What SEO plugin should you be using?
In the digital world were we expect an answer, result or product, quicker than the blink of an eye. It is important to continuously adapt. Google is constantly moving the goalposts, in some circumstances, they make us aware with their regular algorithm updates, but for other changes, it’s top secret.
It is, therefore, our responsibility as trained, digital marketing professionals to recognise what Google is looking for and adapt our client’s online presence to suit.
It is clear that over recent years, Google has been hugely focused on performance and UX. The loading time of a site, how easy it is for users to interact and the relevance of the content all come into the play here.
The basics of SEO is the general notion of telling Google exactly what your page is about. So when someone is searching for a keyword related to your business, Google displays your link within their results page. In order to complete this level of optimisation we traditionally use the WordPress plugin; Yoast.
However, recently, we have recently been switching our SEO clients from our old faithful friend, Yoast to the new kid of the block; RankMath. The first reason for this is that fact of speed. In retrospect, RankMath has acknowledged the size of the Yoast plugin which is a bearing on the performance of the site. They have developed a plugin which is 25% smaller than that of Yoast, and therefore less weighty on the website.
Yoast traffic light system
Even the most novice of website users are probably familiar with Yoast’s traffic light system. The red, amber, green measures indicate the quality of the SEO conducted on the page. While this has traditionally been great, there is definitely room for more accuracy. RathMath’s tool uses a 0-100 scale, with each aspect of SEO bearing a different weight to the score. The idea for a well-optimised page is to score 100/100 which is a much easier matrix to understand than how far into that ‘green’ traffic light section you are in Yoast.
More keywords
Yoast’s free version supports the optimisation of just one keyword per page. Which is best practice, however; there are situations where optimising a page for more than one keyword can work. Particularly in the instance of branding. RankMath allows you to target up to 5 keywords per page within their free-version. You would have to pay for Yoast Premium for this same level of support.
Experience
The UI of RankMath appears so much more modern. Yoast has been on the go for a long time and most of its updates are generally to make it compatible with the latest versions of WordPress. There hasn’t been any huge new developments for Yoast in a number of years, despite the continuous changes to the SEO landscape. RankMath has a more clean and intuitive feel, it’s data is fresh and it going into more detail about what is required to benefit your webpage. RankMath also promises more regular updates, so they really seem to be trying to keep up with the latest trends.
It will be interesting to see if RankMath stays free forever, but right now, all our SEO efforts are being focused on RankMath and we really think yours should be too!
If you have any questions about the different SEO plugins or any other SEO help our marketing team are on hand, reach us at marketing@laser.red