Rank Math SEO Review: Is It Better than Yoast? An In-Depth Review for Beginners

Rank Math SEO Plugin Review

Product Name: Rank Math

4.7

Summary

Rank Math is an all in one WordPress SEO plugin and it took the WordPress SEO community by storm with its amazing list of features. Wondering why is it better than Yoast? Check out our in-depth review to find all the details.

• Download Free Version
• Try RankMath PRO Version Now

If you want to grow the traffic of your website then you must use the power of SEO optimization plugins. 

I have been using the Yoast SEO (paid) plugin all my life before switching to RankMath in 2022. The migration process was smooth as it imported all the settings from Yoast. 

As such I was not facing any issues with Yoast but the outstanding features of RankMath were difficult to ignore. Even a free version of RankMath is more powerful than a paid version of Yoast SEO. RankMath works like a full-time team of SEO experts. 

Obviously, I did not want to miss any features, so I bought the paid version of RankMath. I am giving you a detailed comparison of the free and paid features of RankMath at the end of this article so that you can decide for yourself what is good for you.

Note: If you are just starting your blogging journey, I would recommend going with Rank Math’s free version. You can shift to the pro version as your blog grows and begins generating income.

It’s worth mentioning that not only myself but also many professional bloggers like Matthew Woodward and Ryan Robinson have started using Rank Math.

One aspect of Rank Math that I appreciate is their commitment to continuously adding more features and enhancing the plugin’s utility for users.

In this Rank Math review, I will explain these features under specific headings like

• The ultimate features of this amazing plugin
• Top benefits of using Rank Math SEO plugin
• Why should you use RankMath Pro over the FREE version?
• Pros and cons of RankMath
• And a few other important things about the plugin

Rank Math Review: Is It the Swiss Army Knife of WordPress SEO?

Rank Math SEO Plugin Features List

RankMath offers you a many features including;

Here’s a quick video from the Rank Math team where you can find some useful details about the plugin.

Top Benefits of Using RankMath WordPress SEO Plugin

Quick On-site SEO analysis

You can check your website’s SEO analysis with just one click. After installing the plugin, click on the SEO Analysis tab under Rank Math settings to start the process.

This plugin will automatically start analyzing your website once you click on the “Start Site-Wide Analysis” button. You get an SEO score out of 100.

Here’s how it looks like;

You get three test results including the number of passed tests, warnings, and failed tests. You should primarily bother about fixing “Failed Tests” as they can badly impact your search rankings.

Rank Math uses 70+ different tests to analyze your website’s technical aspects and content to help you optimize your site perfectly.

Performing frequent site audits such as SEO analysis of your site helps you find and fix your website issues so you can improve your overall search rankings.

Optimize up to 5 keywords

You can optimize your posts for up to 5 keywords which is not possible with the Yoast free version.

In long-form content, you may need to target multiple keywords to optimize your content properly. You can use Rank Math’s free version to optimize your long posts for multiple keywords.

In fact, you can optimize for unlimited keywords by using the following filter.

Replace the number 10 (in the above pic) with any number to increase the number of maximum focus keywords for a single post.

Track your keyword positions in the search results

You can integrate RankMath with Google Search Console (GSC) to track the keyword positions.

You can discover almost everything from the Rank Math plugin dashboard including;

• All the keywords that your site is ranking for
• Total number of clicks your site is getting for each of those keywords
• Average CTR (Click-through-rate)
• The position of your website for those keywords in the search results

Here’s how it looks like;

You can easily keep an eye on your current keyword positions. There’s another awesome feature called “Keyword Tracker” will be coming soon which helps you track your website’s rankings for the keywords you choose.

No 3rd party plugin is needed for Rich Snippets

Schema Markup or Rich Snippets helps your website stand out from your competitors.

When the schema markup is implemented (there are several types of schema), here’s how it looks like;

Rank Math offers 19 different types of schema to use. So, you don’t have to install any other plugin or tool for implementing schema markup on your site with the RankMath plugin.

You can easily optimize content for rich snippets and local SEO to make search engines understand your content better.

You can use the RankMath Schema Markup on your blog, a WooCommerce store or a review website.

Redirection manager

Most SEO plugins including the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin don’t offer a redirection manager. In that case, either you need to pay for their premium version or install the redirection plugin separately.

You get an advanced redirection manager with the free Rank Math SEO plugin.

You can pick several redirection types including;

• 301 permanent move
• 302 temporary move
• 307 temporary redirects
• 410 content deleted
• 451 content unavailable etc

Apart from the redirection manager, you can also edit the two most important files on your site which are;

• .htaccess Editor (you can edit and modify your .htaccess file right from your WP dashboard and Rank Math automatically backs up your .htaccess file before saving any changes to avoid accidental issues)
• robots.txt Editor (you can create and update your robots.txt file right from your WordPress dashboard)

Social media integration

You can create engaging, and enticing, social media content for Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, the WooCommerce product SKU has been added into the OpenGraph data, with the data being extracted from the product’s SKU.

You will find the following options in Rank Math’s social media tab:

• Add a custom title, description, and image
• Automatically generate social media images
• Customize Twitter card type as per your need
• Use data from Facebook to the Twitter tab

Here’s how it looks like;

RankMath is currently offering social previews for only Facebook and Twitter. You can add unique titles, description and images to your posts while sharing on FB and Twitter.

Offers you LSI keyword suggestions

You can get automatic LSI keyword suggestions around your focus keyword using RankMath. RankMath starts suggesting relevant LSI keywords automatically so you can optimize your content for better rankings (without keyword stuffing).

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Keywords) can help you with better search traffic. In fact, you can rank for multiple keywords from one page (if you use LSI keywords).

So if you’re looking to boost your organic traffic with LSI keywords, you don’t need any extra tool if you are using RankMath. You just need to connect your Rank Math account to get unlimited keyword suggestions from Google.

Offers a modular framework

RankMath offers a modular framework which is not available in the most of the other SEO plugins including Yoast SEO. You can use only what you need and disable the rest of the modules you don’t need.

Rank Math offers 21 different modules to cater different requirements.

404 Monitor

Rank Math gives you access to a simple and effective 404 monitor that helps you to find and fix all the 404 links on your site.

Side note: A 404 error occurs when you try to visit a page that doesn’t exist. 404 errors are bad for your website’s SEO as they can create a bad experience for the website users.

404 monitor basically offers two modes.

• The simple mode only captures 404 errors
• The advanced mode captures everything including the error page, the referring page including the user agent

You can keep tracking Rank Math’s 404 monitor to fix 404 errors and provide a better experience to your website visitors.

Here’s what the 404 Monitor looks like;

Rank Math’s 404 Monitor keeps a log of all your 404 links and you’ll also have the ability to export them or take bulk actions to get rid of 404 links.

You can also use their Redirection Manager to easily redirect 404 links in just a few clicks.

Note: The 404 data export option is only available in the Rank Math pro version. You can export all 404 URLs generated in the 404 monitor with this feature.

Read: How to Remove Bad Backlinks to Boost Your Site’s SEO

Role manager

The Role Manager feature is useful when you hire other people to handle specific tasks on your website. It enables you to control the actions each user role can perform on your site.

You can compile a detailed list of the particular roles and the corresponding levels of access needed to carry out their duties effectively. After that, you can provide access as per the requirements.

For example, if your objective is to grant your editor authority solely over your posts, you have the flexibility to disable other functionalities, ensuring a tailored and secure access control system.

Content AI

Rank Math has recently introduced a new product called Content AI, aimed to improve SEO. Content AI offers a range of capabilities, including content generation, summarization, expansion, structuring headings, optimizing meta tags, keyword identification, suggesting links, and providing question ideas.

You need to specify certain information like default country, desired tone, target audience, and preferred language before utilizing the tool. You can anticipate more customized and relevant outputs from Content AI based on this information.

You can watch this video to learn how to use content AI. 

Note: Content AI is a separate product from Rank Math, and you get 5 free credits regardless of your Rank Math SEO plan. Content AI plan starting from $49 per year with 7500 content AI credits. 

Yoast SEO vs RankMath SEO: What’s the Difference?

Before we discuss the differences between Yoast SEO and Rank Math, have a look at the following illustration.

As you can see above, RankMath uses less coding, fewer PHP requests (hence it offers more speed than Yoast SEO).

If you’re looking for a lightweight plugin to install on your WordPress sites, using RankMath over Yoast is a no brainer.

Apart from speed, the major difference lies in their features. You get the same features in the Yoast SEO premium version as of RankMath free version.

Here are some of the notable features of both Yoast SEO and RankMath SEO plugins.

Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math Keyword Optimization: You can optimize for only one focus keyword using Yoast but its premium version allows you to optimize for multiple keywords. With RankMath, you can optimize for up to 5 keywords.

Winner – RankMath

Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math Content Analysis: Yoast SEO content analysis tells you if the optimization of your posts is Good or Bad, that’s all! But RankMath gives you an SEO score out of 100. Anything above 80 is actually a good score!

Winner – RankMath

Rank Math Pro: Why Go PRO? Rank Math Free vs Pro Benefits

Rank Math comes one free plan and 3 paid plans. Rank Math Pro is the starting level paid plan which costs you $69 per year best for full time bloggers.

If you are just starting your blogging journey, I would recommend go with Rank Math’s free version. You can shift to the pro version as your blog grows and begins generating income.

Let’s discuss some of the major reasons to use Rank Math Pro over the free version.

Integrated Google Analytics

Rank Math Pro gives you access to an in-built powerful Google Analytics to check your website search traffic from your WordPress dashboard.

Here’s how the integrated analytics looks like;

Rank Math Pro shows you a list of all the posts with a good score, fair score, and poor score.

It will also show you a list of posts along with the title, SEO score, schema, links, and traffic so you can improve their SEO scores based on your analysis.

Track up to 500 keywords

You can track 500 keywords with Pro plan, and 10,000 keywords with the Business plan and 50,000 keyword with agency plan.

If you want to track more keywords, you can email them at [email protected], and they will create a custom plan for you based on your needs.

Here’s how the Rank Tracker looks like;

You can also add more keywords and the rank tracker will show you;

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Position etc

Advanced Schema Generator

Google started showing more “rich snippets” (or schema) in the search results. So it became essential to add schema into your posts, job postings, reviews, recipes, and local business entries.

Rank Math Pro offers an integrated schema to integrate schema markup within your site. You wouldn’t need to install any external plugins for schema

Here are some of the types of schema markups Rank Math supports.

• Article Schema
• Book Schema
• Carousel Schema
• Course Schema
• Dataset Schema
• Event Schema
• FAQ Schema
• FastCheck Schema
• HowTo Schema
• Job Posting Schema
• Movie Schema
• Music Schema
• Person Schema
• Product Schema
• Recipe Schema
• Restaurant Schema
• Service Schema
• Software Schema
• Video Schema

Here’s how it looks like;

You can select your preferred schema type such as article, FAQ, and Course.

Image SEO

Rank Math lets you automatically add ALT and title tags to your images. You wouldn’t need to install any image SEO optimization plugin while using Rank Math.

In case if you already have a ton of blog posts that have images without any alt tags, by using this plugin, you can automatically add them.

Just turn on the image SEO from the plugin settings and it automatically adds alt attributes for images without alt tags. Similarly, you can turn on the missing title attributions functionality to add titles for all images that don’t have any title attribute.

To enable the settings, you need to go to Rank Math > General Settings and you’ll be able to see the Images functionality where you can make changes.

Here’s how it looks like;

Once you enable the option, you can add ALT attributes for images without alt attributes automatically.

The image attributes are dynamically applied when the content is displayed, and the stored content is not changed. Similarly, you can also add missing Title and Caption attributes for images.

Must read: Image SEO: How to Optimize Your Blog Images to Get More Traffic

---

What about the Rank Math Pro pricing?

Rank Math Pro comes in two pricing packages which are listed below.

1. Pro: If you’re a blogger or solopreneur, this plan is perfect for you which costs you just $69 per year and you can install their Pro versional on unlimited personal sites (not on client websites).

• Unlimited personal websites
• Track 500 Keywords
• Powerful Schema Generator
• 24/7 Support
• Google Data Fetch Frequency is 180 days
• Renewal cost will be $79 per year

2. Business: If you want to use the Rank Math Pro version even on your client websites, this option is for you which costs you $229 per year and you will get support for up to 100 client websites.

• Support for client websites
• Track 10,000 Keywords
• Powerful Schema Generator
• 24/7 Priority Support
• No limit on Google Data Fetch Frequency
• Renewal cost will be $269 per year

3. Agency: If you are running an agency and want to use the Rank Math Pro version on up to 500 client websites. The agency plan costs you $459.

• Support for 500 client websites
• Track 50,000 Keywords
• Powerful Schema Generator
• 24/7 Priority Support
• No Limit on Google Data Fetch Frequency
• The renewal cost will be $639 per year

So what are you waiting for?

Click here to try Rank Math Pro today (with a 30-day money-back guarantee) 

Side note: Rank Math Pro offers a 30-day refund policy. So if you’re don’t like their premium version features,  you can email them at [email protected] and they will refund your entire amount without asking any questions.

Rank Math Settings & How To Migrate To Rank Math

Quick note: We’re not going into in-depth details on Rank Math settings as their official blog already has an excellent tutorial on setting up Rank Math SEO plugin. So we’ll talk about the basic (yet essential) things that you need to do after installing the plugin.

If you’re already using an optimization plugin like Yoast SEO, you can import all your SEO settings to RankMath automatically. You wouldn’t have to manually do all the optimization for your individual blog posts or pages.

Rank Math will automatically detect which SEO plugin you’re currently using and helps you easily decide which settings you can import.

You can watch the Rank Math video to understand the step-by-step process of migrating from Yoast SEO to Rank Math. You would need to follow similar steps to migrate from any other SEO plugin to Rank Math.

For instance, if you’re already using Yoast SEO, here’s how the import section looks like;

As you can see above, you can import everything from;

• Settings
• Term meta
• Post meta
• Redirections
• Author meta

Once it’s done, you need to implement a couple of things which include;

• Selecting your site (personal blog, ecommerce store etc)
• Connect your site with Google search console
• Sitemaps

All the above-mentioned steps are easy if you’ve already used Yoast SEO or any other SEO optimization plugin on WordPress sites.

Here are a few simple optimization settings that you can implement on RankMath for better rankings.

• Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives
• Nofollow Image File Links
• Nofollow External Links (you can enable it if you don’t want to pass any link juice to external sites)
• Open External Links New Tab/Window (this option is what we recommend and we’re following the same method for a long time at Bloggers Passion)
• Strip Category Base (enable it)

Once the above things are done, click the “Save and Continue” button to finish the process.

Here’s how it looks like;

That’s it, you’re done.

At post level, here’s how the Rank Math SEO settings look like;

As you can see above, there are multiple things you’ll notice including;

• Your blog post preview (where you can add or edit your title including meta description)
• Focus keywords (you can target multiple focus keywords for a single post)
• Basic SEO suggestions (it suggests you where to insert keywords for better optimization)
• Optimization score (it also gives you a score so you can easily find out how well your page is optimized for your focus keywords)

You can also add unique previews for social media that I have already explained in the social media integration benefit.

Pros & Cons of Rank Math

Pros:

Cons:

SEO Tools Worth Trying:

• Semrush 30 Days Free Trial: Try Pro or Guru Account for Free Now
• Serpstat Review: Is it the Best SEO Tool?
• SpyFu Review: Is It the Best Competitor Analysis Tool?
• KWFinder Review: Is It the Only Keyword Research Tool You Need?

FAQs About Rank Math SEO Plugin

Here are some of the most interesting and frequently asked questions about the #1 optimization plugin i.e RankMath.

Final Thoughts on Rank Math SEO Review

Whether you are a newbie blogger or an SEO expert, Rank Math can definitely help you with better optimization.

So far we tried a lot of optimization plugins on BloggersPassion but Rank Math is by far the BEST SEO plugin for WordPress users. I have been using Rank Math since January 2022, and haven’t encountered any issues up to the present day.

So which SEO plugin are you currently using? Do you have any more questions about the RankMath plugin? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.