Yoast is true "plug and play" content SEO coaching for beginners to pros!
December 17, 2018
Yoast is true "plug and play" content SEO coaching for beginners to pros!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins
We are an affiliate for a primarily digital product. Web presence is practically the only entry into the sales funnel, so building traffic is fundamental. We use Yoast WordPress SEO plugins for all our blogging, because it encourages "best practices" for SEO - good SEO plus thoughtful keyword selections are the keys to getting traffic to the site.
- SEO coaching - best practices for SEO are always in flux. Yoast gives step by step guidance for APPROPRIATE use of keywords in text, headings, subheadings, titles, and images. Yoast also provides reminders for other elements - outbound and internal links, customized meta and the like.
- Readability analysis - Whether readability is essential to SEO, I'm not sure, however, I do believe good writing will provide a better guest experience, which helps entry into the sales funnel. Yoast provides a variety of analytics on readability, such as use of subheadings, sentence length, passive voice, reading ease, etc. Great discipline in becoming a better writer, and hopefully improving SEO!
- Integration - Yoast "plays nice" with other tools! You can integrate Yoast with Google Search Console and your social media for a better, more comprehensive view of your traffic, your site, and your audience.
- Great for beginners and experts alike - even if you had to google "SEO," Yoast is for you! It's easy to set up and walks you through everything you can and should be doing. As you get more advanced, it's highly customizable -- well, there's settings for advanced customization, I'm not an SEO expert, so I haven't gone there yet!
- SEO is complex, and Yoast can seem a little overwhelming just going through all the options available. It would be nice if there were some help with prioritization - "this is essential," "this will is useful, but may only marginally improve your reach," or some other priority generalization.
- Over-reliance on Yoast can be detrimental to your traffic! It's not entirely their fault, but, it's easy to "fall asleep at the wheel," and let your Yoast dashboard become your sole SEO adviser. Well, like every product, there are sometimes bugs and issues which can affect rankings, so, you have to be aware and make sure you also independently check your results!
- Keyword research integration would be great - I don't know if it's available in the premium package, but, I still use my google adwords to research appropriate keywords
- We are getting better engagement on our site, as determined by time on sight, page views and clicks.
- Organic search traffic is significantly higher, however I can't say it's attributable to Yoast SEO alone - more attention to optimizing keywords is also playing a role.
- Because the free version of Yoast is more than adequate for our needs, Yoast is a highly resource efficient, 90% solution to our SEO needs - again, we still need to do our own keyword research, competitive analysis, site audit, etc., but Yoast gives us a great boost to make sure our content reflects SEO best practices.
From a micro-business perspective, it's cost prohibitive to fund a true "all in one" SEO solution. SEOquake and SEMRush are great for SEO data, site analysis and competitive analysis, but we at this time we want content focus, which is where Yoast shines. Longtail Pro is excellent - while it's expensive but not cost prohibitive, we find we get more than adequate keyword research with the free Google adwords tool.