Last Updated on October 15, 2024 by Santhosh Muralidhar

WordPress is the most popular platform for businesses. One of the reasons why many users prefer WordPress is because of its large repository of plugins and plenty of responsive themes. Choosing an effective SEO plugin for your WordPress on-page SEO activities is very crucial. Because without good SEO plugins, it might not be possible to accurately do keyword analysis and content analysis for each page on your website.

So, let’s dive in further and explore the top WordPress SEO plugins

Yoast SEO

Yoast is my favorite plugin for WordPress on-page SEO. This plugin is actively used by millions of sites on the internet and has great ratings from customers. 

Yoast SEO plugin provides us with the functionalities to easily update SEO titles and meta description for each and every page in WordPress.

It also lists out and shows the SEO analysis for each page based on the content and keywords we are using. This analysis usually consists of 12-15 points depending on the version of Yoast we use.

Some of the key areas where Yoast analysis focuses on is the keyword density, image alt tag optimization, internal linking, schema, keyword distribution and more.

Yoast has both free version and a premium version of the plugin. 

Free Yoast is good for small sites and beginners who are satisfied with using 1 target keyword per page

Premium Yoast is good for large business websites with more content who wish to optimize for more keywords in every page. We can target upto 5 keywords for a page by using premium Yoast

I have used Yoast SEO and Yoast Premium for hundreds of my client websites.

The results have been very amazing. Some clients have told me that their organic traffic increased a lot after using the Yoast plugin.

This is how the SEO analysis section of Yoast appears inside the editor of WordPress page

The plugin usually rates a page as “Good”  with green smiles for the keywords we use if the optimization is effective. 

If there are more opportunities for improvements on a page then the Yoast plugin rates the page as “ok” or “Needs improvement”. In this case, you can refer to the analysis of that particular page and focus on improvement based on yoast suggestions

Yoast also provides us with features for sitemap generation and submission, robots.txt file generation, open graph settings, schema settings for products and pages, crawl optimization settings and so on.

Rankmath

I have also used Rankmath for many of my client projects on Fiverr. 

I do think this is a good alternative for Yoast.

However except for a few things I don’t find it anything special than Yoast

Rankmath also boasts plenty of SEO features which can be useful if you know how to use it effectively.

I would like to list out a few specialties of rankmath based on my work experience.

I felt the schema feature of Rankmath is a bit more useful than Yoast, There is also an option to upload custom schema using rankmath. This can be helpful for uploading true ratings and reviews through the schema structure data method.

This custom schema method might require some coding knowledge.

However, you can use a better plugin like Schema Pro for using custom schema on WordPress sites

Another interesting feature of rankmath is that it allows multiple keyword optimization in the free version itself

The plugin also has a built-in SEO title analyzer which will show us the power words usage in titles, numbers, keywords usage in titles, etc

I also felt the open graph settings are quite effective in Rankmath.

Rankmath also provides an automatic redirection feature which is very useful in SEO. This can help when we change the slug of a page. 

There are also plenty of other features in Rankmath. But I don’t think it offers anything special about keyword optimization which is our main focus in any on-page SEO campaign.

I also slightly felt that the keyword analysis part of rankmath is not very sharp like Yoast. Rankmath cannot detect keyword synonyms and partial matches like how Yoast does. This is a drawback of Rankmath. Nowadays google loves content that has keywords placed naturally inside it. So that the content is actually focusing on users and not keywords.

Having related keywords and other variations can make the content look more natural. This is where Yoast analysis wins over Rankmath in my opinion

But still Rankmath is not a bad choice. It’s very good when it comes to providing additional features like Redirections, multiple keyword optimization, SEO title analyzer, etc

Take a look at this example Rankmath analysis screenshot

All in one SEO (AIO SEO)

This is also a very popular WordPress SEO plugin. I haven’t used this plugin much for client sites. Because most of them are happy with Rankmath or Yoast

But occasionally some clients do prefer All in one SEO and ask me to use that.

I think this plugin also provides most of the features of Yoast and Rankmath

It does provide us the facility for uploading SEO titles, meta tags, etc

I also understand the plugin offers multiple keyword optimization features.

This plugin is a good choice for those who are looking for an alternative to Yoast or Rankmath

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