PPC - Pay Per Click Management

For those that have websites run on the WordPress content management system (CMS), one of the necessities of such sites are plugins that manage and improve the SEO of the site. For many years, the ‘go-to’ plugin has been Yoast and, in particular, Yoast Premium. For many sites, this is still the ‘go-to’ plugin. However, there is a new competitor on the block that is promising quite a lot for a not too expensive price. With this, here is a look at Rank Math PRO, the key features that make it different, and whether it is an actual competitor to Yoast Premium.

Key Features of Rank Math PRO

Rank Math has seemingly taken the baseline of what Yoast has set for an SEO plugin, and gone to town with additional new features.  The key features that are of extreme interest to me include the following:

• Keyword rank tracker – this is something that you would have typically had to pay hundreds of dollars a month to achieve, through the likes of SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Moz. The fact Rank Math will track keywords for you is a pretty big game-changer for an SEO plugin, since it enables tighter integration between ‘best practices’ and ‘seeing the results of the best practices’, almost like a feedback loop.
• Speakable schema – this is, again, really interesting since it is a new schema that is looking to gain more momentum, with the likes of AI, Alexa, Okay Google, and Hey Siri. Rank Math is looking into the future of search, which is promising.
• Position History for Keywords & Posts – Similar to the first point, this will show you how your posts are ranking over time, to see if they are decreasing or increasing after small changes to your posts.
• Watermarked Social Media Images – Again, another really nice feature to automatically have done, to protect your online assets.
• Track PageSpeed for Each Post & Page – This is a really good feature, considering core web vitals are going to become a ranking factor for Google in 2021 March.

Rank Math PRO vs Yoast Premium

Rank Math PRO has far more features than Yoast Premium, but this does not mean Yoast Premium is by, any means, a bad plugin. It just appears that value for money, Rank Math PRO offers more.

The one issue with Rank Math PRO is in gaining the market share created by Yoast. The migration to Rank Math from Yoast is not as easy as one might think, with keywords and other data getting lost in translation. For this reason, if you are still using Yoast Premium, it might be a safer bet to stick to using them, especially since they are likely to bring out new features to recompete against Rank Math. For those that do not use Yoast, the best for a fresh install will be Rank Math PRO.

Rank Math (Free) vs Yoast (Free)

Rank Math and Yoast do have free versions, for which Rank Math just about pips it, as compared to Yoast. Features such as automatic 301 redirections for changing slugs is a really handy feature in Rank Math (free), for which the free version of Yoast does not have (and will have to pay for Premium to get such a feature).