Yoast SEO Plugin: As Honest as It Gets

I have had a love-hate relationship with SEO Plugins but at the end of the day I end up using one.

I started using Yoast once I started self-hosting my blog and after some time I ended up using Rank Math.

I ditched Yoast as soon as Rank Math entered the competition and offer everything for free Yoast was charging for.

I have tested several plugins after that and these are my reason for not going back to Yoast.

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Yoast is Very Popular

Lots of people recommend Yoast since It is still very popular and probably the first of its kind.

When I was new to blogging, every video I watched included the installation of Yoast as part of their top ten recommendations.

Yoast currently has more than 5 million active installations

Their main competitors are:

• All in One SEO with more than 3 million active installations
• Rank Math with more than 1 million active installations

Think about the business of Yoast this way, if they can get $99 out of 1% of their fan base pockets, Yoast will make almost five million dollars per year.

More money than I will ever need.

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Yoast: What I don’t like about it

There are many good features on the Yoast Plugin but these are the ones that keep me from using the plugin again.

Yoast promotes integration to services and that’s something I hate about Free plugins.

In the world, we live in, that’s pretty much paid advertising and not a desire to make the lives of Yoast SEO users easy.

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Yoast: Ads Everywhere

No matter where you go, Yoast will show two or three ads insisting that you should buy pro.

I don’t mind seeing ads but seeing these everywhere is kind of annoying

No matter where you are, or what you are trying to tweak, you can escape Yoast’s constant upselling.

Yoast is Expensive

If I wanted to use Yoast on ten sites, I would have to spend almost a thousand dollars to keep my subscription alive.

When you compare that to what SEOPress and Rank Math, you think that the Yoast Team is insane.

If you need with your woocommerce, video and local SEO, you’ll have to pay $70 extra for each one of them or buy their bundle.

What if you have ten sites, you would have to pay more than two thousand dollars for it.

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Yoast Charging for Basic Stuff

If you have tested different SEO plugins, you already know that all SEO Plugins try to charge you for different things.

Yoast SEO charges you for redirections, and SEOPress does too.

Plugins such as Rank Math and Smart Crawl let you create all redirections you want for free.

• Do you want to know what your post will look like when your posts are shared on Facebook or Twitter?

• Do you want to optimize your site for a secondary keyword?

• Do you want to add a social image to your taxonomies?

if the answer to any of those questions is “yes”, you gotta pay for Premium.

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Yoast: Premium Features

SEO Plugins offers so many features for free they have to come up with new premium features that your blog can easily live without.

An example of that is Yoast SEO Workouts.

I can find the uses for it but do you really need it?

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The Good about Yoast

WordPress users including myself have lots of negative things to say about Yoast

But we have to recognize that there are features in Yoast that other SEO plugins charge for.

If you want to add breadcrumbs to your site, you can do that easily with Yoast SEO and not pay a single dollar for that. SEOPress has breadcrumbs among its premium options.

If you are not the one who needs to add a custom schema to your sites, Yoast SEO gives you basic schema options for free. SEOPress doesn’t give you any basic schema option in the free version of its plugin.

If you want to add FAQ Schema, Yoast has a block for that.

if you really want to build some expertise, you can add social media profiles and other sites to your organization’s profile.

Yoast also lets you:

• Create sitemaps
• Write a meta title and a meta description
• Add noindex tags to thin content and taxonomies
• Add open graph to your posts
• Easily change all meta titles and meta descriptions

For the rest of the features, you are welcome to question if you really need them or if a small blog really needs them.

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Final Thoughts

If you really need a plugin to take care of your SEO, Yoast SEO is still the king and can help you optimize every basic thing you need your site needs.

I am bothered by the bunch of ads, the plugins add to each one of their pages, and the pricing.

In this day and age, you can test other plugins and see if you can get the same features without the constant upselling and high prices.