If you just created a new website or blog, you may be hearing a lot of people recommending the WordPress Yoast SEO plugin. Many even claim it is an essential plugin to implement SEO on your site.
While I do think installing and activating an SEO plugin is useful, I’m not so set on Yoast SEO. I actually relied on Yoast SEO for years, years! Read on to find out what I liked (and didn’t like) about the Yoast SEO plugin.
What is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that claims to give you the tools you need to optimize your content and website for search engines. There is a free version available, or you can pay a not-so-small fee to upgrade to their premium Yoast SEO plugin.
What I found useful in Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO does make it easy to create and submit sitemaps to search engines and exclude any sitemaps or data that you don’t want to be indexed. Search engines need your sitemaps in order to crawl and index your website, so you can show up in search results and people can find you!
Another key feature I used in Yoast SEO was the ability to quickly and easily edit my SEO title and meta description on all my posts and pages that I wanted to be indexed. If you do not specifically write an SEO meta description for your blog posts, Google often pulls the first couple sentences of your post – which may or may not be optimized for Google and for clicks.
The last feature I found really useful inside Yoast SEO was the option to designate specific images and descriptions to be shared on Facebook and Twitter. Not that I’m super active on either platform, but don’t you think it’s annoying when someone shares a link to Facebook and there’s no image with it, or worse yet, there’s a totally random, irrelevant image pulled from the site’s sidebar!
That was about it. While those features were useful, I found that Yoast SEO also had quite a few not so helpful features and can often confuse newbie bloggers into thinking their SEO is fantastic when it’s really not.
What I didn’t like in Yoast SEO
The freaking red light, green light. We’re not in grade school anymore, and those green lights or red lights on your posts, really don’t mean much. It is possible to have a perfect row of green lights gifted to you by Yoast, and yet, you could actually be ranking very poorly in Google or not receiving any organic search traffic to that post.
And vice versa, Yoast SEO could give you red and yellow lights on a post, but it could take off in Google Search and end up performing really well. Or it could totally flop. That is up to Google. Other than submitting your sitemaps, Yoast does not tell Google, “Hey look over here! This blogger got all green lights for the post: Hiking In Colorado, so they should be on page 1!”
I see some content creators mistakenly believe that the keyphrase they type into Yoast, automatically also tells Google to rank them for that keyphrase. That’s not how it works.
Whatever keyphrase you type into Yoast (if you use this feature) is just an internal guide for you as you create your post or page. Other than your sitemaps, SEO titles, and SEO meta descriptions, it is not relaying any other information to search engines.
If you do set a keyphrase in Yoast, the plugin will try to give you guidance on including that keyphrase throughout your post. But I found these suggestions from Yoast to be extremely robotic and not actually useful for humans writing content for other humans.
Is Yoast SEO Premium worth it?
I give this a big fat NO! While the free version of Yoast SEO is extremely limited and seems to run on R2D2-era AI, it is not worth it to upgrade when there are so many more powerful plugins out there. Many of them are free!
If you want more SEO features and more advanced features than Yoast SEO can offer, try out the free version of Rank Math SEO. I can’t believe how long it took me to make the switch but I am so glad I did!
I continue to be pleasantly shocked and surprised by the (actually useful) features inside Rank Math. The free version of Rank Math offers almost everything the premium version of Yoast SEO does. Then Rank Math also offers its own premium upgrades to provide even more SEO power.
Just remember, while these SEO plugins can be useful tools and reminders for us to include keywords as we create content, the real power of SEO comes from choosing the ‘right’ keywords or keyphrases to begin with.
That means: choosing keywords your site has a chance of ranking for, choosing keywords that people are actually searching for, and as an added bonus, choosing keywords that lead to sales, whether that’s leading the reader to an affiliate product or one of your own products or courses.
Let me know what questions you have about SEO plugins in the comments below! Although, the best way to find an SEO tool you like, is to test a few out and see what you think.
About the author:
Mallory has been playing around with WordPress and building niche websites since 2017. It’s become a hobby and a challenge to see how many cool, new things she can create online each year.