Rank Math vs Yoast SEO: Which is Better for You?

Last Updated on March 27, 2024 by Azib Yaqoob

Struggling to choose between Rank Math vs Yoast SEO for optimizing your WordPress site’s search engine performance?

To enhance your WordPress site’s SEO performance, utilizing an SEO plugin is essential. While Yoast SEO stands as a widely recommended choice by experts, it’s worth noting that Rank Math offers comparable features and functionality.

Rank Math is relatively new when compared to Yoast SEO. However, Rank Math has grown significantly in the past few years. Rank Math and Yoast SEO are now both well-respected names in the SEO and WordPress industry.

When you come across two SEO plugins recommended by experts, it can be confusing. My clients frequently inquire about Rank Math and Yoast SEO, seeking advice on which one to install on their website.

In this post, I will attempt to answer this question so that you all can have a better overview of each plugin. I will compare the features of both Rank Math vs Yoast SEO plugins side by side.

Introductions

Before we start, I think we should briefly introduce Rank Math and Yoast SEO.

Rank Math

Rank Math is comparatively new to Yoast. It was publicly released in the late 2018. Rank Math comes from an established WordPress development team who are in the industry from 2012.

Since it first came out, Rank Math has become super popular among WordPress users, making it the third most-loved SEO plugin. The second best plugin is All in One SEO (if you’re curious).

In less than two years, it’s gone from hardly being used to being installed on over 500,000 websites. That’s pretty impressive for any SEO plugin on WordPress!

One big reason for its popularity is that it offers a bunch of cool features for free. These features have helped draw in lots of Yoast users.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO has a long history that goes back to 2005 when Joost de Valk created a website called “joostdevalk.nl.”

After some other projects, like owning and selling the domain “css3.info,” de Valk started the Yoast platform in 2009.

The first version of WordPress SEO came out in 2010, and that’s when Yoast BV was founded.

Since then, Yoast SEO has been helping WordPress users improve their website’s visibility on search engines.

Think of Yoast SEO as the default option for SEO on WordPress. If you’re reading an SEO tutorial, chances are it assumes you’re using Yoast SEO.

But it’s not just about SEO. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins ever made for WordPress. It’s been downloaded over 288 million times, showing just how many people trust and rely on it.

Features

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the features provided by both Rank Math and Yoast SEO. We’ll compare them thoroughly to give you a clear understanding of how these plugins differ and where they overlap.

Rank Math free

When we talk about Rank Math features, I think it is important to note that Rank Math use a Module based feature approach.

The benefit of modules is that you can customize your Rank Math SEO experience by only enabling modules that you want from Rank Math’s Dashboard.

• 404 Monitor: Here you can monitor 404 pages. Also, you can customize it according to your site structure and needs.
• Advanced custom Fields (ACF) Support: If you are using custom fields on your site, you can enable this module.
• Works with AMP: By enabling AMP module, Rank Math will auto generate meta tags for AMP pages.
• Connect with Google Search Console: You need to enable this module then connect your Google Search Console account. It will retrieve some data to show in your WordPress Dashboard.
• bbPress & BuddyPress Support: You can also use these modules to set global meta tags on your forum.
• Image SEO: Enable this module to get access to Advanced image SEO features. It can auto generate Alt text, and image titles for your images.
• IndexNow: You can notify Bing & Yandex using the IndexNow API when pages are added, updated and removed, or submit URLs manually.
• Link Counter: This will enable internal and external link counter.
• Local SEO: You can add one location with Rank Math free. However, it has all the features that a business needs to add location schema to their sites.
• Redirections: Enable this feature to place different types of redirects.
• Schema (structured Data): You can configure default schema type for post and pages.
• Role Manager: If your site has multiple users, you can use this feature to control their access to Rank Math features.
• SEO Analyzer: Allows you to analyze your SEO using 28+ different tests.
• Google Web Stories Support: If you use GWS on your website then you can use this module to automatically configure Schema and Meta tags.

Now, let’s take a look at the Rank Math PRO features that you can utilize if you purchase one of their premium plans.

Rank Math Premium:

• Advanced Google Analytics 4 Integration: You can gather all your Google Analytics data right inside your WordPress Dashboard along with advanced filters.
• Keyword Rank Tracker: You can track 100s of keywords and monitor their performance for the last 12 months.
• Free Content AI Trial Credits: With Rank Math premium, you get free credits to use Content AI trial.
• Google Index Status: You can directly check any of your site URL index status.
• Advanced Schema Generator: You can use this feature to choose from a list of pre-included Schema types or use custom Schema.
• White Labelled Email Reports: Add your own branding to your reports and send them to your clients.
• Schema Import: Enter any 3rd party URL and Rank Math will automatically import Schema from that URL.
• Speakable Schema: Speakable schema markup can be used to identify content that is best suited for audio playback.
• Integrate Google Trends: Get Google Trends data from a selection of your focus keywords right inside your WordPress Dashboard.
• Google News Sitemap: With premium, you get the news sitemap feature.
• Video Sitemap: Create a Video Sitemap for your video content automatically.
• Automate Image SEO: Use advanced image SEO module to help you customize your image alt and other tags with a few clicks.
• Local SEO (Multiple Locations): Support for multiple-locations for your local SEO requirements.
• EDD SEO: With premium, you get support for the Easy Digital Downloads SEO.
• Podcast Module: With Podcast RSS feed, and schema markup generated with this module, you can make your podcast discoverable on platforms like Google Podcasts, Apple Podcast, etc.
• Watermarked Social Media images: Add a watermark to all images shared on social media from your website.

Yoast SEO Free

• SEO Analysis: It will give you suggestions to improve SEO of your page.
• Readability Analysis: Likewise, this will give you suggestions to improve your text readability.
• Inclusive Language analysis: You’ll get feedback, divided into categories such as age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status, to help you improve your content and make it appealing to a wider audience.
• Cornerstone Content: It helps you filter and mark your cornerstone content, and to ensure most important pages get the attention they deserve.
• Text Link Counter: It will display a link counter next to your posts in WordPress. It will display internal links from and to your posts.
• Open Graph Data: Allows for social media sites to display a preview with images. This feature will help you optimize your site for social media.
• Twitter Card: Allows for Twitter to display a preview with images and a text excerpt when a link to your site is shared.
• Slack Sharing: This adds an author byline and reading time estimate to the article’s snippet when shared on Slack.
• Rest API endpoint: This Yoast SEO REST API endpoint gives you all the metadata you need for a specific URL. This will make it very easy for headless WordPress sites to use Yoast SEO for all their SEO meta output.
• XML Sitemaps: Enable the Yoast SEO XML sitemaps. A sitemap is a file that lists a website’s essential pages to make sure search engines can find and crawl them.
• Google’s Knowledge Graph Schema: The free version only offers minimal support of google’s Knowledge Graph.
• Crawl Optimization: You can prevent search engines from crawling things they don’t need to, and by removing unused WordPress features.
• Breadcrumbs: With Yoast SEO, it is possible to add breadcrumbs to single posts and pages. You can do that with the breadcrumbs block.
• Integrations and Support: Yoast free can integrate with Yoast SEO’s Schema API to get rich snippets for your podcasts, events, digital products, recipes, WooCommerce.
• Robots.txt: You can create or manage Robots.txt file which can help you give specific directives to different crawlers.

Yoast SEO Premium

We have a Yoast SEO free vs Premium comparison article, which you might also find helpful.

• Redirect Manager: You can add a redirect to a 404 error page. It is worth mentioning that Rank Math offers this feature for free.
• Internal linking Suggestions: You will get relevant content suggested for you while you’re writing your new content. Rank Math also offers this feature but I have to admit Yoast is a better option here.
• More Focus keyphrases: Analyze your content for multiple focus keywords.
• Zapier integration: It helps you to automate the publishing of your posts to your social media of choice!
• SEO Workouts: It helps you identify internal linking opportunities.
• AI Title & meta description: Every Premium customer can use the AI generator feature at no additional cost — there are no credits to buy!
• IndexNow: Automatically ping search engines like Bing and Yandex whenever you publish, update or delete a post.

Yoast SEO Premium vs Rank Math Pro

Both are great options for optimizing search performance of your website. If you want basic SEO functionality like adding meta tags, control sitemap, and robots.txt Yoast is a great option.

I personally find Rank Math PRO features better especially when my clients ask me to optimize their website’s for local searches in their area.

For local SEO purposes, I think Rank Math Pro would be much better option considering the fact that it let’s you apply multiple locations schema. In Yoast SEO, you have to separately purchase one of their addons to add multi-locations Schema markup to your website.

It would be fair to say, Rank Math Pro provides better value for money especially in terms of features.

User Interface

User interface is an important aspect in the adoption of WordPress SEO plugins. In this section, I will compare both plugins interface and usability.

Rank Math

Rank Math uses modules based approach. When you first land on the Rank Math’s Dashboard, you will see all the features that you can either enable or disable according to your SEO goals.

All the other features and settings are rightly placed and you don’t have to guess a lot when looking for a feature.

You can always use their Dashboard to get to the feature that you want to use. In my opinion, Rank Math’s interface is quite beginner-friendly. If you’re someone who is new to SEO, you will find Rank Math’s interface simple.

Yoast SEO

Similarly, Yoast SEO offers a well-structured interface. The layout and interface is slightly different than Rank Math. However, it is simple to use for beginners just as well.

Yoast recently adopted this modular approach which Rank Math first introduced in their interface design.

Now you can enable or disable each feature from Yoast SEO Settings > Site Features.

Yoast SEO’s UI is known for its simplicity and clarity, guiding users through the optimization process with ease.

Comparison: Both plugins offers intuitive interfaces, with minor differences in layout and design. Whether you prefer Rank Math’s modular dashboard or Yoast SEO’s straightforward approach, both options offer user-friendly interfaces for optimizing your website’s SEO.

Setup Process

Both plugins offer a setup wizard which will let you configure basic SEO settings of your website. In this section, we’ll take a closer look at the setup and configuration process.

Rank Math

The Rank Math’s setup wizard can let you configure the most important SEO features. The wizard simplifies the setup process, ensuring that users can optimize their websites for search engines quickly.

When you install Rank Math, you will be redirected to the Rank Math setup wizard. First, they will ask you to connect your free Rank Math account.

By connecting Rank Math’s free account you can enable features like Google keyword suggestions, free Content AI credits, SEO Analyzer test, and install Analytics code.

If you’re already using an SEO plugin, it will give you an option to import your SEO settings from previously installed plugin.

you can add information about the site, such as your website’s name, logo, default social share image and organization name. This data is often used by Google’s Knowledge Panel.

In the next step, it may ask you to connect your Analytics account.

you can configure your sitemap in this step, select pages, and post types you want to include in the sitemap.

SEO tweaks section gives you options like Noindex empty category, tag archives, add nofollow to external links, and open external links in new window.

Yoast SEO

If you’ve just installed Yoast SEO, you’ll see a welcome screen with a link to the first-time configuration. Click on it to start the setup process.

SEO data optimization allows Yoast SEO to view your site as Google does. Yoast optimizes your site’s indexable objects during this step, which may take some time if you have a large amount of content.

In the next step, you’ll be asked to provide information about the type of site you have, which helps Yoast SEO output the correct structured data markup and improve your site’s chances of being featured in Google’s Knowledge Panel.

Adding your social media profiles allows search engines to gain more context about your site, potentially including them in the Knowledge Panel.

By completing the first-time configuration, you’re laying a solid foundation for Yoast SEO to optimize your site’s SEO performance, and increase its visibility in search results.

Comparison: Both plugins offers similar setup processes. However, Rank Math has some additional configuration steps such as including post types in the sitemap, make all external links nofollow, etc.

These additional configuration steps might be confusing for someone who has never used an SEO plugin or lacks prior SEO knowledge.

In my opinion, Yoast’s setup process was much simpler and anyone without any SEO knowledge will go through it easily.

AI Features

Since last year, we are seeing integration of generative AI features in many web applications. Yoast and Rank Math didn’t let us down. They have introduced their new AI features and some are still in the beta phase.

Let’s see in detail which AI features each plugin offers.

Yoast SEO’s premium version has a tool that uses AI to help make catchy meta titles and descriptions for your content, and it doesn’t cost extra.

Rank Math SEO has the Content AI module. It’s packed with over 40 AI tools and lots of prompt suggestions to improve your content for search engines. But you have to pay extra for it, starting at $60 per year, even if you’re using the free version of Rank Math.

There’s simply no comparison here. Rank Math is a clear winner here in terms of AI features that you get when you subscribe to their Content AI module.

Yoast is only offering AI generated meta tags but the good thing is, they are not charging anything extra from their premium users.

If you are someone who relies on AI a lot while producing content, you will find many helpful features to assist your content creation in Rank Math’s Content AI. However, if you only want AI assistance for meta tags, Yoast has you covered.

Pricing and Plans

Yoast and Rank Math, both offers free SEO plugins which you can install from the WordPress.org plugins directory.

Both companies also offer premium plans with additional SEO features when you upgrade to Premium from free versions.

Yoast SEO Premium:

Yoast SEO Premium is a comprehensive solution priced at $89 for a single site license.

What’s great is that it offers discounts for multi-site licenses, starting at 5% per additional site. This means the more sites you have, the more you save.

Yoast provides various add-ons tailored to specific SEO needs such as Video SEO, Local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and News SEO, each priced at $69 for a single site plugin purchase.

Rank Math Premium:

Rank Math, on the other hand, offers two premium versions:

1. Pro Version – Priced attractively at $59, the Pro version allows unlimited use on personal websites and lets you track up to 1,000 keywords.
2. Business Version – For those with more extensive needs, the Business version is priced at $199. It offers unlimited use on personal and client websites, along with support for tracking up to 20,000 keywords.

Note: Both Rank Math versions are currently available at special launch prices. The Pro version, which typically costs $129, is now offered at $59, while the Business version, usually priced at $429, is available for $199.

Comparison:

Here’s a quick comparison between the premium offerings of Yoast SEO and Rank Math:

Yoast vs. Rank Math: Which should you use?

When it comes to choosing between Yoast SEO and Rank Math for your WordPress website, the decision ultimately boils down to which plugin offers the best value for your needs. While both plugins excel in providing essential SEO functionalities, there’s a clear winner in terms of features and affordability.

Rank Math emerges as the clear winner in this comparison. Not only does it offer a powerful set of features comparable to Yoast SEO, but it also provides additional functionalities at a slightly lower cost. With Rank Math, you get access to advanced SEO tools, intuitive user interface, and comprehensive support.

While Yoast SEO has long been a popular choice among WordPress users, Rank Math’s emergence has disrupted the SEO plugin landscape.

Its feature-rich offering, combined with competitive pricing, makes it an attractive option for WordPress users looking to maximize their SEO efforts.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a powerful SEO plugin that offers more features at a slightly lower cost, Rank Math is the clear choice.

Its comprehensive set of tools, user-friendly interface, and affordability make it an invaluable asset for optimizing your website’s search engine visibility and driving organic traffic.