Yoast SEO Review: Missing the Mark on Features? (2024)

Ease of Use

My rating here is a solid 4.2 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• The installation process for both the free and pro versions of Yoast SEO is straightforward and user-friendly.
• A potential downside is the requirement to keep the free version installed even after upgrading to the pro version.
• More advanced users might find the setup wizard a bit too basic, preferring more granular control over their site's SEO settings from the get-go.

Yoast SEO excels in making SEO more approachable for WordPress users, thanks to its user-friendly installation process and the intuitive setup wizard.

However, there's slight room for improvement in how it manages the transition between the free and pro versions and in the setup experience.

Installation Process

Yoast SEO follows a free plugin-pro plugin installation process with a separate pro plugin to be installed.

If you want to install the free version (especially if that’s all you need), you can find it in the plugin repository:

• Go to plugins > add new plugin
• Search for the Yoast SEO plugin
• Install and activate the plugin

After the plugin is activated, it will then trigger the setup wizard (more on this later), which I recommend you go through.

For the pro version, you need to purchase it first from their website and then download the pro plugin from your account.

Then do the following steps:

• Go to plugins > add new plugin > upload plugin
• Browse through your files and select the plugin
• Click the install now button

⚠️ Note: After installing the pro plugin, don’t uninstall the free plugin as the premium version requires it.

The final part is to simply connect your subscription by going to the site section of your Yoast account and adding your site.

The installation process is pretty straightforward, it’s painless and is quite the same with any plugin with a pro version. 🙂

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Setup Wizard

As I explained earlier, the setup wizard will automatically start after you activate the free version.

But in case you didn’t go through it right away, don’t worry as you can easily start it from 2 locations:

• On the plugins page
• Directly on the plugin settings > general > first-time configuration

It looks like this:

The first part, as you can see above, is to run the SEO data optimization where the plugin will scan your site and create a database.

The next part is quite important as it creates a sort of profile for your website:

• What it represents
• Website and organization name
• Organization logo

The next few ones include adding your organization’s social media accounts and whether or not Yoast can collect anonymous information about your website.

For the last one, I usually opt out since I prefer not to share any information regarding my website — as much as possible anyway. 🙂

Plugin Settings

Yoast has a dedicated settings page where you can tweak various settings like those for content types, categories, and tags.

There is a dedicated page here too where you can enable/disable site features, all of them grouped into different categories.

The majority of the settings here are SEO-related site settings.

For example, if you go to the home page, you can tweak the search appearance, including the title and meta description, as well as the social media appearance.

You will see similar settings for posts, pages, categories, and even tags.

There are also some advanced settings here for other important elements like breadcrumbs, archive pages, special pages, etc.

Here are the settings available for breadcrumbs:

It’s a little easier to find the settings that you need since Yoast SEO is one of the most simplistic WordPress SEO plugins around. 🙂

👉 Related: Best SEO Plugins for WordPress: Free and Paid Options

Features

I would rate its overall features a 3.8 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• Yoast SEO shines with its post and page optimization features, accessible even in the free version.
• While the premium version unlocks additional functionalities like the redirects tool and content insights, it falls short of justifying its price point.
• Yoast SEO includes several built-in tools, though these tools are not as relevant or user-friendly for the average user.

Yoast SEO offers a solid foundation for users to improve their website's SEO.

However, the premium version's value proposition and the limited appeal of some advanced features to the average user prevent it from achieving a higher score.

With that, here are some of the most notable features of Yoast SEO:

1. Post and Page Optimization (Free)

Yoast SEO is the most popular free SEO plugin in the market, and its post and page optimizer is well-known among bloggers and content marketers.

In fact, most beginners started with Yoast SEO as you can easily understand what’s happening on the screen.

Here’s what the SEO optimizer looks like:

You can see that there are four tabs available:

• SEO
• Readability
• Schema
• Social

The SEO tab is where you can check how optimized the content is according to the focus keyphrase and change the meta (title, description, and slug).

If you’re subscribed to the premium subscription, you can also make use of AI-optimized SEO titles and meta descriptions.

There are also other bonus features here like marking the post as cornerstone content, and how search engines would treat this post.

⚠️ Note: No matter what I try, and I also checked other websites that I handle, I can’t get the internal linking suggestions feature to work. 😓

The readability tab is a nice touch as it checks for different metrics like passive voice, sentence length, transition words, word complexity, and a lot more.

Here’s what it looks like:

Think of it as a bit of a replacement for the Hemingway Editor, if you ever use it to check your writing (it’s not as robust, but still a good tool).

The schema tab is simple — it lets you choose what type of page or content you’re working on while the social tab is where you can tweak the post’s social media appearance.

This free feature is quite useful — if there’s one thing I want to change, I prefer it to be located on the side panel so I can scan the post while checking the suggestions. 🙂

2. Built-in Tools (Free)

Yoast also includes free built-in tools that are quite helpful for SEO professionals — but not so much for your average user.

It’s also conveniently located in plugin settings > tools and you simply have to click on what tool you want to open.

There are three usable tools here:

• Import and export
• File editor
• Bulk editor

The first tool — import and export — will let you import and export settings from another Yoast SEO installation as well as other SEO plugins.

A fun fact here that not so many users know is that this is also the place where you can export and import redirects.

Here’s what it looks like:

The second one allows you to edit your robots.txt (or create one when it’s not available) and .htaccess file.

⛔ Warning: Unless you know what you’re doing, I suggest you don’t visit the file editor to avoid any damage to your website.

The last one will allow you to easily edit the SEO title and description of your posts and pages without opening them.

I admit that it’s a handy tool when it comes to updating the titles and descriptions of your posts and pages especially when you didn’t do it the first time.

Well, all of the tools here have their uses. But most of the time, regular users won’t need to touch them (it’s nice to know though that they’re here).

3. Redirects (Premium)

This one is my favorite feature of Yoast, though unfortunately, it’s locked behind their premium subscription.

It’s a no-nonsense redirect tool where you simply have to select the redirect type (default at 301) and enter the links.

I love the fact that the type field is pre-selected, so you just have to enter the links — unless you need a different type of redirect.

In total, there are five different types available:

• 301 Moved permanently
• 302 Found
• 307 Temporary redirect
• 410 Content deleted
• 451 Unavailable for legal reasons

There’s also a regex redirect tool that’s seen as a more powerful redirect command:

It has the same types of redirects available.

However, this is one of those tools that you must only touch if you know what you’re doing — otherwise, the plain tool will suffice.

In the settings tab, you can also change the redirect method as well as enable the generation of a separate redirect file.

Reliability

I would rate its overall reliability at 3.9 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• Yoast SEO demonstrates a strong commitment to maintaining and improving its plugins, with frequent updates ranging from 2-4 times per month.
• While it performs adequately in terms of memory usage and page speed impact, it falls short when compared directly to competitors such as Rank Math.
• The distribution of updates between the free and premium versions of Yoast SEO presents a mixed picture.

Yoast SEO's commitment to regular updates and the clarity with which it communicates these changes to users are significant positives.

However, when it comes to efficiency and the distribution of enhancements, there's noticeable room for improvement.

Performance

For performance, Yoast seems to be holding well, both in memory usage and in page speed inside the website.

Here’s data from WP Hive when they checked this WordPress SEO plugin (free version) using their own test script:

The average memory usage is 132.57 KB (which is an okay score), while the average page loading time is increased by 0.15 seconds.

I also tested Yoast SEO (both versions, focusing on the free as its results are higher) using the Code Profiler plugin.

The results are:

• Frontend: 0.072 seconds
• Backend: 0.14 seconds

Let’s compare it with how the others went:

From the results above, it’s easy to see that although Yoast has okay scores, it’s lower than how Rank Math is doing.

I hate to say this, but it shows that Yoast isn’t that optimized as Rank Math has more features out of the box and it’s performing better.

For the actual SEO performance though, I believe that most SEO tools have more or less similar effects, and it’s in the features where they mostly vary.

👉 Related: Rank Math Review: The Ultimate SEO Game-Changer?

Updates and Performance

What about the updates and maintenance?

Despite how it compared earlier to Rank Math, Yoast is actually doing quite well in terms of updates and maintenance.

You can check the changelog here:

From the screenshot above, you can see that there are changelogs for all their products (free, premium, local, news. etc.)

With a quick scan, I can easily see that Yoast has been updating their plugins 2-3 times per month (sometimes 4).

Here are some of my observations with the changelog:

• There are rare instances where Yoast has only one update for the month, while there are also times when they updated 4 times.
• In terms of enhancements, the premium version receives more love (well, that’s to be expected) as I see improvement updates almost every month.
• Unfortunately, the free version receives similar updates 1-2 times per 6 months, with the majority of the updates being about bug fixes.

But overall, I’m happy with the fact that Yoast SEO is committed to improving all their WordPress plugins and still adds new features.

Support

My rating here is 4.1 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• Yoast SEO excels in offering a well-structured and informative knowledge base alongside developer documentation.
• The absence of a real-time chat support feature stands out as a significant gap in Yoast's support offerings.
• Yoast's active presence and responsiveness on the WordPress forum represent a mixed aspect of their support.

Yoast SEO's support system is solid, marked by a strong knowledge base and proactive engagement with users through forums and direct contact options.

Introducing real-time chat support could significantly boost their support and offer users immediate help making the support experience more seamless.

Customer Service

As you might have seen from an earlier screenshot, Yoast has a support page within the plugin settings with shortcuts to their support features.

You will see here shortcuts to the following:

• Frequently asked questions
• Help Center
• WordPress forum
• Bug report
• Contact the support team

Their help center is simply like a bigger version of the support page found in the plugin settings, with similar contact options.

They also have good customer support personnel handling the WordPress forum (there are probably around two of them).

For the replies, they seem to reply to most of the posts, though it may take a few hours before they respond to a question.

It’s probably due to their duty hours — but at least, I can see that when they reply, they do what they can to answer the query.

They have one more interesting support feature where you can contact them directly through chat (though I’m not really sure if it’s chat or just a send-a-message feature).

Here’s what it looks like:

Unlike the full-fledged chat feature, I can’t seem to conclude if it’s a chat support feature since there is also no chat history that I can check out. 🤷

At the very least though, you have some options if you need to contact and ask them something that can’t be answered in the help center.

Knowledge Base

For knowledge base, Yoast has two types:

1. Help articles
2. Developer documentation

What you see on the support page and in the help center is already the starting list of help articles — there’s no page whatsoever where you can browse categories.

On the bright side, you can always use the search feature to look for the help article that you need, which is faster than browsing yourself.

For the individual help articles, here’s an example:

It has all the helpful elements, with the steps clearly emphasized, and annotated images that illustrate the steps.

In some of their articles, they have a section in the bottom part of the article where they talk about potential issues that you may encounter (really helpful).

The dev documentation isn’t that far behind:

Like what you expect from a dev doc, it contains the necessary scripts, and there’s also an FAQ section at the end of the article. 🙂

Despite what Yoast could’ve done to improve their KB, I’m pretty satisfied with their help articles and developer documentation.

Pricing

I would rate its overall pricing a 3.3 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• Yoast SEO's 30-day money-back guarantee offers a significant positive in terms of customer confidence and satisfaction.
• The primary drawback of Yoast SEO's pricing comes from the comparison of its premium version's cost to the features it offers.
• Yoast SEO's approach to selling separate plugins for additional functionality and offering bundles for these can be seen both positively and negatively.

Yoast SEO provides a solid foundation for users to optimize their sites with its free version, which may suffice for basic SEO needs.

Improvements in the premium version's feature set or adjustments in pricing could help improve the overall rating in this area.

Cost Breakdown

As you know by now, Yoast has a free and a premium version.

Like other plugins, the free version is like a free taste, with the premium version being the cream of the top in terms of features.

You can easily find the free version on the WordPress plugin repository:

Here are examples of how the free version differs from the premium version:

• The free version allows you to use AI to generate the title and the meta description.
• The premium version allows you to optimize a post or page with up to 5 keywords (5 synonyms and related keywords).
• The redirects tool is only available in the premium version (as I explained earlier, this is my favorite feature).

But despite that, if you only need the page and post optimizer, then the free Yoast SEO plugin will more than suffice for your needs.

For the premium version, the price for it is a flat $99/year:

As I explained in the features section, the premium version of Yoast is more expensive than Rank Math — but Yoast premium has fewer features.

In the screenshot above, you can see that Yoast also has other plugins here that they sell such as:

• Video SEO
• Local SEO
• News SEO
• WooCommerce SEO

Yoast though sells bundles (since everything would add up to $400+/year), and you can get all of the plugins above for $229/year.

When compared to other SEO plugins like Rank Math, all these features are usually built into the pro version (while Yoast sells them separately). 😮‍💨

Money Back Guarantee/Refund

But what about refunds?

The good news is that Yoast offers a 30-day money-back guarantee and refund policy for their SEO plugins and tools.

Here’s their refund policy page:

It’s a bit long, so here’s a summary of what this page contains:

• Within 30 days of the initial purchase, they will refund the full price that you paid after contacting them and explaining to them why you’re not happy.
• No refunds are provided after 30 days, and refunds don’t apply to renewals and monthly subscriptions.
• Upgrades and bundles purchased after the initial 30 days can be downgraded within 30 days of the upgrade and get refunded for the upgrade (not the initial subscription).

You might have to explain why you’re not happy (like features you hope to be in the premium version are missing) but at least you would get a refund. 🙂

Final Thoughts

Yoast SEO serves as a solid foundation for those looking to optimize their WordPress sites for search engines.

If you're thinking of investing in a Yoast SEO subscription, I recommend you thoroughly evaluate your specific SEO needs against the features provided by the free versus the premium version.

For many users, the free version offers sufficient capabilities for basic SEO needs.

On the other hand, the value of the premium version becomes most evident when its specific functionalities directly support your site's SEO strategy and objectives.

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