Is Yoast Premium Worth It? Know Before Investing In A SEO Plugin

There is no chance that you have not heard of or used the Yoast SEO plugin if you are a blogger. Moreover, since the introduction of WooCommerce for WordPress, eCommerce sites are also in SEO. Therefore, adding meta tags and other elements to your website is necessary to improve its SEO profile.

Yoast was the first plugin that made SEO easier for web developers and bloggers. With the WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin, you can optimize your content so you can take on search engines with authority.

Additionally, it recommends changes that can help improve your site’s page speed, as well as its crawlability, ensuring that Googlebot understands your content correctly.

When you look at the current price, that is $99 a year for each license. This is too expensive in my opinion. However, since it offers so many features at that price, I can obtain them from several other plugins for very cheap to no cost.

If you use multiple plugins, your website may become a bit heavier. But do you need to pay 99 dollars per year? Let me now share my honest opinion on Yoast premium, its features, and its alternatives.

Yoast – What is it?

Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins available. Developed by an Estonian company called Automattic in 2007, it assists you in building a well-optimized site with an emphasis on keyword research and optimization. Thousands of bloggers around the world rely on the plugin for their blogs.

Yoast premium is a WordPress plugin designed to simplify your life. The main feature of this tool is search engine optimization, which enables you to select different keywords and phrases to focus on.

However, it can also be used as an all-in-one solution for webmasters who want to create and manage a website, optimize the content of their pages, and publish them in several formats (HTML, XML Sitemap).

Features Gap Between Yoast Free vs Premium

Is Yoast Premium Worth It? Features Analysis

Multiple Keywords Targeting

Yoast’s free version allows you to target only one keyword for content optimization, while the premium version allows you to target five keywords. Is this feature worth upgrading for? RankMath is Yoast’s closest competitor, offering this feature for free.

Yes! In Rank Math, you can target a maximum of five keywords when optimizing your content without paying a fee. In my opinion, that is not the key feature I am seeking in a premium plugin.

Social Snippet Preview

Well, this is a handy feature and really needed? You can create different images, titles, and meta descriptions depending on the post. Using the free version, you can create them and then share them on any social media platform and check whether or not they look good.

Nevertheless, if you purchase the premium version, you can check out the preview and determine whether it is satisfactory or not. Then, you can immediately change the setup to look at what looks better on social media.

Is it worth getting the plugin for this feature? It depends. If your website traffic comes mainly from social media, this should be your primary focus. On the other hand, you definitely need a tool if you want your content to appear more prominently on social media channels.

The WordPress repository is constantly updated with new plugins, and you can find some that focus specifically on social sharing. In addition, there are many free and premium social sharing plugins available that can be customized. Hence, I do not think the Yoast SEO premium plugin is worth for this particular feature.

Cornerstone Content

Due to its internal links, this feature appeals to me greatly. There will be some articles in your content that are evergreen and highly relevant. You can justify further suggestions in your Yoast workout settings if you have additional suggestions. When you add new content, the cornerstone will also appear.

Alternatively, you can go to that section and manually set links to your cornerstone contents. I can’t emphasize enough how crucial that is to a money article. For the most part, I give the highest link value to my most essential or most generating content. Therefore, I believe this is a necessary feature of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Orphaned Content

An orphaned content is the opposite of a cornerstone. These contents have not been linked within the past six months. Hence, the reason maybe you have published content poorly.

In addition, you may have targeted the wrong keyword and stopped working on the content after several failures. Another example is a “Guest Posting” you have published on behalf of another author and did not find it worthy of linking to.

Yoast will add all of these to the orphaned content list. Using this feature, you can link more often to orphaned content or remove them whenever new content is added. Of course, it is unlikely that all of your posts will not rank on Google, nor will you rank all of them. Thus, in my opinion, it is an asset, but the choice to utilize it effectively is yours.

Overall this feature of Yost SEO premium is very worthy that I think.

Internal Link Suggestion

The feature can be pretty helpful for both newly-built and old websites. For example, if you create content every day but unsure that how to link internally, this might be useful as a guide.

Furthermore, this is a convenient solution for those redesigning their website with a large amount of content. However, they do not know where to build the internal links or do not have enough time to do it manually.

I find this feature to be a bit controversial. It might work for you only if you are not aware of where is the appropriate location to include internal links in your content.

Since this feature is an addition to the plugin, and Yoast is not dedicated to this feature, I will keep this as a positive. Also, if you use this feature frequently, you will become accustomed to it. On the other hand, if you use the free Yoast plugin, you will miss this feature significantly.

So for this specific feature, I think Yoast SEO premium is really worth it. Although, you can use an automatic internal link-building plugin that has proven more effective.

Content Analysis

Content analysis or insights is a useful feature but not very helpful. It indicates how many times you have used each word and the estimated reading time. As you probably know, Google no longer cares about keyword density, even though it is not a negligible feature.

Yes, this could be extremely useful when avoiding keyword stuffing. Ideally, if your main keyword is a simple phrase, it should be less prominent in your content.

Is this feature completely unique? My answer is no. The nearest competitor to Yoast is Rank Math. While they do not have this keyword density metric, they have something better. Rank Math uses Natural Language Processing in its content analysis. This means more data is available to optimize your content if you compare with it.

Redirect Manager

Redirect Manager is a handy addition to Yoast’s premium features. Most SEO plugins lack it, but Yoast takes advantage of it.

Now let me talk about it.

If you are fixing your SEO issue and need to change your permalink, you must also change each internal link you place on the website.

This is both a near-impossible and challenging task if your website has more than 1000 pages. To determine which links are functioning and which are not, you need to examine each URL individually.

Then, by using the redirect manager, you need to replace the new link with the old one, and all the links will be updated automatically.

Even when I consider paying for this feature, I can find free plugins that accomplish the same goal. So my question is why you would like to pay for something available for free elsewhere.

Export Focus Keyword

If you depend on Yoast SEO, then this will work perfectly. It is also a lifesaver for SEO freelancers. However, you might get some issues while fixing a website and might need to remove all the plugins.

If you remove Yoast from the plugin dashboard, all its data will be lost. If you do not know the keywords or do not desire to spend time on each page manually setting keywords, you should keep them in a spreadsheet.

This feature is available with the premium version. So I really appreciate this feature because I know that some issues can arise when I have a site with hundreds of pages.

For example, I can lose all of my data if I make one mistake.

In the future, I want to avoid optimizing my pages whenever there is a problem on my site. Instead, I wish to utilize that time more productively. Therefore, when I use Yoast (free version) for SEO help, I will buy the premium package at least for this feature.

1 Year Support

I loved Yoast’s support and access to their SEO course the most. If you have questions regarding the plugin, you can reach out to the Yoast Academy.

It might be helpful if you are a beginner in the field of SEO and have no idea where to begin. Furthermore, as they will discuss a lot about their plugin, you will be able to use the Yoast SEO plugin more effectively.

FAQs

Some SEO questions are evergreen. Plugins are trying to keep up with Google’s newest algorithm, but no one can guarantee what will work except for Google.

Will Yoast Premium Improve My Ranking?

No, Yoast simply provides instructions for fixing the on-page SEO factors necessary to rank well in search results. But it will not increase your ranking. Yes, it will help you improve your content if you are a complete beginner in Content Optimization, but that does not guarantee any ranking.

Should I try to get green lights for each recommendation?

I want to answer this question in the following manner: you are doing search engine optimization for Google and users. It is not for plugins. Therefore, all of the green lights are not required. However, most suggestions are intended to enhance the content, and none are detrimental.

Sometimes you will have to write short sentences, and sometimes you will have to write long sentences for the sake of understanding. But this is not a terrible practice. To make your sentences easier to read, the plugin will remind you to keep them at a reasonable length.

However, if I cannot convey my thought clearly in a shorter sentence, I will go for a little longer to be more precise.

Final Verdict

Is Yoast Premium worth the cost? My personal opinion is no. However, that is not the final answer. Only people with little or no experience in SEO or agencies with a significant amount of SEO work can still benefit from such services since it simplifies the process.

Apart from that, the 99$ a year for some features that I can get for free is not worth it. Additionally, if this does not meet your expectations, you will be disappointed after spending that amount. Most of the features you need of Yoast can be found in the free plugin.

Finally, I would like to point out that as long as Yoast provides the free version, you can use the free version on your newly created website. But if you require additional features available in a premium version, and if you really need them, you can upgrade. It is really worth it better than using an additional internal linking plugin.

In my experience, Yoast SEO’s competitor Rank Math has more features than it. You can try Rank Math for free or a premium subscription to test out more features.