Yoast vs. Rank Math Comparison: Which SEO Plugin is the Best?

From blogging without an SEO plugin installed on my WordPress site — to picking the personal favorite SEO plugin for my blog, I have tested almost all the SEO plugins available for WordPress. From the start, it was difficult to understand how the optimization works. I believe nearly all bloggers, webmasters had experienced it in the early stage.

However, today, I, you, and almost all webmasters know how SEO works with a content strategy and some additional factors. As a content creator focusing on SEO is one of the most important tasks. I can also say you can be a good writer, but if you have not optimized your content for SEO, somebody else is going to outrank you with a less creative but highly optimized article.

So in WordPress, while writing articles, we use a reliable SEO plugin. At this moment, I must say Yoast and RankMath are my two top choices. Thanks to both of these plugins, because they have helped me understand on-page SEO into a more profound level.

… on-page, SEO is powerful. If you have not correctly implemented it yet, you should. It may take time, but once your page picks the right spot, it hard to outrank (just what I believe according to my experience).

In this article, I will try to differentiate two of the most popular SEO plugins, Yoast, and Rank Math. I believe this post will help you to choose the right plugin and do on-page SEO properly.

Before we start, let’s get an idea of what these plugins are:

• Yoast is a popular WordPress SEO plugin with more than 5 million installations. Yoast is reliable and has two versions of it, i.e., it’s a freemium plugin. The free version of Yoast can be downloaded from the WordPress repository.
• Rank Math, on the opposite side, is a new edition from MyThemeShop, which is also available in the WordPress repository. Rank Math does not have as much popularity as Yoast has, but the review on the plugin is positive.

That being said, let’s pin Rank Math against Yoast SEO to get their pros and cons so that you can make a decision in which WordPress SEO plugin is most suitable for you.

#1. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Installation Guide

As you can find both the plugin on the WordPress repository, installing and activation part is similar to other plugins. After activation, you can see both plugins creating a unique section in your WordPress admin sidebar.

To configure Yoast SEO with your site, you will need to click on the installation wizard. It will guide you through all the primary information that the plugin needs to work with the website.

The installation guide in Yoast is simple and easy. It has a total of 8 steps where you will provide information such as company name, environment, search visibility, website type, etc. Once the pre-setup is complete, you can move for more advanced configurations.

Similarly, after the installation of Rank Math will bring a 5-step installation wizard where you will require to provide your site details, search console information, site map configurations, advanced optimizations, and confirmation of the settings. Once the pre-setup is complete, you will be able to go for more advanced settings.

Our Choice: Both the plugins provide installation wizards, but the approach is different. Yoast goes for simple information that anyone can provide where’s RankMath comes with some complex settings, but they have outlined every setting and how they are going to help your site.

RankMath, though, it has some advanced settings it the wizard will guide you through, and that’s pretty much the complete settings of the plugin. That’s why the wizard of RankMath is preferable than that of Yoast.

#2. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — User Interface (Dashboard)

The user interface is a crucial part while you are going to use a tool. A feature-rich but straightforward user interface appears to be more helpful for the users. When the user interface concern comes to Yoast SEO, it does not offer a good interface, but you can perform all the configurations.

Of course, all the necessary settings are available in an organized order; however, a beginner may feel confused with multiple settings on the viewport.

On the other hand, Rank Math represents a clean dashboard where you can enable or disable primary functions with just one click. All the information related to each function is written inside the card, along with its status.

Enabling or disabling will determine whether the advanced configurations of a particular module will be available or not.

Our Choice: Both plugins provide useful configurations for the users in an easy to understand manner, though the Rank Math dashboard user interface is a little cleaner and easy to understand with simple enable/disable options.

#3. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Schema.org Integrations

Schema.org is quite useful when it comes to increasing your article’s click-through rate on the search results. Integrating schema.org will let you enable featured snippets, star ratings, defining post format, and much more. A complete SEO plugin should have the schema.org settings in it.

Yoast SEO plugin is compatible with schema.org, but you will need to install an add-on separately as it entirely skips the schema part. It would be nice to have full schema set up for individual pages, but with Yoast installed, you will end up installing another plugin in your WordPress.

On the flip side, Rank Math comes with full schema.org configuration. After enabling the schema.org, you will have complete control over how you want to set your page or post.

Under your blog post, you can set schema inside the rich snippet tab of the Rank Math tool.

Our Choice: It’s clear that having all the settings inside your SEO plugin is way better than installing a separate plugin for it. Since the schema is an essential part of SEO, having the settings for it inside your primary SEO plugin is recommended. We go for Rank Math’s way in terms of schema.org integration.

#4. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Keyword Assigning

Keyword assigning is an essential part of an SEO tool. Without focus keyword or keyphrase, you can’t just optimize your page or post for random key combinations.

Hence before creating your content, selecting and assigning the keyword with SEO plugin is vital for on-page SEO. Both of our SEO plugins allow you to assign keyword/keyphrase and apply different methods to show you how your content optimization based on that specific keyword is going on.

Yoast free version allows you to assign a maximum one keyword to your content. You will need to buy the premium version for optimizing your content for multiple keywords.

After assigning the keyword, Yoast sensor will guide you through what you will need to add on your page, what’s your readability score, how well the content optimization is going on according to the selected keyword, and much more.

Your content SEO optimization result will be represented with green, orange, and red status as good, average, and critical, respectively.

Rank Math, on the other hand, lets you assign a maximum of 5 keywords for optimization, but you will need to activate the feature with your Mythemeshop account, which is entirely free.

Like Yoast, Rank Math also provide you guidance on how you should write your content to make it entirely targeted and optimized for that specific keyword or keyphrase. The guidance or rules are pretty much the same, but Rank Math shows your optimization score (0-100) digit, which is more satisfying than just a green light.

Moreover, Rank Math can give you keyword suggestions immediately once you start typing the keyword in the “focus keyword” textbox.

Our Choice: In keyword assigning both plugins does an excellent job while the Rank Math score system is a little satisfying than Yoast. Again, with Yoast, you can optimize your article with suggested keywords of the primary key phrase, which you have to do manually in Rank Math.

Both plugins are beneficial in terms of keyword assigning. You can choose the one that you feel more comfortable to use.

#5. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Google Search Console

Search Console is a tool that will help you track data of your site indexing, keywords performance, page performance, full site insight, and much more. Since you are publishing articles for Google ranking, mainly, you should track the record of search console regularly.

If your SEO plugin should do webmaster verification of your site, and after that, you would like to track the webmaster tool’s records directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Yoast SEO does help in webmaster site verification. But it does not provide an interface where you can see your search console records directly.

Rank Math makes it suitable to track search console records right from your SEO dashboard. To enable this ability, you will need to provide your Gmail address and verify it so that Rank Math can fetch that information and display them in WordPress.

Our Choice: Rank Math is the plugin you will want to install if you like to track search console data without visiting your webmaster tools account every day.

#6. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a crucial part when it comes to indexing your website. Without a sitemap, your site can not be fetched by Google’s crawler. It’s mandatory that you have a sitemap generator on your site, and it continuously pings the update of the website to major search engines.

Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math plugins generate the sitemap of your website automatically. The URL of the sitemap is different. But that is just a URL structure that won’t have any positive or negative impact on the search rankings. In both plugins, you can generate custom sitemap once respective post types are available on your site, such as news sitemap.

#7. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Link Management

While creating your content, many times, you will need to add links inside your content. It can be internal links or external links. When its external link, it’s a common practice to assign “no follow” or “dofollow” tags depending on your philosophy.

However, it would be better if you have global control over your external links rather than setting them individually.

Yoast does not provide such control over external links, so you will need to assign link properties manually.

But Rank Math has “SEO tweaks” that let you manage the links and much more straightforward tasks automatically according to your settings. You can decide whether to index empty categories or not, nofollow/dofollow image links, nofollow/dofollow external links, etc.

Our Choice: As you have guessed already, Rank Math is the favorite SEO plugin in terms of link management, which automates so many attributes and saves your time.

#8. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — 404 Errors And Redirect Manager

Your WordPress site may have a“404 – page not found” issue with some links. So you should detect the broken links and apply 301 permanent redirects on them. It will keep your site 404 error-free, and Google likes such websites.

You would certainly like to track all your link errors inside your WordPress dashboard and take care of them as well.

Both Yoast and Rank Math plugins have powerful tools to detect broken links. Once you get the notifications, you can quickly apply 301, 302, or 307 temporary redirections according to your choice.

The redirection tool of Yoast comes with the premium version wheres in Rank Math plugin; it comes as a free integration. Nevertheless, both of them are equally powerful and useful, as well.

#9. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Woocommerce SEO

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. With this plugin installed, you can convert your website into a proper online store. Creating listings, adding products, configuring payment gateways, tracking your monthly revenues, and much more can be easily managed with WooCommerce plugin.

Yoast and Rank Math supports WooCommerce functionality and easily integrates with the WooCommerce plugin to fetch the metadata of products so that they can appear in the search engine directly.

Yoast plugin’s WooCommerce integration comes with the premium version, while Rank Math provides it for free.

Our Choice: If your budget doesn’t suit the premium version of Yoast, you can get your WooCommerce SEO done with the help of the Rank Math plugin. However, both the plugins are equally useful when we go for the features and functionality related to WooCommerce.

#10. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — The Support System

Well, whichever tool we use, there are times when we need support from the developer team. Both Yoast and RankMath are plugins that made of codes that can be broken or do not function well sometimes.

In such a case, you will get premium quality support from Yoast if you have the premium version of Yoast plugin. If you are a free user, you can check their guide. I contain almost all the information that you may need to know or fix your problem.

On the other hand, the developers of Rank Math, Mythemeshop has published well-written documentation about the plugin, which has all the information and tutorials about the plugin. In case you need their direct help dedicated support team is available 24/7.

What Will be Your Choice?

As you can see from the comparison, both plugins are very good with their features. But there is no doubt that Rank Math is providing you more while being free to all plugin. Some useful features in Rank Math are not available on Yoast. Some of them are available in the Yoast premium version.

My idea is if you are already using the Yoast premium version, then you should not switch to Rank Math just for one-two more features, which you can do with some third-party tools as well. The reason I can never doubt Yoast because it’s a great plugin with great ability. It has been proving it’s worth over the years.

However, if you are using the free version of Yoast, you should move to Rank Math because this plugin has many to offer and can full fill your needs without purchasing any premium version.

I hope this comparison is going to help you choose the more suitable SEO plugin for your WordPress site. If you have any questions/recommendations regarding this article, let me know in the comment section below.

Have a good SEO day with your site…