Item: Yoast
Rating: 8
Author: Dragan Nikolic

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is what we install on every WordPress website we maintain. It makes the websites SEO friendly and easy to configure in terms of titles, meta descriptions, visibility, Schema.org, robots.txt and sitemaps, taxonomies...which roughly translates to Onsite and Technical SEO.

It takes care of several key things that WordPress doesn't do well upon clean install.

Pros and Cons

Onsite SEO (titles, descriptions, content analysis...)
Technical SEO (breadcrumbs, robots, sitemaps, Schema.org)

UI (it doesn't use standard WordPress dashboard elements or design language and it should).
Marketing (it should slow down with ads).

Return on Investment

ROI (more sales and conversions due to improved content marketing).
More returning customers due to better quality content.

Alternatives Considered

All in One SEO Pack is a direct Yoast WordPress SEO competitor, but it lacks the functionality and support the latter has. While they both do a good job of making sure your WordPress website is SEO optimized, Yoast goes one step further and does a really nice analysis of your content and makes sure it's optimized and easy to read.

It's a no-brainer whether to use Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack, because Yoast is better in every segment.

Support Rating

Yoast SEO premium has a, well, premium support. While you can also do well with a free version of the plugin, the support is not at the same level. It's difficult to maintain the plugin that's been downloaded and installed on more than 1M websites.

I dislike how the plugin now tries to incorporate a whole lot of new features and it's becoming cumbersome. It also uses a lot of resources, but it's the best one out there, so I guess I have to deal with that.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Yoast WordPress SEO plugin fixes several key things when it comes to WordPress websites. It handles taxonomies and prevents duplicate content issue. It is good if you want to improve your content marketing as it analyzes the content and suggests improvements. It handles technical SEO issues in the background so your sitemaps and Schema.org markup is taken care of upon installation.

If you're looking for a solid SEO plugin, this is the one to have, but don't update it the second new releases comes out, because it can be buggy.

Yoast SEO, the Best WordPress SEO plugin

Overall Satisfaction with Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins