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Yoast SEO vs Rank Math: An Honest Comparison!

Yoast SEO vs Rank Math

There was a time when Yoast SEO was the absolute ruler in the world of SEO plugins for WordPress. But now the time has changed and a new, less popular SEO plugin called Rank Math is performing far better than any other SEO plugin out there. In this article of Yoast SEO vs Rank Math, I will compare the two plugins thoroughly and help you choose between Yoast and Rank Math. Discover the very best SEO plugin for your WordPress site.

At the end of the article, I have shared my personal experience that helped me decide between Yoast SEO and Rank Math and realise that one is a hundred times better than the other. So stay tuned for that.

NOTE : THIS IS NOT A SPONSORED COMPARISON. ALL REVIEWS/COMPARISONS ON TechRBun ARE 100% HONEST. IT’S A PROMISE.

Let’s first look at the features that they offer vs the size they take up and the load they put on your server.

Table of Contents

FEATURES, PRICE AND SEVER LOAD: RANK MATH VS YOAST SEO. Which Has More Features To Offer?

Rank Math is a free plugin with a small size but provides a ton of features which it’s bulky competitor, Yoast SEO charges premium fees for.

At the time of this comparison, Yoast SEO is 26.4 MB in size and Rank Math is just 8.5 MB in size.

RANK MATH IS A TOTALLY FREE PLUGIN WHILE YOAST SEO HAS A PREMIUM VERSION.

Keeping those values in mind, let’s continue with the comparison.

Also, note that I will give points to each of the plugins for each of the features that they provide.

I believe this will make this comparison of Yoast SEO vs Rank Math easier to understand and we will have some numerical value to compare.

Here’s a quick comparison chart:-

(ALL FEATURES ARE EXPLAINED IN DETAILS AFTER THE CHART)

YOAST SEO VS RANK MATH: QUICK COMPARISON CHART

FEATURESYoast SEO Plugin
Yoast SEO Plugin
SCORERank Math Plugin
Rank Math Plugin
SCORE
PRICEFREE OR $89 / yr ex. VAT (PREMIUM)0.5COMPLETELY FREE1
SERVER LOADHIGH (SLOW)0LOW (LIGHT & FAST)1
SUPPORTS RICH SNIPPETSYES. ONLY 1 TYPE OF SCHEMA MARKUP1YES. 14 SCHEMA MARKUP TYPES14
USER INTERFACE NOT USER-FRIENDLY 0CLEAN, USER-FRIENDLY 1
INITIAL SETUPEASY1EASY, BUT BETTER.1.5
COMPATIBILITY CHECK BEFORE INSTALLATIONNO0YES1
SUGGESTIONS TO ENHANCE ARTICLE READABILITY YES. DOES THAT VERY GOOD.1YES. DOES THAT GREAT AS WELL!1
AUTO CANONICAL URLYES1YES1
AUTO LSI KEYWORD SUGGESTIONSNO0YES1
ADVANCED REDIRECTION MANAGER! ONLY IN PREMIUM !0.5YES1
70+ DETAILED SEO TESTSNO0YES1
AUTO IMAGE SEONO0YES1
GOOGLE POST PREVIEWYES1YES1
CONTROL PAGE TITLEYES. IT IS EASIER. SIMPLY DELETE THE STUFF THAT’S NOT REQUIRED.1YES. BUT NEED TO MANUALLY TYPE THE SHORTCODES.0.5
CONTROL PAGE META DESCRIPTIONYES1YES1
AUTO ADD METADATA SMARTLYNO0YES1
CONTROL ROBOTS METAYES1YES1
GOOGLE KEYWORD SUGGESTIONNO0YES1
OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT FOR UP TO 5 KEYWORDS! ONLY IN PREMIUM !0.5YES1
INTERLINKING SUGGESTIONS ! ONLY IN PREMIUM ! 0.5YES1
AUTO CAPITALIZE TITLESNO0YES1
AUTO POST REDIRECT ON URL CHANGENO0YES1
404 MONITORNO0YES1
TEAM ACCESS (LET YOUR TEAM ACCESS THE SEO PLUGIN)NO0YES1
193 LOCAL BUSINESS TYPE SEONO0YES1
ADD OVERLAY ICONS ON SOCIAL IMAGESNO0YES1
ADVANCED SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATIONSNO0YES1
SOCIAL MEDIA SHARE PREVIEWSNO0YES1
EASILY VERIFY PROPERTY FOR BING / GOOGLE / YANDEX / PINTEREST / NORTON SAFE WEB SITE VERIFICATION / BAIDU / ALEXABING / BAIDU / YANDEX / GOOGLE4ALL OF THEM7
OPTION TO AUTO NO-FOLLOW EXTERNAL IMAGESNO0YES1
OPTION TO NO-FOLLOW EXTERNAL LINKSNO0YES1
OPTION TO OPEN EXTERNAL LINKS IN NEW TABNO0YES1
PING SEARCH ENGINES FOR CRAWLYES1YES1
CONTACT INFO SHORTCODENO0YES1
TRACK KEYWORD RANKING ON GOOGLENO0YES1
SEO ANALYSIS SCORENO0YES, DETAILED1
SUPPORTS CUSTOM POST TYPE (POST / TAG / CATEGORY)YES1YES1
BULK EDIT TITLE AND DESCRIPTIONYES1YES1
FOCUS KEYWORDYES1YES1
CHOOSE PILLAR POSTS AND PAGESYES1YES1
XML SITEMAPYES1YES1
SUPPORT FOR REGEXNO0YES1
DEBUG REDIRECTIONSNO0YES1
ADVANCED SOCIAL URLS FOR SERPNONE0YES, LOTS1
REPRESENT SITE AS PERSON / COMPANYYES1YES1
CHOOSE A SEPARATOR CHARACTERYES1YES1
MODIFY GLOBAL METAYES1YES1
STRIP CATEGORY BASEYES1YES1
SEO BREADCRUMBSYES1YES1
AUTO BREADCRUMBS (EVEN IF THEME DOESN’T SUPPORT)NO0YES1
.htaccess EDITORYES1YES1
RSS OPTIMIZATIONSYES1YES1
DOCUMENTATIONYES1YES1
SUPPORT ! ONLY IN PREMIUM ! 0.5EXTREMELY HELPFUL24/7 SUPPORT TEAM1
TOTAL SCOREYoast SEO28.5Rank Math73

In this comparison, Yoast SEO scored a total of 28.5 points, while Rank Math scored 73 points.

Rank Math scored approximately 2.6x more than Yoast SEO!

Thus in overall, Rank Math easily outperforms Yoast SEO and clearly wins the competition.

Continue reading for the detailed comparison below.

CHECK OUT: HOW TO SHIFT FROM YOAST SEO TO RANK MATH (WITHOUT LOSING TRAFFIC)

DETAILED COMPARISON

Now that you have glanced through the brief comparison chart of Yoast SEO vs Rank Math, it’s time to dive a little deeper and study the differences in details. So, you can make the best possible choice for the SEO of your website and make it shine in the eyes of Google.

I will explain all the points listed in the above comparison chart serially, in the same order as displayed on the chart.

PRICING

Rank Math is a completely free plugin developed by MyThemeShop

On the other hand, Yoast SEO offers two plans: A free plan and a paid plan.

The free plan serves the very basic SEO needs of a website and it is also a memory hog as it takes a lot of storage space on the server and produces a lot of requests (function calls) due to its inefficient code.

The paid version of Yoast SEO charges $89 per year (excluding taxes). It provides some more features but still is no match against Rank Math.

Here’s a quick comparison between the free and paid versions of Yoast SEO:-

Yoast SEO Premium vs Free
[SOURCE: yoast.com]

Although Rank Math is completely free now, it can be assumed that in the future there will be surely a paid version of the plugin available.

According to a report from bloginos.com (website is currently down), Bhanu Ahluwalia from Rank Math has told that all the current features that Rank Math provides that are listed above in the comparison chart, would still be available in the free version.

And thus, the clear winner in terms of pricing is Rank Math!

SERVER LOAD

We all know that installing heavy plugins or too many plugins on our WordPress site will definitely slow down the site.

Thus while installing a plugin, it’s better to do some research and find out how efficient the plugin is, how much storage space does it take up on the server and how much load does it put on the server to perform its processes.

Yoast SEO is a pretty heavy plugin and its code is not very efficient either. On the other hand, Rank Math is a small-sized plugin with very efficient coding and provides many more features than Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO vs Rank Math : Performance
SOURCE: rankmath.com

As can be seen, the Yoast SEO plugin’s code is almost 1.5x larger than Rank Math plugin’s code. While Rank Math provides a ton more features than Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO adds a large number of requests and adds more bulk to your website, while Rank Math’s precise coding structure makes fewer PHP requests, making your website lighter and faster while providing more features.

Thus, it’s a no-brainer that Rank Math is much more efficient than Yoast SEO and thus puts less load on your server, resulting in a faster website.

Thus, in terms of speed and efficiency, the clear winner is Rank Math!

SCHEMA MARKUP (FOR RICH RESULTS)

Often on doing a Google search, we see descriptive snippets which briefly satisfies our search intent.

Say for example :

On searching “Sandwich Recipe” on Google, a result like the one shown below might appear.

Recipe Rich Text Schema Markup.

As you can see, 3 Rich results are shown in position 0 (topmost position).

The recipe rich result contains the image preview of the dish, then the title, name of the author, user ratings and the time to prepare.

There are numerous other examples of rich results, say for example when you search the name of a popular celebrity, his/her picture along with a short description is shown. That too is a rich snippet.

The advantages of showing the rich snippets from your website on Google is that it increases CTR (Click Through Rate) incredibly. And thus, it brings a lot more visitors to your site and also improves your ranking on Google as CTR is an important ranking signal.

Yoast SEO provides only 1 type of Schema Markup.

Yoast only has the capability to provide Schema Markup for general articles. It cannot provide specific enhanced structured data for different types of searches like recipes, books, products, etc.

But on the other hand, Rank Math has 14 different types of specialised Schema Markups, that provide rich structured data for :

  • Article Rich Snippet (GENERAL)
  • Book Rich Snippet
  • Course Rich Snippet
  • Event Rich Snippet
  • Job Posting Rich Snippet
  • Local Business Rich Snippet
  • Music Rich Snippet
  • Person Rich Snippet
  • Product Rich Snippet
  • Recipe Rich Snippet
  • Restaurant Rich Snippet
  • Review Rich Snippet
  • Service Rich Snippet
  • Software/App Rich Snippet
  • Video Rich Snippet

Thus, in terms of Schema Markup/Structured data too, Rank Math gets the clear win!

USER INTERFACE

User interface matters a lot for any app/website or any other software platform, including plugins.

If the user finds it difficult to browse through the features and functions of the plugin, there is no use of providing it.

The Yoast SEO dashboard is very cluttered and when you need to change a particular setting or configure something, it might be difficult to look for the settings if you’re not a tech-savvy.

Yoast SEO dashboard

That’s how the Yoast SEO dashboard looks. Certainly, it’s very helpful and is very difficult to navigate as maximum options are available neither through the default dashboard page nor through the header menu in the dashboard.

But in the case of Rank Math, the dashboard provides a very clean user interface and is much more pleasing to the eyes.

Rank Math Dashboard

The Rank Math dashboard is very clean and provides all the important settings at one place and makes it very convenient for the user to control the site’s SEO from a single easy to use dashboard.

But, there might be a few users who might prefer Yoast SEO’s UI over Rank Math’s. Thus, I’m not announcing a clear winner in terms of the User interface.

INITIAL SETUP

Both the plugins provide an easy to use initial setup wizard that walks the user through the basic SEO settings of the website like the type of site i.e. person or organisation, the logo of the site, etc.

Although Rank Math provides slightly better features during the initial setup, I don’t think there’s a clear winner among the two in terms of the setup wizard.

Thus, in the initial setup, both the plugins do a good job of guiding the user through the site’s basic SEO.

COMPATIBILITY CHECK BEFORE INSTALLATION

Rank Math has this unique feature of performing a pre-installation check which first sees if your website is compatible with the plugin or not, thus preventing any chances of a breakdown of your site.

But Yoast SEO does not perform any such check.

There are cases when sites break down due to incompatibility with a plugin.

And then, the only way to recover from the breakdown is from a pre-existing backup. Otherwise, your site is gone.

Thus, in terms of safety and precaution, Rank Math easily wins the game.

SUGGESTIONS TO ENHANCE ARTICLE READABILITY

Both the plugins do an extremely good job of pointing out the mistakes in the structuring of the article.

It helps enhance the article to make it more comfortable to the eyes of the readers. So that they are engaged with the content for a longer amount of time, thus increasing the dwell time on the blog and helps reduce the bounce rate, giving a positive ranking signal to Google.

So, there’s no particular winner in this category.

AUTO CANONICAL URL

This feature points out the most appropriate version of the URL of a post/page of your website to Google.

There might be a lot of URL variations like:-

example.com

www.example.com

http://example.com

https://example.com

https://www.example.com

and all the URLs point to the same page, that is the homepage of the website.

Now, Google might get confused which among all those variations is the most appropriate one and whether or not those are the same page or duplicate versions of one page.

To prevent these confusions, the rel=”canonical” attribute is used along with the most appropriate URL.

Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math handle the process of mentioning the canonical URL to Google automatically.

AUTO LSI KEYWORD SUGGESTIONS

When you do a Google search, at the end of the search page there is usually a “Related Searches” section where some keywords related to your search query are listed.

This is an example of the related searches of the search query “seo tools”

Google Related Searches

These related search queries are called LSI keywords.

When you target a particular keyword in your blog post, you must ensure that you include these LSI keywords into your article.

Google treats them as highly relevant keywords and including them in your content will help Google build more trust in your content.

Imagine someone writes an article on SEO but doesn’t include the term “Search Engine” even ones in his/her post. Would the post look trustworthy? No, right? That’s the importance of LSI keywords.

Rank Math automatically suggests the LSI keywords when you enter the main focus keyword in it.

And that’s a huge time-saving feature. Because then you don’t need to spend a lot of time putting each and every of your targeted keyword on Google and collect the LSI keywords for them.

But there’s no such feature in Yoast SEO. It does not provide LSI keywords. You need to get those manually.

Thus, the clear winner in terms of LSI keywords suggestion is Rank Math.

ADVANCED REDIRECTION MANAGER

Redirections are a crucial part of SEO. No one likes to see the boring 404 error page.

The free version of Yoast SEO does not provide any redirection feature. To get the redirection manager in Yoast, you need to pay $89/yr.

Rank Math, on the other hand, provides an advance redirection manager which provides:-

  • 301 TYPE REDIRECTION (PERMANENT REDIRECTION)
  • 302 TYPE REDIRECTION (TEMPORARY REDIRECTION)
  • 307 TYPE REDIRECTION (TEMPORARY, DURING MAINTENANCE REDIRECTION)
  • 410 TYPE REDIRECTION (CONTENT DELETED REDIRECTION)
  • 451 TYPE REDIRECTION (LEGAL REASONS REDIRECTION)

Thus, in terms of redirection management too, Rank Math wins.

70+ DETAILED SEO TESTS

Rank Math claims that it analyses your web page with over 70 different SEO tests to enhance your On-Page SEO.

It’s safe to assume that the free version of Yoast SEO would never provide such features.

Thus, Rank Math gets a plus point.

AUTO IMAGE SEO

Rank Math can smartly rename image files and add alt tags to them.

This boosts the overall on-page SEO and also makes the images search-friendly.

Thus, it enables the images to show up on Google Images (search) and can drive traffic to your website from there as well.

Yoast SEO provides no such feature.

The winner is Rank Math.

GOOGLE SEARCH POST PREVIEW

Both, Rank Math and Yoast SEO show a preview of how the post/page would appear on Google Search Page on Mobile devices and as well as on Computers.

This feature helps the writer make sure that the title’s or meta description’s length is not too large.

Both the plugins perform equally well in this case.

DESKTOP GOOGLE SEARCH PREVIEW OF A SAMPLE ARTICLE IN YOAST SEO

Google Search Desktop Preview In Yoast SEO

MOBILE GOOGLE SEARCH PREVIEW OF A SAMPLE ARTICLE IN YOAST SEO

Google Search Mobile Preview In Yoast SEO

DESKTOP GOOGLE SEARCH PREVIEW OF A SAMPLE ARTICLE IN RANK MATH

Google Search Preview Desktop On Rank Math

MOBILE GOOGLE SEARCH PREVIEW OF A SAMPLE ARTICLE IN RANK MATH

Google Search Preview Mobile On Rank Math

CONTROL PAGE TITLE

Both, Rank Math and Yoast SEO provide the ability to edit the title and description of any post or page to define exactly how it should appear on Google search.

Although the title of the article can easily be changed directly through the WordPress editor, you cannot control whether or not the separator or the site title would be displayed or not.

This is where this function comes in. It allows you to control exactly how the title and description of your page will appear on Google.

It is to be noted that sometimes Google does not display the description provided by you, and instead, it shows some other relevant description from your content, based on the search query.

This feature works flawlessly on both the plugins.

But, editing titles on Yoast SEO is a little simpler than on Rank Math.

Let’s consider a scenario:

say, you need to shorten a page title by removing the separator and the site title from it.

On Yoast SEO, you can simply delete those to variables from the SEO title bar, and that’s it.

But on Rank Math, you need to either type the shortcodes (%sitetitle%, %sep%, etc.) again from the beginning or choose them from the drop-down menu.

Although that’s a minor issue and I have high hopes that Rank Math will surely fix it in its future updates, for the time being, Yoast SEO wins in this category.

CONTROL PAGE META DESCRIPTION

Both the plugins allow you to put custom meta descriptions for your posts and pages.

It’s a tie among Rank Math vs Yoast SEO in this category.

AUTO ADD METADATA SMARTLY

Rank Math has the ability to smartly add additional meta description to your posts for better on-page SEO.

Yoast SEO has no such feature.

Thus, the clear winner in this category is Rank Math.

CONTROL ROBOTS META FOR INDIVIDUAL POSTS

Both the plugins allow you to control the robots.txt file for individual posts so that you have more controls upon the indexing of your posts.

1 point each for both the plugins!

GOOGLE KEYWORD SUGGESTION

While setting the focus keyword phrases, Rank Math pulls suggestions directly from the Google Search Suggestions.

This feature makes sure that your content is optimised for the keywords that people are actually searching for.

Yoast SEO lacks this functionality.

The winner is Rank Math!

OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT FOR UP TO 5 KEYWORDS

The free version of Yoast SEO allows you to enter only 1 focus phrase (targeted keyword) for your post. Thus, helping you optimise your article for only one particular keyword.

But Rank Math allows you to set up to 5 focus keywords and helps optimise your content so that your article ranks high on Google for all those keywords.

The paid version of Yoast supports this feature, but for a fee of $89. While Rank Math does that for free.

Rank Math is the clear winner in this category of Rank Math vs Yoast SEO.

INTERLINKING SUGGESTIONS

When you create a new post, Rank Math gives you smart suggestions for linking back to your old pillar posts (most valuable and long articles).

This feature ensures good rank flow between pages. Good interlinking can also help in boosting the domain authority of a website.

The best benefit is that it will keep your readers engaged for a longer amount of time as he/she will browse through the different articles on your site and this will decrease the bounce rate.

And lower bounce rates means higher Google rankings!

The free version of Yoast SEO lacks this feature.

Thus, the point goes to Rank Math!

AUTO CAPITALIZE TITLES

Rank Math can smartly capitalise the title of your article automatically to gather more attention on the Google Search Page and hence increase your CTR (Click-through rate).

Click-through is also a very important ranking factor and a higher click-through rate will help your site rank higher on SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page).

Again, Yoast SEO does not support this feature.

AUTO POST REDIRECT ON URL CHANGE

Very rarely we may need to change the URLs of posts and pages. That time if proper redirection of the old URL to the new URL isn’t done, visitors and crawlers will face a 404 error, which is bad for your site’s SEO and reputation.

Rank Math automatically redirects the old URLs to the updated ones without any manual effort needed! Trust me, this feature can be a lifesaver for your website.

The free version of Yoast SEO does not support this feature.

Rank Math wins this category as well!

404 MONITOR

Situations may arise like maybe you share a wrong URL of your website on Social Media.

Now every time someone tries to visit the link, they are going to face a 404 error.

What’s worse is, you may not even get to know that such a thing is actually happening.

That’s when the 404 monitor comes into play.

Rank Math has a built-in 404 monitor, which will track all the 404 hits on your website and give you a comprehensive report of the URLs which are causing these errors. And then, you can simply redirect those URLs to the correct ones.

Yoast SEO doesn’t support this feature.

TEAM ACCESS (LET YOUR TEAM ACCESS THE SEO PLUGIN)

Rank Math lets you give access to your SEO settings and reports to your team.

This feature is particularly helpful for those websites which have a dedicated SEO team but the administrator doesn’t want them to give access to the controls of the rest of the site.

This feature is not available in the Yoast SEO plugin.

193 LOCAL BUSINESS TYPE SEO

The rich snippet support of Rank Math SEO is just amazing! It supports specialised rich snippet structures for 193 different local business types.

Yoast SEO doesn’t even come close to Rank Math in this category.

ADD OVERLAY ICONS ON SOCIAL IMAGES

Rank Math: SOCIAL MEDIA ICON OVERLAY

Rank Math SEO can overlay a GIF or Video icon over social shares to improve click-through rate and bring more visitors to your site.

Yoast SEO doesn’t support this feature.

WELL, WE’RE ALMOST HALFWAY THROUGH THE YOAST SEO VS RANK MATH COMPARISON.

ALTHOUGH IT MIGHT LOOK CLEAR THAT RANK MATH WILL WIN THIS, I’D REQUEST YOU NOT TO SKIP LINES.

BECAUSE THEN YOU WOULD MISS THE DESCRIPTION OF THE EXCLUSIVE FEATURES THAT ACTUALLY MAKE THE DIFFERENCE AND MAKE ONE OF THEM STAND OUT!

ADVANCED SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATIONS

Both, Rank Math and Yoast SEO can optimize social metadata for all your posts.

SOCIAL MEDIA SHARE PREVIEWS

Rank Math Social Share Preview

Rank Math has the ability to preview how your posts would look if you share them on social media sites.

Yoast SEO does not offer this feature.

EASILY VERIFY PROPERTY

There are many websites (e.g. Pinterest Business Profile, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc.) which require website-verification by putting a piece of code on the header of your website.

Rank Math SEO provides easy property verification for the following 7 services:

  • Google Site Verification
  • Bing Site Verification
  • Baidu Site Verification
  • Alexa Site Verification
  • Yandex Site Verification
  • Pinterest Site Verification
  • Norton Safe Web Site Verification

Yoast SEO provides easy property verification for the following 4 services:

  • Bing Site Verification
  • Baidu Site Verification
  • Yandex Site Verification
  • Google Site Verification

Thus, it’s clear that Rank Math provides easy property verification for more services than Yoast SEO does. So, Rank Math wins this round.

OPTION TO AUTO NO-FOLLOW EXTERNAL IMAGES

Rank Math can automatically add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to images that you put in your posts/pages from external sources (those that are not hosted on your website).

Yoast SEO does not provide this feature.

OPTION TO NO-FOLLOW EXTERNAL LINKS

Rank Math SEO plugin can automatically add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all the external links present on your website.

This feature is also not provided in the Yoast SEO plugin.

OPTION TO OPEN EXTERNAL LINKS IN NEW TAB

When you provide external links to your site, it guides the visitor out of your site and thus reduces the dwell time on your website.

Rank Math can help you prevent that by automatically setting all the external links as such that they will open in a new tab when the visitor clicks on them.

Yoast SEO lacks this useful feature.

PING SEARCH ENGINES FOR CRAWL

Both the plugins can ping the search engines when a new post is published.

This helps in faster indexing of the article.

Also, Check out: How To Get Your Articles Indexed On Google Instantly

CONTACT INFO SHORTCODE

Most of the time we need to provide our contact information multiple times on our website.

Using the Rank Math SEO plugin, you just need to enter your contact information once in the plugin and then place copies of it anywhere on your website using a simple shortcode.

Although this is not an SEO feature, it comes quite handy.

TRACK KEYWORD RANKING ON GOOGLE

Using Rank Math, you can keep track of your keyword rankings on Google. No need to visit Search Console just to see the stats.

This feature is not found in the Yoast SEO plugin.

SEO ANALYSIS SCORE

Unlike Yoast SEO which only indicates the SEO score with Bad/Medium/Good (Red/Yellow/Green) signals, Rank Math provides scores ranging from 0 to 100, which gives a more accurate measure of your on-page SEO.

SUPPORTS CUSTOM POST TYPE (POST / TAG / CATEGORY)

Both the plugins support SEO optimisation for various kinds of pages (viz. posts, pages, categories, tags, and custom posts) on your website.

BULK EDIT TITLE AND DESCRIPTION

You can edit the titles and descriptions of multiple posts at a time using this feature.

Both Rank Math and Yoast support this feature.

FOCUS KEYWORD

You can add your targetted keywords for your posts and these plugins will help you optimise your articles so that you rank high on Google for those keywords.

The Rank Math SEO plugin allows you to add 5 focus keywords to optimise your post.

The free version of Yoast SEO only allows you to add 1 focus keyword.

Rank Math wins this category easily.

CHOOSE PILLAR POSTS AND PAGES

Pillar posts are those which hold the most value on your website.

You can choose Pillar posts for different categories using either of the two plugins.

But, the free version of Yoast SEO doesn’t show any suggestion to interlink those pillar posts with similar articles.

Rank Math shows smart suggestions to interlink your pillar posts when you create new content of the same category.

XML SITEMAP

Both the plugins create indexable sitemaps of your website which you can submit to the search engines.

SUPPORT FOR REGEX

With its Regex support, Rank Math helps you optimise a lot of varieties of posts for better search ranking.

You won’t find this feature in Yoast SEO.

DEBUG REDIRECTIONS

The smart redirection manager in the Rank Math SEO plugin helps you debug any issue that may arise after setting up redirections.

As you guessed, Yoast SEO does not provide this feature.

ADVANCED SOCIAL URLS FOR SERP

For brand searches, Rank Math optimizes your social media URLs to be shown in rich formats in the SERPs.

Rank Math optimises the following social media URLs:

  • LinkedIn URL
  • Instagram URL
  • YouTube URL
  • Pinterest URL
  • SoundCloud URL
  • Tumblr URL
  • Myspace URL

However, Yoast SEO does not support this type of URL optimisation.

REPRESENT SITE AS A PERSON / COMPANY

You can choose whether you want to represent your website as a personal blog or as a company.

This setting is available in both the plugins.

CHOOSE A SEPARATOR CHARACTER

You can set any symbol you want as the separator character for all the titles in your site.

The separator character is the one which is placed in between the page/post title and the website title.

For e.g., if you visit the about us page of TechRBun (this website), you will see that the title shown is “About Us – TechRBun”. In this case, the hyphen (-) in the middle is the separator character.

MODIFY GLOBAL META

Both the plugins give you the freedom to modify the global robots.txt settings for your whole website and as well as for individual posts and pages.

STRIP CATEGORY BASE

The URL of the Category Archive in WordPress follows the structure: example.com/category/category-name.

Either of the two plugins can be used to strip off the “category” substring from the URL.

This feature is useful because Google prefers short URLs.

SEO BREADCRUMBS

Both the plugins support adding breadcrumbs for SERP.

AUTO BREADCRUMBS (EVEN IF THE THEME DOESN’T SUPPORT)

Although most of the WordPress themes support breadcrumbs, in case a theme doesn’t support it by default, Rank Math can automatically add the breadcrumbs in the SERPs.

Yoast SEO doesn’t support auto breadcrumbs.

.htaccess EDITOR

Advanced users can edit the .htaccess directly from either Rank Math or Yoast SEO

RSS OPTIMIZATIONS

Both Rank Math and Yoast SEO can optimize the RSS feed of your blog automatically.

SUPPORT

From my personal experience, I can say that the Rank Math support team is excellent!

Rank Math claims to be supported by an expert team, available 24×7, 365 days a year!

On the contrast,

Yoast SEO does not even provide a support service for its free users.

The Yoast support team only serves its premium customers.

MY EXPERIENCE

I used to use the Yoast SEO plugin for all my WordPress sites earlier.

But about 6 months ago, a friend of mine told me about the Rank Math plugin and asked me to check it out.

After reading about the unique features of Rank Math and all the positive reviews of it, I read some Yoast SEO vs Rank Math comparisons online but didn’t find them very helpful. So I decided to try it myself.

I had also seen some negative reviews about the plugin but I wanted to try it anyways. So I installed it on one of my WordPress sites.

The in-built importing tool in the Rank Math plugin made the shift from Yoast SEO to Rank Math a walk in the park.

I was so satisfied with the efficiency, unique features and SEO capabilities of Rank Math, that I deleted Yoast SEO from all my WordPress sites and Rank Math.

The major difference that shows how much better Rank Math is than Yoast SEO is that Rank Math is bundled with SMART SEO features (for e.g., LSI KEYWORD TOOL, AUTO IMAGE SEO, SMART REDIRECTION MANAGER, ETC.) that truly make a difference.

Rank Math simply gives you a boost ahead of the mass who are not smart enough to understand how valuable the smart features of it are.

The level of satisfaction that Rank Math has provided me has compelled me to write this Yoast SEO vs Rank Math comparison today. Because you know, good work deserves some praise.

I hope this will help those webmasters who want to know whether Yoast SEO or Rank Math is the best SEO plugin for WordPress out there.

Please consider sharing this article if it helped you make your mind up and choose between Yoast and Rank Math. Make sure you comment down below if you have any questions regarding this comparison of Yoast SEO vs Rank Math.

Do check out some other articles of my website and subscribe to the push notifications to receive interesting monthly updates.

Have a nice day!

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Written by Anirban Roy

Anirban is a full-stack developer and an SEO expert. He has 6 years of experience in web development and software engineering. With a passion for writing, he has been blogging since 2017.

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6 Comments

  1. No need to go for free hosting to use Yoast plugin. You can install WordPress on your laptop/pc and use it to check your blog before publishing.
    I write my post on blogger then copy paste Heading & content on my local WordPress & use Yoast to do SEO.

    • Yes, that’s an excellent solution too. I had thought of this solution as well but didn’t get the time to update the article.

      I will add this method in the article. Soon.

  2. A great article Anirban! The detail was most helpful for me as I’m down to RankMath vs SEO Framework in my search (pardon the pun) for an SEO plugin. Not too many people go into this much depth. You are most appreciated! 🙂

    However, you also gave me great information to counter with “are you sure” when clients insist on Yoast.

    • Thank you much, D’Anne! Your comments are much appreciated. Really glad that you liked my Article.

      I would also like to inform you that Rank Math has recently added many more features that I have not been able to cover up in this article yet, but will soon update it with all the latest features of Rank Math.

      It’s truly a much better alternative to Yoast.

  3. I would have never known this fact, had I not come to this post by chance. It wakes me up because I thought there’s no plugin that can outrank Yoast SEO. Thanks for such valuable insight! I’ll change my plugin right away! I wish you checked out my poor blog https://www.willsblogger.com for positive feedback or improvement. Thanks once again!