Item: Yoast
Rating: 10
Author: Michelle Green Arnson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress helps us make all of our web content more searchable- and findable- by making it super simple to optimize every post and page. The ability to audit new and existing content in real-time and get concrete suggestions on ways to improve our SEO makes it easy to keep up with ever-changing best practices.

Pros and Cons

SEO Analysis: This is the best. As you create content, you get a real-time audit of what you're doing right and, more importantly, what you need to fix in order to make that content as optimized as possible.
Set up wizard: Once Yoast is installed, their wizard helps ensure it can get to work immediately at making your website more Google-able. Could not be simpler.
Free training: Just getting started with SEO or Yoast? They have free training videos that make it so easy to get up to speed and start optimizing your content.

Density: Because even the free, basic Yoast SEO tool has SO MANY FEATURES, if you're brand new to SEO as a concept/practice, you might feel a little overwhelmed at first. Just go watch the training videos!
Bulk Title Editing: I'm sure this tool can be useful, but I've never found it to be particularly intuitive or helpful.
Limitations: I'm grasping at straws here, but it would be nice if some of the premium (paid) features- specifically the social media previews- were available in the free version. Like I said, grasping.

Return on Investment

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.

Support Rating

There's lots of guidance within the plugin settings, and within the plugin tool on each page or post, and did I mention the training videos already? The makers of Yoast are pretty great at anticipating where questions will come up and trying to answer them quickly and clearly. I'm really not sure how they could make it any easier to use or benefit from.

Key Insights

Do you think Yoast delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Yoast's feature set?

Yes

Did Yoast live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Yoast go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Yoast again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Google Analytics, Google Forms, WordPress

Likelihood to Recommend

The Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin has been ideal for our small shop. In designing a new website, we got lots of expert advice on how to structure it to be SEO friendly in its launch state, but there's no way we could pay the pros to continually optimize all of our new content day after day, month after month, year after year. Fortunately, our pros included the Yoast SEO plugin with our new WordPress site and gave us a quick and dirty tutorial before handing it all over. The free plugin has allowed us to make our content super SEO-friendly without taking up a dime of our nonprofit budget.

Searching for a great SEO tool? You've found it.

Overall Satisfaction with Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins