Does Premium Yoast SEO Plugin increase my rankings on Google and Bing? Of course, Yoast SEO Premium will improve your Google Rankings just the way Free Yoast SEO does.
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I am currently using the free Yoast SEO Plugin here at flashlearners.com (as at the time of writing) and I have also used Premium Yoast plugin. I’m currently using the Free Yoast Plugin and still rank very high on Google.
From my experience, the premium Yoast plugin won’t make your blog rank higher than the free version. The only difference is that the premium Yoast plugin has more features than the free version.
The features in the premium Yoast plugin you can’t find in the free version are
- Redirects module
- Synonyms and keyword distribution
- Internal linking
- Social previews
- Multiple focus keywords
- Orphaned content filter
- Better Support
However, the good news is that you can get other free plugins to handle features in the premium Yoast SEO Plugin.
For example, you can use the redirection plugin or 404 to 301 plugin to handle redirections. For internal linking, you can do it manually or use internal link generator Plugin and so on.
Not just me, most other top bloggers have testified to the fact that using the free Yoast SEO plugin doesn’t affect rank. If you are not ranking well, check out other things you are not doing correctly and don’t put the blame on the poor free plugin.
With these few points of mine, I hope you agree with me that you don’t necessarily need to have the premium Yoast SEO plugin to rank higher?
You may also continue reading for full features, advantages and disadvantages of the free and premium Yoast SEO plugin.
Premium Yoast SEO Plugin Features
- You can change post’s SEO title and meta description for category, tag and author archive pages on a per post basis.
- You can manage your permalink settings and edit some parameters like removing stop words from slugs, manage some redirects and canonical settings.
- You can have Google search result snippet previews.
- It has the ability to verify Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Yoast SEO Premium adds a powerful redirect manager where you can quickly fix 404 errors in your Google search console by setting up redirects and marking them as fixed in Search Console.
- Sitemaps are the quickest and easiest way to get indexed and notify search engines about your content. WordPress SEO by Yoast makes it super easy to add XML sitemaps in WordPress.
- One of the greatest features of the plugin is that it integrates your site with Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ social platforms.
- With the feature of multiple focus keywords, you can optimize a post for more than one focus keyword.
Pros of Yoast SEO Premium
- It is regularly updated and moreover, the community is big that you can easily find suggestions, tips and guides to get the most out of the plugin.
- As premium version comes with some extra options, it can be solved utilizing other free plugins.
- It integrates features from some of the most popular plugins like Robots Meta and RSS footer.
- Yoast SEO allows you to add a backlink to your own site for each post in your RSS feed.
- It helps in improving your SEO ranking.
- It offers email support for premium users and WordPress support forum for free users.
- Yoast provides many premium modules with premium SEO plugin to increase SEO visibility.
- The Bulk Editor in Yoast SEO allows you to show items with a certain status which you can find useful sometimes.
Cons of Yoast SEO Premium
- Many security threats. It goes vulnerable many times giving hackers access to your site.
- No redirect feature if a link is changed.
- Website speed may get reduced as all features get activated at once.
Free Yoast SEO Plugin Features
- It provides all-round SEO functionality that you can tailor to your website’s needs.
- It comes with powerful content analysis tool that helps you optimize every single post or page on your website.
- It also offers Breadcrumb Navigation, open graph meta tags, built-in robots.txt, .htaccess editor. Breadcrumbs feature permits you to show readers exactly where they are in the structure of your blog.
- Yoast SEO also offers some paid addon plugins available for niche sites with specific SEO needs. These addon plugins are Video SEO, Local SEO, News SEO.
- Yoast SEO offers a traffic light system once you have saved a draft of your post. Green means that your SEO is fine. Red means it is poor, and changes must be made, while orange means that you have one or two factors that still need some work.
Pros of Free Yoast SEO Plugin
- Using the snippet preview, you can see how your post or page will look like in the search results, whether your title is too long or too short and whether your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result.
- Yoast SEO eliminates a lot of duplicate content by excluding subpages of archives from being indexed.
- You can add up to eight different social networks so Google knows they belong to your site. Social platforms will understand exactly what your content is about and which is the title, image, URL, description and more so they can display everything correctly when it is shared.
- Yoast SEO will analyze your content for more than a dozen SEO best practices and tell you how you are doing for each of them with an easy to understand traffic light scoring system.
- Yoast SEO can import settings from other websites and even other SEO plugins if you are making the switch. Of course, it can export them, too.
Cons of Free Yoast SEO Plugin
- The basic Yoast SEO plugin comes with no support. You are not guaranteed an official response from Yoast team. For professional support, you will need to buy a Yoast SEO premium.
- Free version doesn’t offer much of SEO benefits (such as usage of multiple keywords, internal link suggestions etc which are quite helpful for you to boost your SEO). However, you can do all that on your own or with other plugins.
Learn SEO SO4E1: Does Premium Yoast Plugin Mean Higher Ranking? Let me know how you feel via the comment box and don’t fail to share this post with your Blogger Friends.
Others On The Series....
Recommended: Complete season 1 of my blogging series Important: Full Season 2 of my blogging series S03E1: How to remove strange characters in your blog SO3E2: How to upload Apk files to wordpress library SO3E2: Write long and interesting posts SO3E3: Common mistakes to avoid in blogging SO3E5: How to cure 404 error in blogging SO3E6: best banks for bloggers SO3E7: Future And Present state of SEO SO3E8: Causes of error occurred during Indexing SO3E9: Types of links link SEO SO3E10: Before you pay for hosting RECOMMENDED: Latest on the series
Edeh Samuel says
Sir Isaac, please how do i setup yoast plugin like your?