SEO expert, and you want finite control of each individual aspect of your site, Yoast, like most plugins, engines, tools, etc, hides a lot from you or gives you limited options. It really is meant for someone who wants to apply a general strategy to a whole site. That being said, you can manage Yoast per page on a WordPress site, but even then, I know some SEO experts prefer other tools that are meant for very specific purposes.

Overall, Yoast is the best plugin for SEO in WordPress when applied as a whole.

Incentivized

• The UpCity platform is easy to use and simple to understand.
• UpCity helps our agency by providing high quality copywriting for blogs and websites, as well as detailed research and analysis using their software.
• The UpCity SEO report card tool is a helpful sales tool for generating leads.

Incentivized

• Readability - makes it easy for you to assess the reading level of your piece to ensure it is correct for your intended audience.
• SEO tips - red/orange/green traffic light system to provide tips on what aspects need improving to be SEO-focussed.
• Redirect tool - easy, automated detection and setup.

Incentivized

• Pricing seemed far to high for small agencies just starting.
• I know UpCity has many more features than just a checklist, but I didn't find them as useful as the checklist and relied on other tools for citations and reporting.

Incentivized

• Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin is really good at copy and link scanning and optimizing, however, I have not been able to find any assistance on image optimization on our pages and posts. That would be a good update!
• Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin is good at ranking pages and posts individually. I would like to see an overall dashboard of your entire website/blog's SEO health according to the software.
• N/A

Incentivized

I see no reason to discontinue using Yoast as it has been very beneficial for my website and my business.

Incentivized

Usability is mediocre: They have a dashboard to track things but they have some antiquated system of ranking companies and don’t tell you what the logic is behind it. You also have no way to combat negative ratings or respond and try to correct them.

It's super easy to use. Really, it requires little-to-know tutorials or walkthroughs at all — it explains everything you need to know in the description and tooltips built straight into the tool. I've never had to google a how-to or tutorial to use Yoast — it just works, and it works well

Incentivized

I received little help from customer service rep, Sarah. She told me I should speak to a manager to “reset my expectations”. Apparently, all the sales promises of more traffic and increase SEO were an issue with my expectations, and not the company failing to deliver.

I gave it a 4 just because it is helpful if you are just getting started with SEO, it guides you and shows you what you need to do in order for your website to be up and running properly. As a seasoned SEO analyst I wouldn't recommend it just because I can do things better my way.

Incentivized

We selected UpCity primarily because of the ongoing services they provide. The UpCity software is a simple platform that enables us to easily show progress and ROI to our clients.

Incentivized

Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins was a little easier to understand and offered a real-time guided plugin that helped me write throughout my drafting process. Semrush was much more helpful as a reporting tool, not so much in content creation. Both tools are useful in different ways, it is just a matter of knowing each one's strengths and weaknesses.

Incentivized

• Complete waste of money.
• No return on value
• Spent majority of marketing budget on 5 clicks to my site!

• Findability: I love few things more than hearing, "I just found you on Google!" and knowing that they found us on Google because our SEO is on point.
• Using the Yoast SEO Plugin over time has taught me to create better, more optimized content from the start, rather than having to edit that content after I realize it's not very SEO friendly. This saves a lot of time and lets me put my energy into other things.
• The plugin has helped us make our sometimes-dense content more readable and sharable, which absolutely improves stakeholder engagement.

Incentivized