Rank Math vs Yoast

It's true that the choice between Rank Math SEO and Yoast SEO is a significant one for WordPress website owners. Both free WordPress SEO plugins offer robust tools to enhance search engine optimization, but they differ in their features, approach, and pricing. In this article, you’ll see a comparison of Rank Math vs. Yoast, as well as what each plugin offers.

Below is a brief intro about Rank Math and Yoast SEO, in the case you’re new to one or both of these SEO plugins.

Rank Math SEO

Rank Math SEO is a newer WordPress SEO plugin that aims to simplify website optimization for search engines. It offers a wide array of features, including multiple keyword analysis, built-in schema markup, and a redirection manager, often available in its free version. With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive tools, Rank Math helps users improve their website's SEO and achieve better search engine rankings.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a one of the older WordPress plugins, and designed to help website owners optimize their sites for search engines like Google. It offers features such as content analysis with readability checks, keyword optimization suggestions, and tools for managing meta descriptions and titles. By guiding users on SEO best practices, Yoast SEO aims to improve a website's visibility in search results and attract more organic traffic.

To make it a bit easier to digest, here’s a side-by-side comparison chart of both plugin’s features:

Social Media Integration

Keyword Optimization

Rank Math: Rank Math allows optimization for up to five focus keywords in the free version, providing a significant advantage over Yoast's single keyword limit. It offers a clear interface within the content editor where you can add and analyze each target keyword individually.

The plugin provides real-time feedback on keyword usage in the title, meta description, headings, content, and URL for each specified keyword.

Yoast SEO: The free version of Yoast SEO restricts keyword optimization to a single focus keyword, which can be limiting for comprehensive targeting.

While the premium version allows for optimization of up to five related keywords, this functionality requires a paid upgrade.

Yoast's interface clearly displays the analysis results for the single focus keyword, offering suggestions for improvement in various aspects of the content.

Winner: Rank Math, for offering the ability to optimize for multiple keywords (up to five) even in its free version, providing a more flexible approach to targeting various relevant search terms within a user-friendly interface.

Schema Markup

Rank Math: Rank Math offers an extensive array of schema markup types, far surpassing Yoast's free offering, and includes a user-friendly interface for implementation directly within the post editor. Its intuitive schema builder allows users to easily select and configure various schema properties without needing any coding knowledge.

Furthermore, Rank Math can automatically detect the content type and suggest relevant schema, simplifying the process for even novice users.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO provides basic schema markup capabilities in its free version, primarily focusing on essential schema types like 'Article' and 'WebPage'.

For more advanced schema types and granular control, users typically need to utilize Yoast SEO Premium's schema blocks or resort to manual coding.

While the implementation within the block editor is straightforward for the basic schemas, it lacks the visual builder and wide range of options available in Rank Math's free version.

Winner: Rank Math, for its significantly more comprehensive schema options available in the free version and its intuitive, dedicated schema builder interface that simplifies the implementation of complex structured data.

Content Analysis

Rank Math: Rank Math's content analysis provides comprehensive feedback on various SEO aspects, including keyword density, readability, link count, and title/meta optimization. The analysis is presented within the content editor, offering a clear overview of areas needing improvement with actionable suggestions. Its scoring system provides a numerical representation of the overall SEO health of the content, making it easy to track progress.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO's content analysis focuses on both SEO and readability, using its well-known traffic light system to indicate the status of different optimization factors.

It offers detailed feedback on keyword usage, text length, heading distribution, and sentence structure, among other elements.

The readability analysis is particularly robust, providing specific suggestions to enhance content flow and comprehension.

Winner: It's a close call, but Yoast SEO might have a slightly better interface for content analysis due to its very clear and instantly understandable traffic light system for both SEO and, notably, its more detailed readability feedback which is presented in an easy-to-digest manner directly below the content editor.

While Rank Math provides a numerical score and actionable advice, Yoast's visual cues and in-depth readability focus make its interface intuitively effective for content optimization.

User Interface

Rank Math: Rank Math presents a modern and clean interface, utilizing a modular design that allows users to enable only the features they need, reducing clutter. Its setup wizard is highly intuitive, guiding even beginners through the initial configuration process smoothly.

The on-page SEO meta box is well-organized and provides real-time feedback directly within the content editor.

Yoast SEO:Yoast SEO offers a more traditional and straightforward interface, relying on a traffic light system for SEO and readability analysis, which is easily understandable.

While user-friendly, navigating through its various settings and tabs can feel slightly less streamlined compared to Rank Math. Its integration with the block editor is functional, providing analysis in the sidebar.

Winner: Rank Math, for its modern, intuitive design, user-friendly setup wizard, and well-organized on-page optimization meta box.

Setup Wizard

Rank Math: Rank Math's setup wizard is praised for being user-friendly and efficient, guiding users through essential SEO settings in a step-by-step manner. It allows for easy migration of settings from other SEO plugins like Yoast, simplifying the transition process. The wizard also offers different setup modes (Easy, Advanced, Custom) to cater to various user expertise levels.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO features a straightforward setup wizard designed to help users configure basic SEO settings upon installation. While easy to follow, some users might find it less comprehensive compared to Rank Math's wizard, particularly regarding advanced options.

Connecting the premium version sometimes requires navigating to their website, which can be a slight inconvenience.

Winner: Rank Math, for its more comprehensive and user-friendly setup wizard that includes easy migration options and caters to different levels of users with its multiple setup modes.

XML Sitemaps

Rank Math: Rank Math automatically generates XML sitemaps for all essential content types, including posts, pages, products, and custom post types, with granular control over which content is included or excluded.

Its sitemap settings are clearly organized within the Rank Math dashboard, allowing for easy customization and viewing of the generated sitemap index and individual sitemaps.

The interface provides straightforward options to exclude specific terms or post types and ping search engines upon sitemap updates.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO also automatically generates XML sitemaps for various content types, and its sitemap settings are accessible within the plugin's settings panel.

The interface allows users to enable or disable sitemaps for different content types and exclude specific posts or terms. While functional, the customization options within Yoast SEO's sitemap interface are generally less extensive compared to Rank Math's more granular controls.

Winner: Rank Math, for its more comprehensive and user-friendly interface for managing XML sitemaps.

The clearly organized settings within the Rank Math dashboard and the more granular control over which content is included or excluded provide a better user experience for customizing and optimizing website sitemaps.

Redirection Manager

Rank Math: Rank Math includes a built-in and robust redirection manager in its free version, allowing users to easily create and manage various types of redirects (301, 302, 307, 410, 451). The interface is integrated directly within the WordPress dashboard, providing a centralized location to handle all website redirects. It also offers features like auto-redirect on post/page slug changes and the ability to import/export redirection rules via CSV.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO includes a redirection manager, but this feature is only available in its premium version. The interface is clean and allows users to create different types of redirects. While functional, accessing and utilizing this feature requires a paid subscription, unlike Rank Math's free offering.

Winner: Rank Math, for providing a fully functional and user-friendly redirection manager within its free version, offering significant value compared to Yoast SEO, where this essential feature is locked behind a premium paywall.

Local SEO

Rank Math: Rank Math offers robust Local SEO features directly within the plugin, including the ability to add multiple business locations with detailed information like address, phone number, business hours, and maps.

Its dedicated Local SEO module provides options to mark up business information with schema.org markup, ensuring search engines can accurately understand and display local business details in search results.

The interface for managing local SEO information is well-integrated into the WordPress dashboard, making it easy to input and update business details.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO requires a separate Local SEO premium add-on to unlock comprehensive local SEO features. This add-on provides functionalities to manage business information, display opening hours, and integrate with Google Maps.

While the interface of the Local SEO add-on is user-friendly, the core free version of Yoast SEO offers very limited local SEO capabilities.

Winner: Rank Math, for offering comprehensive Local SEO features, including the management of multiple locations and schema markup, directly within its core plugin (even the free version has some basic local SEO settings).

This provides a more integrated and cost-effective solution compared to Yoast SEO, which requires a separate premium add-on for similar functionality. Rank Math's interface for managing local SEO is also well-organized and easy to navigate within the main plugin settings.

Google Search Console Integration

Rank Math: Rank Math offers a direct and seamless integration with Google Search Console, allowing users to connect their account and view important performance data directly within the WordPress dashboard.

This integration provides insights into keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, and crawl errors without needing to switch between platforms.

The interface for the Search Console data is well-organized within Rank Math, presenting key metrics in an easily digestible format.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO also provides integration with Google Search Console, enabling users to connect their account to the plugin.

However, the free version primarily focuses on submitting your XML sitemap to Search Console. To view performance data and insights within the WordPress dashboard, users typically need to utilize third-party plugins or access Search Console directly.

Winner: Rank Math, for its more comprehensive and user-friendly Google Search Console integration. It allows users to view key performance metrics directly within the WordPress dashboard, providing actionable insights without the need to navigate away from their site.

The presentation of this data within Rank Math's interface is also well-structured and easy to understand.

AI Features

Rank Math: Rank Math integrates AI through its "Content AI" module (which requires separate credits), offering suggestions for keyword usage, content length, headings, and SERP analysis directly within the content editor.

Its AI-powered writing assistant, RankBot, can help generate content outlines and improve writing quality. The interface for Content AI is integrated into the post editor sidebar, providing real-time feedback and suggestions as you write.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO has introduced AI features in its Premium version (currently in beta as of April 2025), primarily focusing on generating SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions.

This AI functionality is designed to help users optimize their snippets for better click-through rates in search results. The interface for the AI title and meta description generation is located within the snippet editor, offering suggestions that users can review and implement.

Winner: Rank Math, for having a more mature and comprehensive set of AI features integrated into its plugin as of April 2025. While Yoast SEO is actively developing its AI capabilities, Rank Math's Content AI offers a broader range of assistance for content optimization and writing directly within a user-friendly interface.

The integration within the post editor sidebar makes the AI suggestions readily accessible during the content creation process.

Readability Analysis

Rank Math: Rank Math offers a readability analysis that checks factors like sentence length, paragraph length, use of transition words, and the Flesch Reading Ease score.

The results and suggestions are presented within the content editor, providing an overview of areas that could be improved for better user engagement. While helpful, some users find its readability checks to be less granular compared to Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO is renowned for its in-depth readability analysis, examining a wider range of factors including sentence length, paragraph length, transition words, passive voice, consecutive sentences, and the Flesch Reading Ease score.

Its traffic light system provides a clear visual indication of the readability score, and detailed feedback is offered below the content editor with specific suggestions for improvement. The interface makes it easy to identify and address readability issues within the text.

Winner: Yoast SEO, for its more comprehensive and detailed readability analysis features, coupled with its highly intuitive interface. The clear traffic light system and specific, actionable feedback presented directly below the content make it exceptionally easy for users to understand and improve the readability of their content.

Link Counter

Rank Math: Rank Math automatically displays the number of internal and external links within the content editor sidebar, providing a quick overview of the linking structure.

This feature helps users ensure they are including enough relevant links for SEO and user navigation. The interface clearly separates internal and external link counts, making it easy to monitor link distribution.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO also analyzes and displays the number of internal and external links within the content analysis section below the editor. It provides feedback on whether the number of internal and external links is sufficient for the length of the content.

The interface clearly indicates if more links are recommended based on its analysis.

Winner: It's a very close call, as both plugins provide the essential functionality of counting internal and external links and offering feedback.

However, Rank Math might have a slightly better interface due to its dedicated display of link counts directly in the sidebar, offering an immediate and persistent overview without needing to scroll to the content analysis section below the editor as with Yoast SEO.

This readily available information in the sidebar could be considered a more convenient user experience for monitoring link counts during content creation.

404 Monitor

Rank Math: Rank Math includes a built-in 404 Monitor in its free version, which tracks and logs 404 errors that occur on your website, providing information on the URL that triggered the error and when it happened.

The interface for the 404 Monitor is located within the Rank Math settings in the WordPress dashboard, presenting a clear list of encountered errors. From this interface, users can easily identify problematic URLs and implement redirects to fix them directly.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO offers a 404 Monitor, but this feature is exclusively available in its premium version. Once activated, it allows users to track 404 errors within the WordPress admin. While the interface is straightforward, providing a list of broken links, accessing and utilizing this functionality requires a paid subscription to Yoast SEO Premium.

Winner: Rank Math, for providing a fully functional 404 Monitor within its free version. This allows all users, regardless of whether they have a paid subscription, to easily identify and address broken links on their site, contributing to a better user experience and SEO health, all through a readily accessible interface in the WordPress dashboard.

Video SEO

Rank Math: Rank Math, through its free features and Pro version, offers several functionalities that indirectly aid video SEO, such as comprehensive schema markup that includes VideoObject schema, improving the visibility of video content in search results.

Its general SEO analysis also helps optimize the surrounding text content for better video context. While it doesn't have a dedicated, advanced video sitemap feature in the free version, Rank Math Pro includes the generation of video sitemaps to help search engines discover and index video content effectively.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO requires a separate Video SEO premium add-on to unlock advanced video SEO features. This add-on provides the functionality to create video sitemaps specifically for video content, ensuring proper indexing by search engines.

The Video SEO add-on also helps in adding VideoObject schema markup to video pages and offers guidance on optimizing video titles and descriptions for better search visibility.

Winner: Yoast SEO, specifically its premium Video SEO add-on, offers a more dedicated and feature-rich interface tailored for video SEO.

While Rank Math provides some video SEO benefits through its schema capabilities and general SEO features, Yoast's dedicated Video SEO add-on provides specialized tools like video sitemap generation and specific optimization guidance within its interface, making it more focused on the unique needs of video content creators.

Image SEO

Rank Math: Rank Math automatically adds missing ALT text and Title attributes to images based on user-defined patterns or filenames during content analysis, streamlining the image optimization process.

Its interface within the content editor provides suggestions for improving image SEO by ensuring relevant keywords are included in the ALT text and file names. Additionally, Rank Math's general SEO analysis considers the presence and optimization of images within the content.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO includes checks in its content analysis to ensure that images have ALT text, prompting users to add descriptive text for accessibility and SEO. While it highlights the importance of ALT text, the free version doesn't offer automated solutions for adding or suggesting ALT text based on patterns or filenames.

Users need to manually add and optimize the ALT text for each image through the WordPress media library or directly in the content editor.

Winner: Rank Math, for offering a more proactive and potentially time-saving approach to image SEO with its ability to automatically add missing ALT text and Title attributes based on defined patterns.

Its integration within the content analysis also provides clear suggestions for optimizing images, making the process more efficient compared to Yoast SEO's manual approach in the free version.

WooCommerce SEO

Rank Math: Rank Math offers comprehensive WooCommerce SEO features directly within its core plugin, including options to optimize product titles, descriptions, and product schema markup (like Product and AggregateOffer) without requiring separate add-ons.

Its interface seamlessly integrates WooCommerce-specific SEO settings within the product editing page, providing dedicated fields and analysis for optimizing product listings for search engines. Furthermore, Rank Math's general SEO features, such as XML sitemap generation, are fully compatible with WooCommerce product pages, categories, and tags.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO requires a separate WooCommerce SEO premium add-on to unlock advanced SEO features specifically tailored for online stores. This add-on provides functionalities to optimize product pages, manage product schema, and improve the overall SEO structure of a WooCommerce site.

While the interface of the WooCommerce SEO add-on is well-integrated with the product editing page, the core free version of Yoast SEO offers only basic SEO capabilities for WooCommerce products, treating them largely as standard posts or pages.

Winner: Rank Math, for offering robust and integrated WooCommerce SEO features directly within its core plugin (including the free version having significant WooCommerce optimization capabilities). This provides a more streamlined and cost-effective solution for e-commerce store owners compared to Yoast SEO, which necessitates purchasing a separate premium add-on to access comparable WooCommerce-specific SEO functionalities.

Rank Math's interface keeps all essential WooCommerce SEO settings conveniently accessible within the product editing screen.

Keyword Rank Tracking

Rank Math: Rank Math includes a built-in Keyword Rank Tracker directly within the WordPress dashboard, allowing users to monitor the search engine positions of their target keywords over time.

The interface is well-organized, displaying keyword rankings, average position, best position, and traffic estimations, providing valuable insights into SEO performance without leaving the website admin area.

Users can easily add and manage the keywords they want to track and view historical ranking data.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO, in its core plugin (both free and premium as of April 2025), does not offer a built-in keyword rank tracking feature.

While Yoast SEO Premium allows users to optimize content for multiple keywords and integrates with third-party tools for keyword performance analysis, it lacks a native rank tracking functionality within its interface. To track keyword rankings, Yoast SEO users need to rely on external tools and services.

Winner: Rank Math, for its inclusion of a built-in Keyword Rank Tracker directly within the WordPress dashboard.

This provides a significant advantage in terms of convenience and workflow, allowing users to monitor their keyword performance without having to integrate and navigate separate third-party tools, all within a well-designed interface.

Elementor Integration

Rank Math: Rank Math offers seamless integration with the Elementor page builder, embedding its SEO analysis directly within the Elementor editing interface. This allows users to optimize their content for SEO as they build their pages visually, with real-time feedback on keyword usage, readability, and other crucial factors readily available within the Elementor sidebar.

Rank Math's settings are context-aware within Elementor, providing relevant SEO options for the specific elements being edited.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO also integrates with Elementor, displaying its SEO and readability analysis within the Elementor panel. Users can access Yoast's feedback and suggestions without leaving the Elementor editing environment, allowing for concurrent design and optimization.

While functional, some users find the presentation of Yoast's analysis within Elementor to be slightly less integrated and context-aware compared to Rank Math.

Winner: Rank Math, for its more deeply integrated and context-aware interface within Elementor.

By embedding its SEO analysis and relevant settings directly within the Elementor sidebar and offering context-specific options, Rank Math provides a smoother and more intuitive workflow for optimizing pages built with Elementor.

Google Analytics Integration

Rank Math: Rank Math offers a direct and comprehensive integration with Google Analytics 4, allowing users to connect their GA4 property and view key website traffic and performance data directly within the WordPress dashboard.

The interface presents various reports, including traffic overview, top keywords, top landing pages, and more, in an easily understandable format without requiring users to switch to the Google Analytics platform. This integration provides valuable insights into website performance alongside SEO metrics within a single, unified dashboard.

Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO does NOT offer Google Analytics integration. You will need to install a plugin like MonsterInsights, which previously used to be Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast.

Winner: Rank Math, for its more comprehensive and user-friendly Google Analytics integration. By displaying a wider range of key GA4 reports directly within the WordPress dashboard, Rank Math provides a more seamless and convenient way for users to monitor their website's traffic and performance alongside their SEO efforts, all within a well-designed interface.

For most features, both Rank Math and Yoast SEO are free. However if you’d like to upgrade and benefit from all of Rank Math’s features, you can purchase Rank Math Pro starting at $5.75 per month the first year, and they bill annually. They also have a Content AI add-on that starts at $3.25/month for the first year.

With Yoast SEO, if you wish to upgrade to the premium version, it’s $99 per year. As for their add-ons, like Local SEO, Video SEO, and WooCommerce SEO, they have all of them bundled with Yoast SEO Premium for $229/ year. As a side not, if you don’t want to purchase the bundle, each of the add-ons are $79/ year.

Price-wise, depending on how few websites you run, Rank Math may save you a few extra and give you more features, as it doesn’t fool with bundling other features in separate add-ons.

When it comes to pitting Rank Math vs Yoast, it’s important to remember that your content and how it’s organized are what will matter more than a WordPress SEO plugin. These plugins are only a tool to guide you as well as add special code to help search engines find and efficiently crawl your website.

Overall, Rank Math is often favored by users seeking maximum functionality, especially within the free version. As for Yoast, it has a very strong reputation, and a large user base, and is very reliable. Ultimately, the "better" plugin depends on your specific SEO goals, technical expertise, and budget.