Yoast SEO VS Rank Math: Today everyone has understood that a site that is not visible on Google is useless!
Companies and their webmaster or SEO agencies who have developed their site on a WordPress CMS then asked themselves a question: which SEO tool to look for to optimize a website with search engines and mainly Google?
The answer so far has been the Yoast SEO tool.
but recently a new actor has appeared: Rank Math.
Naturally, many SEOs wonder about these 2 solutions: which of the two plugins is the best for the optimization of a WordPress site? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of these solutions?
WordPress plugins for SEO optimization
First of all, we would like to remind you that these 2 solutions certainly have the advantage of presenting an “all in one” SEO optimization solution. But there are also other WordPress plugins, often necessary, to optimize the SEO of a website.
As we will see these extensions allow a number of useful tasks for SEO but do not forget that other extensions must be integrated because they cover other strategic aspects of the optimization of a site, such as speed. the site, caching, minification of CSS & JS files, script deferral, image optimization, redirects… etc.
So, if you want to optimize the natural referencing of your WordPress site, you absolutely need one or more SEO plugins, but here too, don’t forget that there is, at the base, a difference in the tasks of optimization and SEO.
We will therefore focus on optimization and with regard to these 2 SEO extensions, Yoast SEO is undoubtedly the best known and the most used (more than 5 million uses) but a little new has appeared Rank Math coming from challenging us.
What are the typical tasks of an SEO plugin?
To summarize, using a WordPress SEO plugin means allowing you to:
- Provide information on content (metadata, title and Hn tags, Alt, Canonical tags, etc.) and URLs for the exploration of the search engine bot
- Provide instructions in the robots.txt as well as a sitemap
- Analyze your contributions as well as the content pages including recommendations for action in SEO
- Managing your redirects
- Provide structured data
And the application of this solution is coupled with your optimization strategy: how you configure the plugin, how you write your pages, and how you fill in the meta and tags, … all this is under your own responsibility (knowing that the tool will assist and guide you).
So, this Rank Math vs Yoast SEO comparison!
1 – Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Presentation
Yoast SEO: it is a WordPress plugin on the market since 2010, a very popular company based in the Netherlands and according to its own information, more than 80 employees are currently working on this plugin.
Often cited in WordPress tutorials, it is de facto the extension identified as the SEO tool.
Yoast SEO is available in a free version and a premium version. In general, we can say that the plugin works perfectly and offers sufficient functionality in its free version.
The plugin is updated every 14 days on average.
Rank Math: recent plugin (2018 and official publication in 2019), developed a priori in India, from the creators of “MyThemeShop”. Rank Math is used on over 200,000 sites, but little information about the company itself.
A current free version but the developers have already admitted that the plugin will have a premium version later while retaining the existing free functions (but history shows us that there is always a risk that these declarations will not be kept…).
2 – Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Features
A – Installation:
Yoast SEO is installed with a configurator and offers assistance to make the right settings. It nevertheless presents some weaknesses (taxonomies for example but fortunately it is possible to modify them later in the advanced parameters);
on the other hand, some of these parameters are extremely relevant, such as the indexing of categories or keywords (the most important and useful characteristic for the optimization of a site).
Overall, the actions recommended by Yoast SEO are still good.
RANK MATH is very oriented toward the optimization of Yoast SEO (it even offers to repatriate the settings of Yoast! But beware, a return from Rank Math to Yoast SEO is not possible automatically,…).
However, the installation is more detailed and better described. From the start are included the advanced parameters such as taxonomies, sitemap, NoFollow, or NoIndex tags (which can be assigned to categories that do not yet contain a URL) and we also have the possibility of configuring other advanced options ( control of profiles with access to Rank Math, control of 404 errors, redirections).
B – Features
Yoast SEO:
The plugin allows you to easily define the titles and meta descriptions SEO permalinks, and create an XML sitemap more customizable than the basic WordPress while giving a return (in the form of the light color green/orange/red) on the configuration of these main characteristics (length, density, position,…).
In addition to the optimization of keywords, there is a notion of readability index which corresponds to Flesch’s calculation and determines the “ease” of reading your text (occasionally useful).
Search Console can be checked just like social media descriptions (text and images) and there is the option to mark important pages as ” Cornerstone ” to help optimize them and get more internal links to them. . You can add breadcrumbs to your site and count the number of internal links in your content.
The plugin generates structured data from entered information which can then be retrieved by search engines. This could be information about the site, such as the company or your blog, author, or social networks.
One of Yoast SEO’s biggest weaknesses is its main keyword optimization: it tends to recommend its use which can quickly lead to over-optimization to get a good ranking (plus it doesn’t recognize synonyms with precision).
Some reviews also mention that the plugin code is overloaded with too many functions, which could lead to security vulnerabilities or slow load times. But, there, unfortunately, we could apply it to WordPress in its generality!
Rank Math:
We find the same main optimization functions that allow you to define SEO titles/meta descriptions (also with templates), social network descriptions (text and image control), sitemap creation, Markup schema for structured data, connection to Search Console. You can also add breadcrumbs to your site and count the number of internal links in your content.
The positive points are:
- Targeted Keyword Analysis (support for multiple keywords that allows you to see how well your content is optimized for those keywords).
- SEO optimization for local SEO (but only one free spot)
- The image optimization and automatically set the alt tags and title.
- The suggestion of internal links (internal mesh ).
- Managing redirects (301 and 302)
- Handling 404 errors
- The addition of the Google Analytics tracking code.
The keyword analysis is also heavily SEO-oriented of Yoast which can be found in the sidebar of the Gutenberg editor.
On the positive side: we can therefore add as many synonyms as we want.
Another original part of Rank Math is its analytics interface which allows for specific follow-ups on Search Console reports (e.g. search impressions and keyword positions), Google Analytics traffic statistics, and the correspondence of these statistics to the SEO score for each content (score from 0 to 100 as well as a color code).
3 – Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: a good keyword analysis?
Rank Math and Yoast SEO both support keyword analysis as you create content. That is you can add the keyword (s) you are targeting and the extension will analyze your content to tell you if they are well optimized and if you need to make any changes.
But beware, none of these 2 solutions will tell you what your strategic keywords are and that you need to work on your site! you will need a study of your activity, your market, your competitors to know the keywords on which you must be positioned in Google’s responses. So, by having this list of keywords, you will be able to incorporate them as much as possible into your texts (without this being “undrinkable” for the Internet user), and with this type of tool, control that they are represented in your internal pages.
One of the advantages of Rank Math, however, is that it allows you to analyze multiple keywords at the same time.
On the other hand, the 2 visualize the results and give a note on your page as well as a list of specific advice indicating whether you have implemented them or not.
Is Rank Math Better Than Yoast SEO? which one to choose?
We come to the conclusion and it is always difficult to have an objective opinion between a tool mastered and used for a long time versus a relatively new tool.
So a few remarks:
- Rank Math and Yoast SEO both do a good job of integrating with necessary and important tweaks ,
- They are also very suitable and accessible to users,
- Obviously both are great SEO plugins .
What differences then:
- Yoast SEO is more popular ,
- Rank Math offers more features than Yoast SEO.
However, this does not necessarily mean that it is better as it will depend on the use of these additional features (and fortunately some can be disabled avoiding, again, heavy and unnecessary code detrimental to the speed of loading of the device. ‘a website).
In addition, it is quite possible for you to overcome these shortcomings of Yoast SEO by standard WordPress extensions that can be downloaded in the administration: image optimization (Imagify plugin for example), Redirects 301-302 and 404 error (Redirection plugin), Google Analytics (GA plugin), …
Conclusion:
If you already have an SEO approach relying on operational tools or plugins and you are looking for a tool to assist you and control your SEO titles/descriptions and other basic settings, go to Yoast SEO which has the most experience.
If you are looking for a complete tool that will be closer to the Swiss Army Knife, go on Rank Math.
Whatever your choice, you can be reassured because you will not make a “mistake” by choosing one or the other of the extensions, the main thing is to have a tool that will help you and advise you to achieve your goals. optimization of your website.
What about OMT, then?
We tested the 2 extensions and came back to Yoast SEO for 2 main reasons: without being paranoid, we do not want to give all our access/codes to an external platform and above all, we prefer to have independent tools between them (or even several for the same function) to perform these different analyzes.
And finally, for those who would like to change, switching to another plugin will not increase your traffic by magic! it’s a set of techniques and a long writing process that you need then… and an SEO agency would be much more useful to you.
