Rank Math Review – Why I Ditched Yoast For RankMath
Updated on Jul 23, 2020Are you wearing black?
Because today we’re holding a funeral.
It’s for a dear old friend of ours…
The Yoast SEO plugin.
It has been a relatively faithful friend and served us well
for many many years.
It was there for the high rankings…
The Yoast SEO plugin.
But the time has come to say goodbye. Because there’s a new
free SEO plugin in town…
Review of: Rank Math
Reviewed by: Matthew Woodward
R
ating:
Updated On: July 23, 2020
Summary:
Rank Math is the new best free SEO WordPress plugin for anyone that is building out their website. I have been running it across my fleet of sites for the last 9 months and have now converted all of my sites from Yoast SEO to RankMath.
Rank Math Review: Why I Ditched Yoast For Good
Rank Math creates the perfect foundation for your on-page SEO.
In comparison to Yoast, it’s:
- Faster
- Easier
- More intuitive
And it achieves all of this without slowing your website down. Just take a look at this side-by-side comparison:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO plugin’s code is almost 1.5x larger than ours. It adds more requests & bulk to your websites as a result.
Rank Math SEO
Our code is precise and effecient. That means , fewer PHP requests, more speed, many extra useful features.
Better still, it has more modern-day SEO features.
For example…
They have a 100-point page analysis test that goes deep into the needs of each page:
Title Readability
- Focus keyword appearsat the beginning of the SEO page title.
- Your title contains a negative/ positive sentiment. Awesome!
- Your title contains 1 magnet words. Booyah!
- Your title contains a number. nice!
They allow you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free which you would have to pay for with Yoast-
They allow you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free which you would have to pay for with Yoast-
And best of all?
It’s absolutely free.
Take a look at this quick video to learn more about Rank Math:
So I’m going to show you how to setup Rank Math the right way and migrate from Yoast if you need to.
How To Migrate To Rank Math
You can painlessly migrate to Rank Math in just a few clicks.
They have a comprehensive setup wizard that allows you to:
- Migrate from Yoast & other SEO plugins
- Quickly add essential site information
- Optimize all your previous posts
Meaning you could be up and running in the next 10 to 20 minutes.
Step #1: Backup Your Site And Perform A Quick Audit
The first step is to back up the current version of your site which you can do this using a free plugin like Updraft.
Once you have your backup, use a site audit tool like:
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs
- SEMRush
- Website Auditor
To perform a quick crawl of your site to get a snapshot of your current SEO situation.
This is so we can compare our site before and after the migration to make sure everything went as expected and we didn’t
create any holes.
I noted down some random stats from my crawl in a Google sheet:
You can get your own version of the sheet by clicking here.
Keep this information handy because we’ll be using it as a benchmark to make sure your Rank Math deployment was successful
(better safe than sorry right!).
Now let’s start setting up Rank Math…
(Optional) Step #2: Migrate From Yoast (or other SEO plugins)
If your site is currently using Yoast SEO or any of the other popular SEO plugins, you can quickly migrate everything to Rank Math.
This allows you to easily make the switch without:
- Needing to update your old posts
- Going through all your settings again
Rank Math will automatically detect which SEO plugin your site is running and offer to migrate you.
Just go to-
Sidebar > Rank Math > Setup Wizard
And you should see this prompt:
Make sure the 4x import boxes are ticked. Then click “Start Import from Yoast SEO”
You can now start configuring your site…
Step #3: Configure Rank Math
If you didn’t import from Yoast…
Go to your WordPress dashboard.
Open:
Sidebar > Rank Math > Setup Wizard
You will see this page:
Click ‘Start Wizard’.
If you did import from Yoast…
You will already see the screen about website information. Either way, fill out the basic information for your site:
Click ‘Save and Continue’.
Now, connect your Google Search Console account:
*Save and continue.*
Now it’s time to create your sitemaps. You’ll want to turn ON:
- Sitemaps
- Images
- Posts
- Pages
And turn OFF anything else that isn’t required.
*Save and continue.*
On the SEO Tweaks page, leave everything as default. That should look like this:
*Save and continue.*
That completes the initial setup. On the final page click the ‘return to dashboard’ option.
Then go to:
Rank Math > General Settings > Images
If you are generally on top of your alt tags (which you should be) you can leave these two options set to off.
But if you want Rank Math to automatically generate them for you (not recommended), you can enable it here-
*Save and continue.*
Then go to:
Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta
On this page turn ‘Capitalize titles’ ON.
*Save your changes.*
Then head to:
Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta > Homepage
And fill out your homepage information:
*Save and continue.*
Finally, go to:
Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta > Social Meta
And fill out all of your social profiles:
*Save your changes.*
And…that’s it!
Once you have completed this list you have set up the world’s best free SEO plugin.
Step #4: Review The Changes
The final step is to see how migrating to Rank Math has affected your site.
Use the tool you used earlier to re-crawl your site and then compare the results-
Most of these changes for me were minimal and upon further investigation they were nothing to worry about.
BUT…
Pay close attention If you see changes like this:
In this case, Rank Math made a HUGE change to my site.
It removed canonicalization tags from my tag archive pages because they were no-indexed but that’s OK because the pages
aren’t indexed anyway.
In this case, Rank Math made a HUGE change to my site.
If you see any radical changes your not sure of, let me know in the comments and I’ll help you out.
Wrapping It Up
Here are the headlines of my Rank Math review:
- Rank Math is free to use
- Rank Math is better than Yoast Premium ($89+ per year)
It can also INSTANTLY help you to fix many website issues.
For example…
My rich snippets were filled with errors and “bloat” from a third-party plugin I was using:
As you can see it produced a number of warnings and errors!
But after installing Rank Math and using their rich snippet feature these problems were solved instantly-
There was also a remarkable drop off in the errors on my site after installing:
So, the real question is…
Why pay $89 a year for Yoast when you can get the more powerful Rank Math for free?
Oh, and did I mention that they have excellent customer support?
What are you waiting for?
Download Rank Math now – it’s 100% free.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Rank Math?
Rank Math is a new SEO plugin that I was so impressed by, I migrated all of my sites to use it. They offer a lot of incredible features
under one roof and best of all – it’s 100% free.
Is Rank Math Free?
Yes, it is! At the time of writing Rank Math is 100% free for anyone to use. Not surprising that it’s becoming a ‘must to have’ SEO tool.
Rank Math vs Yoast
The biggest difference is pricing, RankMath is completely free. Yoast on the other hand has a freemium model which means you have to pay to access all of the plugins features. Rank Math allows you to enjoy all of those premium features for free, but that might change in the future if they release a premium version.
Is it easy to migrate from other SEO plugins like Yoast?
Yes – there is a dedicated setup wizard that will take you through the migration process. Rank Math will import all of your settings in one click but please see my full tutorial above for the correct testing procedure.
What is the best way to setup Rank Math?
Just follow the steps in my tutorial to make sure you set it up the right way without any risk!
It’s easy to learn, simple to execute and it delivers results quickly.
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