Yoast SEO Review Premium Vs Free Plugin

Are you looking for the finest plugins to boost your SEO? Yoast SEO is a widespread WordPress plugin that permits website owners to optimize their content for search engines. With nearly 5 million plus active installations, it has become one of the ideal SEO plugins for multiple websites. 

However, this SEO plugin has two versions: the free version and the premium version. In today’s blog, we will explore the major differences between the free and premium versions and will also help decide which one is best for you and your business needs.

Why Choose Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin with an extensive range of features specially designed to help you optimize your website’s SEO. These effective features range from internal linking to keyword optimization to readability analysis and content management. Every feature contributes to the website’s optimization.

A significant advantage of this SEO plugin is that it permits you to specify your keywords, work at a page level, and analyze whether the content matches the keywords you require. 

Moreover, Yoast SEO can also check whether the content is readable and whether the images have an alt tag or not. With the plugin, you can also choose the free version or the premium version. 

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Yoast SEO Premium Plugin Review:

Let’s first discuss the Yoast SEO Premium plugin to help you decide whether it is worth it or not. The premium version offers many benefits, including:

1. Using Multiple Focus Keywords

With the Yoast SEO Premium version, you can set up to 5 focus keywords. Focusing on multiple keywords can help you bring a lot of search traffic from multiple keywords. However, you have to be careful when using multiple keywords. Your entire content may look search-optimized completely and not so useful for the audience to see your content.

Yoast SEO Premium’s multiple focus keywords option is only reliable for tracking secondary keywords. It is not helpful for optimizing content. When using Google Autocomplete, make sure to research both your secondary and primary keywords so you know they are being searched. If using Mozbar, ensure that you check that they are not too competitive.

Why You Should Use Multiple Focus Keywords?

You must do some keyword research to select your focus keyword effectively. It is often quite hard to select only one keyword if you want your content to rank for more than one keyword. 

Here, we are giving you 4 examples in which optimizing your content for various keywords is the best strategy.

• Synonyms: People use various terms while searching. To reach multiple groups of people, you should ensure that your post will rank for the different keywords.

• More than one topic: Sometimes, a particular post has more than one topic or quite a few subtopics. For instance, “yoga for back pain” and “yoga for spinal cord.” These two topics can fit very nicely in only one article.

• Key phrases: Many times, a user tends to use key phrases rather than specific ones to search for something. It is advisable to optimize your content on multiple variations of your focus keyword.

• Long tail keyword variants: If you want your content to rank in Google, you must focus on long tail keywords. Normally, these keywords have less competition and will be comparatively easy to rank for.

Google tries to search for the exact match and the word order is also very essential. Google seems to handle search queries with stopwords a bit differently. With Yoast SEO Premium, optimizing your content for various focus keywords is really simple. 

You just have to click on the tab in the Yoast Premium box to add a fresh keyword. A new box will be visible and you can enter the second focus keyword that you want to optimize your post for. Yoast ensures that by checking the content, you see whether your content is optimized for every keyword you enter or not.

2. Orphaned Content

As the name says, orphaned content is content that is not linked from anywhere on your website. It is not readily accessible to search engines and your website visitors since you’re not using any internal links (no links from actual content in this case).

In simple words, if any of the posts do not have any internal links added, they can be called orphaned content. “Orphaned Content” basically refers to blog posts that do not get any links from other posts.

One of the best reasons to use Yoast SEO Premium is that it informs you which posts belong to the orphaned category. This feature helps you immediately fix problems to rank in search engines. Only Yoast Pro users can use this feature. 

3. Redirect Old URLs to New Ones

Whether you are moving pages on your site, cleaning up pages, or restructuring your site, you need to delete some pages or posts. However, it is very risky because when the old URL gets viewers, it will be served as error 404 not found.

So, for the page repeatedly visited, you need to redirect the old URL to a fresh one with the details you think are more relevant to those visitors or viewers. You can also tell your visitors that the content has been removed or even temporarily show another page. You can do all these things directly within the WordPress dashboard with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin.

Their redirect modules can help you solve these issues. Here are some of the redirect types available in the Yoast Premium version. 

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

Yoast Premium also allows you to develop Regular Expressions (REGEX) redirects. It allows you to redirect a bunch of URLs containing a particular expression or word with only one redirect.

4. Internal Linking

Yoast SEO Premium provides multiple link suggestions for your written content, such as internal link suggestions. This option is very helpful because relevant internal linking boosts your SEO game. You will not find this feature in the free version of the Yoast plugin.

Maintaining internal links to related posts is not as easy as it looks. It is one of the most important SEO strategies. If you want to get ranked, you have to make informative, high-quality, and relevant content about the keywords you want to get searched for.

Internal linking helps Google show the most important and the most related posts. Yoast SEO’s Premium users will see a new box on the right-hand side of your website called Yoast Internal Linking. It features a series of links that are proven to be appropriate to the text you are working on.

5. Social Preview For Boosting Social Media Activity

When a post has a lot of images, you might end up selecting the wrong image. If you want to catch a reader’s attention to your blog, then your blog post share should look really good.

With Yoast SEO Premium, you can review what your blog post will look like on Twitter or Facebook without even going to those channels. You just have to go to the Yoast plugin’s meta box, upload the picture you want to show, and ensure it looks fine.

Features Of Yoast SEO Premium Plugin

There are multiple features of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, including:

• You can change the post’s SEO meta description and title for tag, category, and author archive pages on a per-post basis.

• It helps to manage the permalink settings. It also helps to edit some parameters, including canonical settings, remove stop words from slugs, and manage some redirects. 

• You can preview the Google search result snippet. 

• The ability to verify Bing Webmaster tools, Google Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer.

• It adds a strong redirect manager that allows you to quickly solve 404 errors in your Google search console by setting redirect and fixing them in the Search Console.

• Sitemaps are the easiest and quickest way to get indexed and inform search engines about your content. The Yoast SEO plugin makes it very simple to add XML sitemaps in WordPress.

• One of the significant features of this plugin is that it combines your website with Google+ social platforms, Facebook, and Twitter. 

• The multiple-focus keyword feature helps you to optimize a blog post for more than one focus keyword.

Advantages Of Yoast SEO Premium Plugin

Let us now look at some of the advantages of the Yoast Premium plugin:

• It is updated regularly. Also, the community is big enough for you to find tips and suggestions easily. It also guides you in getting the most out of this plugin.

• The Premium version comes with many extra options; it can also be solved by utilizing some other free plugins.

• It has features from some of the most famous plugins, such as the RSS footer and Robots Meta.

• Yoast SEO Premium version permits you to add a backlink to your own website for every post in your RSS feed. 

• The premium version also helps you to improve your SEO ranking. 

• It also provides email support for premium users. Additionally, it has a WordPress support forum for all the free users. 

• Yoast SEO offers multiple premium modules to increase visibility.

• Yoast SEO’s Bulk Editor permits you to show items with a particular status, which can be effective sometimes.

Disadvantages Of Yoast SEO Premium Plugin:

After reviewing the pros of the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, let us now look at its disadvantages.

• If a link is changed, no redirect feature is available.
• A lot of security threats. Many times, it goes vulnerable, providing hackers access to your website.
• The speed of the site may be reduced as all the features are activated at once.

Yoast SEO Free Plugin Review:

The Yoast SEO Plugin’s Free version offers notable SEO functionality that can be tailored to suit you and your website’s needs. Let us look at some of the benefits of using the free version of the Yoast plugin:

Ideal For Optimizing Search-Friendly Content

The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most ideal content analysis tools. You can easily find Yoast’s content analyzer directly in a meta box below the WordPress text editor.

The Snippet Editor permits you to edit and preview how your blog post appears in the SERPs. It also allows you to customize your SEO title and rewrite your meta description to boost CTR. To utilize the Content Analysis tool, you just have to add your focus keyword. However, in the free version of the plugin, you can only input one keyword.

After specifying the keyword, Yoast SEO will then analyze the content against the 12 best practices of SEO. For example, the number of outbound links, keyword density, and readability. It also reviews whether your keyword is used in the title, first paragraph, and in the meta description of the content.

A helpful “Traffic Light” scoring system helps you analyze everything and easily identify the areas needing improvement. Yoast SEO also shows the whole content using the exact same traffic light system, where the ultimate goal is to show a green light.

The Ability To Utilize XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap makes it much easier for Google to locate the pages on your website. If search engines do not index your content, then whatever SEO strategies you are using will not be helpful.

Yoast SEO Plugin provides a built-in XML sitemap feature. It allows users to create a sitemap, which is automatically updated whenever a new page or post is published. You can easily allow XML sitemaps by guiding to SEO and then clicking on “XML SItemap.”

After enabling and activating the sitemap functionality, Yoast SEO informs search engines whenever new content is published. Additionally, your images also get indexed, meaning you can show up in Google image searches.

Built-in With Social Media

With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can tell Google the URLs of 8 famous social networks by guiding to SEO and then tapping on “Social.” you can also integrate your site with 4 popular social media tools, including Google+ Publisher Verification, Facebook Open Graph, Pinterest Open Graph, and Twitter Cards.

Features of social media are also available in the content analysis meta box. Below the “Social” tab, you can easily tailor the way you want your content to appear on the social media channels. Additionally, you edit the title, craft a meta description, and upload a custom picture.

Features of Yoast SEO Free Plugin

There are a lot of features of the Yoast SEO free plugin, including:

• The free version of the Yoast plugin offers all-round SEO functionality. These functionalities can be easily tailored according to your site’s requirements.

• It has a powerful content analysis tool that enables you to optimize every single page or post on your site.

• Yoast SEO provides Breadcrumbs Navigation, .htaccess editor, open graph meta tags, and built-in robots.txt. The breadcrumbs feature enables you to display readers exactly where they are in your blog’s structure.

• It also provides some paid add-on plugins available for niche websites with particular SEO needs. These add-on plugins are News SEO, Video SEO, and Local SEO.

• Once you have saved a draft of your content, the Yoast SEO plugin also provides a traffic light functionality. If the light shows a green color, it means your content is fine. However, if it shows a red color, your content is poor and it needs some changes. If it displays an orange color, it means that you have very few factors that need some changing.

Advantages Of Yoast SEO Free Plugin

Let us look at the advantages of the Yoast Free plugin:

• Utilizing the snippet preview, you can analyze how your page or post shows in the search results. You can also see whether your title is too short or too long and whether your meta description makes a purpose in the context of a search result. 

• Yoast SEO helps to eradicate a lot of duplicate content by eliminating subpages of archives from being indexed. 

• You can also add up to 8 different social media networks to help Google know they belong to your website. Social media platforms will know exactly what your content is about. It will also understand the description, title, URL, image, and more so it can show everything correctly when it has been shared.

• Yoast SEO also analyzes your content for more than a dozen best practices of SEO. Additionally, it will tell you how you are performing for each of them with an easily understandable traffic light scoring process.

• It can also import settings from other sites and even other SEO plugins if you are going to make a switch.

Disadvantages Of Yoast SEO Free Plugin

After reviewing the pros of the Yoast SEO Free plugin, let us now look at its disadvantages.

• The basic Yoast plugin comes with zero support. You are also not guaranteed an official response from the Yoast SEO team. To seek professional help, you will need to buy the Yoast SEO premium version.

• The free version does not provide many SEO benefits, such as internal link suggestions and the usage of multiple keywords.

Is Yoast SEO Premium Worth It?

So, is Yoast SEO Premium worth it? Yes, the Yoast Premium Version for one website costs you just $99 for a year, and you will also get updated features every day. Here are some of the ultimate features worth looking at in a Yoast Premium plugin.

Yoast SEO Keyword Analysis

With the free Yoast plugin, you can only target one keyword, whereas with the premium version, you can easily optimize for keyphrases, related keywords, synonyms, and so on.

Here are a few essential things you can do with Yoast Premium keyword analysis:

• Optimize for word forms, synonyms, and related key phrases.
• You can add related keyword phrases easily.
• Optimize your page so it ranks for synonyms and search engines like Google.
• You can also easily check your keyword phrase distribution to optimize your content better. 
• You don’t need to worry about various word forms.

Content Insights

Yoast Premium plugin displays the 5 phrases or words you use the most on your page to verify whether they match your selected keywords. This feature is only available for the Premium users of Yoast Plugin. 

To conclude, the content insight keyword feature offers an indication of what your content is focusing on. If the words are very different from the topic, you may have to simply rewrite the content accordingly to match up with the actual topic.

Focus Keyword Export

The Focus Keyword Export feature is only for the Premium users of the Yoast Plugin. This feature offers many highly related and new keyword ideas to help you determine what to optimize next. You can also download an overview of every focus keyword you have used till now. 

Additionally, you can select whatever keyword data you require to optimize, such as title, keywords, readability score, URL, and so on. After that, you can simply download the overview as a CSV file.

With just one click, you can easily export your URLs, meta descriptions, focus keywords, titles, scores, and so on.

Flesch Readability Check

The premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin makes it easy to check the readability of your written content and calculates the Flesch Reading Score. Flesch’s reading score measures the complexity of an English-written text. In short, it helps to tell you how easy or hard your text is to read.

Text with a high Flesch reading ease score of about 100 is extremely simple and easy to read. It means that your text includes short sentences and no words more than two syllables are there. A Flesch reading score of 60-70 is seen as normal for online reading and websites.

Yoast SEO Pricing:

The Premium version of the Yoast SEO currently costs

• $99 in the US (ex. sales tax)
• £99 (ex. VAT) in the UK
• €99 (ex. VAT) in the EU

Additionally, there is a small discount if you purchase multiple licenses. Basically, you need one license for every website. It is also important to note that this price is only for one year. So, if you want to continue using the premium features of the Yoast plugin, you will have to pay $99/year. 

Some Alternatives To Yoast SEO Plugin:

Last but not least, we are going to tell you about some of the other alternatives to the Yoast SEO plugin that are worth checking out:

• All-in-One SEO Pack: This plugin offers many of the same SEO features as Yoast but without the premium add-ons. 

• SEOPress: This alternative was made by a team of French developers, and it is especially for WordPress users. 

• Rank Math SEO: It is one of the most popular choices for all WordPress users. It provides many of the same features as Yoast and has an easy-to-use interface. 

• Moz Pro: Moz Pro helps you optimize content easily and quickly. It offers features like link building, keyword research, and more to help you rank higher. 

• JetPack by WordPress.com: It offers all-in-one analytics, security, optimization, and many more helpful features.

• SEMRush: This powerful advanced SEO suite combines effective features, including website optimization, keyword research, and competitive analysis.

• SEOQuake: A perfect alternative to Yoast SEO plugins, especially for those wanting a comprehensive SEO suite in one place.

• Ahrefs: It offers everything from link analysis to keyword research to content optimization and competitor comparisons.

• Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest is one of the most famous keyword research tools. It helps you quickly find profitable keywords to target in your content. 

• Google Search Console: This free service from Google offers effective insights into your site’s performance and organic search traffic. 

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool: A crucial tool for any SEO expert, the Screaming Frog Spider tool permits you to crawl the whole website and collect essential data on site performance. 

• SERPstat: This essential SEO tool provides everything from competitor analysis to keyword research. 

• Google Trends: Google Trends is an effective way to find trending keywords and topics that can help you make more engaging content. 

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Final Line:

Yoast SEO is an effective and powerful SEO plugin. It helps you optimize your website automatically in several ways, has great features, and is also easy to use and set up. It has both free and premium versions that offer a bunch of features. However, the premium plan has many more features than the free one. Overall, the Yoast plugin is a great tool for optimizing your content for search engines. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):