If you use WordPress, you should be using Yoast SEO.
May 23, 2018
If you use WordPress, you should be using Yoast SEO.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins
I use the Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress almost every day. As a web content writer, business blogger, and de facto "editor in chief" for our agency, I use WordPress a lot an for a variety of content types. Yoast serves as a great checklist for on-page SEO. As you may know, there are many elements that go into on-page optimization. Without Yoast, it would be easy to occasionally forget one or two of them if I was in a hurry. Yoast provides a very visible red-yellow-green light icon that lets you know how well optimized your page is. Long story short, if you use WordPress, you should have the Yoast plug-in.
- The traffic light icon serves as a visible signpost telling you, at a glance, how far along your optimization of a given page is.
- The checklist offered educates users about which elements factor into SEO.
- Yoast provides a Google Snippet editor so you can customize exactly how you want your SERP snippet to read, which is a big advantage.
- Yoast also offers a readability score, which can serve as a reasonable guide for new writers.
- Yoast's plug-in is great for on-page but does not provide insights into your ongoing SEO strategy, and how different pages on your site interact with one another.
- The readability score feels a bit crude. I understand that it provides a nationally recognized readability standard, but as a (dare I say) expert writer with an extensive background in many styles, I sometimes disregard this score. Maybe Google prefers the readability standard to my own, but as it sometimes shoots down sentences with more sophisticated structures, I believe that I know better. Maybe I'm a fool, but sometimes a writer's just gotta write.
- Offering keyword research and data would be nice. There is very little input about the quality of keyword you are choosing. If you are confident that you know your keywords without input, then this won't be a problem.
- To my knowledge, Yoast does not offer a competitive analysis or track your SERP performance for you. Tools for on-page only.
- We predominantly use WordPress for our custom websites, so Yoast is essentially "free" for us to use for all of our clients.
- There are a few great SEO tools out there, but they generally come at great cost. We have used and gone away from a few such tools. Because of Yoast's integration with WordPress, and cost-effectiveness, it has become our most indispensable SEO tool.
- Yoast saves us a bit of SEO research time because it prominently displays all of the items we need to pay attention to, strictly for the purposes of on-page SEO.
- Moz and WordStream
Yoast is less robust than the standalone pay services that stand on their own outside of WordPress. Moz is a great research tool, especially for agencies like ours. It gives us access to insights for several clients with ease. That said, it is expensive, and once you get the hang of keyword research, you can probably find a fair amount of answers on your own without it. WordStream is not exactly an SEO tool, as it is built around PPC ads, but it does provide keyword research, and offer plenty of info that can be gleaned for SEO purposes. These tools are deep and very powerful, but, for the cost, they are arguably not as valuable as Yoast, which specifically shines for its WordPress integration and on-page prowess.