Yoast vs Rank Math vs All In One SEO: which is the better SEO plugin?
If you’re looking for a WordPress SEO plugin, then you’ve probably come across the most popular WordPress SEO plugins: Yoast, Rank Math, and All in One SEO.
And we bet you feel slightly overwhelmed trying to figure out which one is better. Don’t worry because we’re here to help you make your decision easier.
In this post, we’ll compare Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. All in One SEO and show you their major differences and where they break even. We’ll also give you our verdict on which of the three is the best SEO plugin for WordPress.
Since this is a comprehensive post, feel free to use our table of contents to jump to the sections you want:
To begin, let’s give you a brief introduction to our contenders.
Introduction Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. All in One SEO
Our three contenders are all complete SEO plugins for WordPress, which offer basic and more advanced SEO tools and features.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO started out as WordPress SEO by Yoast in 2010, and it was created by Joost de Valk. It offers a Lite (free) version and a Pro version, as well as several addons.
In August of 2021, Yoast was bought by Newfold Digital, putting it in the same stable as other popular brands like Bluehost, Hostgator, Web.com, and more.
For more details, check out our in-depth look at Yoast WordPress SEO.
Rank Math
Rank Math is a relative newcomer compared to Yoast and All in One SEO but has quickly grown in popularity. The plugin was launched in late 2018 by the developers behind MyThemeShop. It offers a Lite version and a Pro version.
All In One SEO (AIOSEO)
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is one of the original WordPress plugins on WordPress.org, and it has over 3+ million active installations. Millions of savvy marketers trust the plugin to rank their sites and drive targeted traffic, thanks to its powerful SEO features. It offers a Lite version and 4 paid versions.
Before we dive into detailed comparison, here’s a quick look at the differences and similarities between these 3 top SEO plugins.
| Feature/Plugin | Yoast SEO | Rank Math | AIOSEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup Wizard | Free for a single site | Simple and intuitive wizard | User-friendly setup wizard |
| On-Page Optimization | Basic meta box with essential features | Comprehensive meta box | Advanced meta box with more options |
| Content Analysis | Readability and SEO analysis | In-depth content analysis | In-depth content analysis |
| Breadcrumbs Navigation | Yes, limited customization | Yes, limited customization | Yes, extensive customizable |
| XML Sitemaps | Automatic generation | Automatic generation | Automatic generation and auto syncing with GSC |
| Social Media Integration | Basic social settings | Advanced social media settings | Advanced social media settings |
| Redirection Manager | Yes (Supports 5 redirect types) | Yes (Supports 3 redirect types) | Yes (Supports up to 19 redirect types and status codes) |
| Schema Markup | Basic schema support | Advanced schema options | Next-gen schema generator |
| Unique Features | Slack sharing | Google Trends integration, Content AI | Author SEO, AI writing assistant |
| Pricing (Free Plans) | Free for a single site | Free for a single site | Free for single site |
| Pricing (Paid Plans) | Starts at $99/year | Starts at $67.85/year | Starts at $49.60/year |
Getting Started: Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. All in One SEO
To get started with any of these SEO plugins, they have set up wizards to help you configure your SEO settings. And they’re all more or less beginner-friendly, so you don’t have to be an SEO expert to use any of these plugins.
Setup Wizards Compared
In contrast to both Rank Math and All in One SEO, Yoast’s installation wizard is the least beginner-friendly of them all. Its 12 configuration steps may feel a bit more complicated and technical than necessary when just starting out.
Let’s show you why.
Yoast First-time Setup
After installing and activating Yoast, you’ll first see an overview of the Yoast SEO Dashboard. In General settings, you can find the First-time SEO configuration wizard, which makes it easy to get started.
While we’ve seen worse, Yoast SEO’s configuration wizard feels slightly overwhelming and technical, which isn’t optimal for someone just starting out.
Rank Math First-time Setup
As opposed to Yoast SEO, Rank Math’s installation wizard is easy to follow, and you can go through it rather quickly.
Once you’ve installed and activated Rank Math, you’ll see the Dashboard with different Lite or Pro modules. You need to navigate to the Setup Wizard tab to start the configuration process.
The setup wizard comes with 5 +3 configuration steps depending on if you’re installing the Lite (Easy) or Pro (Advanced) version of the plugin.
What may feel like an initial roadblock is that it asks you to connect your Google Analytics account already in the second step.
The Google Analytics integration is a great feature in itself. However, most website owners who track their stats use an advanced Google Analytics plugin like MonsterInsights.
AIOSEO First-time Setup
All in One SEO’s setup wizard is the most beginner and user-friendly of them all. It comes with 4 simple steps that quickly help you configure your SEO settings.
After installing and activating AIOSEO, you’ll see the General Settings tab, where you can launch the Setup Wizard with a single click.
It even offers a video to help users understand the setup process before they start.
The next step lets you categorize your site and set up the home page title and meta description. And to make the setup process super easy, it has preinstalled smart tags with different variables you can use.
For example, if you choose the Site Title smart tag, the name of your site will be added to the SEO title.
Compared to Yoast and Rank Math, All in One SEO has the most straightforward and easy setup wizard. It helps beginners as well as SEO experts to get started optimizing their websites at rocket speed.
Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. AIOSEO: On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization is a crucial SEO factor for ranking your content in search engines, which we’ll look at for our three contenders next.
Yoast’s SEO Meta Box
All three plugins have an SEO meta box to edit your SEO title, description, and keywords on individual posts and pages.
The SEO meta box in Yoast does the job, but the interface feels a bit outdated and cramped up.
Also, the Lite version only has variables for the title, page, separator, and site title to optimize your title and meta description. Besides, the focus keyphrase is the least important for your optimization, which Yoast still puts first.
Rank Math SEO Meta Box
Contrary to Yoast and All in One SEO, Rank Math’s SEO meta box is located in the WordPress block editor. This isn’t optimal since it makes it difficult to view and manage your on-page SEO.
You have to click on the Edit Snippet button to get a less cramped-up screen where you can edit the title, permalink, and meta description.
Even though Rank Math offers many more variables than Yoast SEO to help you optimize the title and description, it still can’t compete with All in One SEO’s meta box.
AIOSEO’s SEO Meta Box
The AlOSEO General settings menu starts with a nice-looking Snippet Preview of how your post’s title, description, and the permalink will look in search results.
You can choose between 22 smart tags or type in your title and meta description manually to optimize your post or page.
Overall, AIOSEO’s meta box is beginner and user-friendly and lets you easily manage your SEO.
On-Page Content and Readability Analysis
Content and readability analysis are great SEO features that analyze your content against SEO best practices.
For instance, it checks the readability, number of internal and external links, and keyword density. It also checks if you’ve used your focus keyphrase in the SEO title, meta description, and first paragraph of your content.
Yoast
Yoast SEO provides a fairly detailed analysis of the page content and readability, and gives recommendations on how to improve your SEO.
Rank Math
Rank Math takes the content analysis feature one step further and includes an Additional tab that checks more advanced SEO metrics.
All In One SEO
But All in One SEO tops both contenders with a quick and easy overview of your overall SEO score at the top right corner of your page.
This, together with the Basic SEO and Readability features, quickly tells you how well you’ve optimized your page. As well as what you need to improve to get your visitors glued to your content, which ultimately will boost rankings.
On top of that, AIOSEO even analyzes your title and offers immediate results on what you need to improve to increase click-through rates.
Rank Math also offers a title readability feature, but then again, the interface isn’t as user-friendly as in All in One SEO.
Breadcrumbs Navigation
Breadcrumbs navigation is a second form of navigation that helps both users and search engines navigate your website better.
Even though both Yoast and RankMath offer basic breadcrumbs, All in One SEO’s Pro version gives you access to fully editable breadcrumb templates for content types, archives, and taxonomies.
You can easily customize the templates using smart tags or directly editing the HTML code. This gives you full control over how your breadcrumbs will appear on your site and in search results.
Plus, it also gives you access to more advanced breadcrumb features, such as displaying paged breadcrumb navigation and editing the format before the page number.
AIOSEO makes customizing your breadcrumbs easy and pain-free to improve the user experience and boost your SEO in no time.
XML Sitemaps
The deal is that if search engines can’t index and crawl your site, no amount of SEO will save you. That’s why sitemaps are so important. They help you with just that and also provide Google with all your new updates.
All three contenders offer built-in XML sitemap functionality. But Yoast and Rank Math don’t offer RSS sitemaps or the option to disable and enable your sitemap for certain content like All in One SEO.
Let’s take a closer look…
As mentioned, Yoast SEO has XML sitemap functionality, but the Lite version comes with limited customization options.
Rank Math lets you edit more variables in your sitemap, such as references to images and featured images, excluding posts and terms, etc.
Even better, All in One SEO lets you customize all your sitemaps and offers an RSS sitemap.
This is a great feature since all your latest updates and author credits are automatically sent to search engines and much faster than a regular XML sitemap.
One of the best features of AIOSEO’s sitemaps is that if you connect to Google Search Console (GSC) using AIOSEO, your sitemaps will automatically sync with GSC.
AIOSEO also lets you exclude individual posts and terms from your sitemap, which you can’t do in either Yoast or Rank Math. And the Pro version includes automatically generated video sitemaps, news sitemaps, image sitemaps, etc.
One of the best features of AIOSEO’s sitemaps is that if you connect to Google Search Console (GSC) using AIOSEO, your sitemaps will automatically sync with GSC.
Alright, let’s move on to comparing social media integration for all plugins.
Integrating and optimizing your social media is important because it can strengthen your brand and increase your referral traffic. You’ll gain more visibility online and can use social proof to generate more sales for your business.
Social Settings
Yoast SEO’s Social settings offer Open Graph metadata and the option to upload a featured image for Facebook and Twitter, as well as adding your own title and description.
Unfortunately, the free version doesn’t show previews of what your content will look like when shared. This function is only unlocked on the paid plans.
Rank Math comes with similar social settings, but you can only edit them from your individual posts and pages.
All in One SEO lets you set the default Facebook and Twitter images for your posts. But it gives you more options to help fine-tune your social media metadata, images, and more.
This removes the extra work of ensuring that the right image and content is displayed for each post when your content is shared on social media.
And if you don’t want to upload a specific image, you can choose to add it from a default post image source.
That way, AIOSEO offers quick and easy optimization of your social media. If you want to learn more, please visit our guides on how to add Twitter Cards in WordPress and how to fix the wrong Facebook thumbnail.
Social Media Profiles
By getting your visitors to follow you on different social channels, you can stay in touch with them and easily bring them back to your site.
Rank Math is limited in regards to this feature and only lets you link your Facebook and Twitter page. And Yoast SEO lets you add up to 8 social media profiles.
With AlOSEO, you can add as many as 11 profiles and let Google know about them.
In the Social Profiles section, you can simply paste in the links to your social networks.
This will help you stay connected with your social media audience and increase referral traffic and shares. For more details, please visit our post on how to integrate social media into your website.
Besides helping you easily connect with your audience on social media, AIOSEO also outputs social schema. This helps boost your entity SEO, improve your E-A-T score, and much more.
Now, let’s take a look at more advanced SEO tools for these WordPress SEO plugins.
Advanced SEO tools help you further optimize your site for search engines without having to install any additional plugins.
All three WordPress SEO plugins offer key features like:
- Built-in robots.txt and .htaccess editor
- Import and export SEO data
- Canonical links
- Image SEO
- WooCommerce SEO
- Redirection Manager
- Custom SEO user roles
- Advanced schema markup
These are all great SEO features, that will help take your SEO to the next level. However, we feel that we need to look a bit closer at the redirection manager for our contenders. That’s because redirecting your 404 pages is crucial if you want to maintain your rankings on Google.
Redirection Manager
Yoast SEO offers 5 ways to redirect your 404 errors, while Rank Math only supports 3 redirect types.
Whereas, All in One SEO’s Redirection Manager offers 19 different redirect types you can choose between.
More importantly, it lets you add redirects on a server level to speed up your redirects. It also gives you the option to not store IP addresses for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) reasons.
What’s even more unique with All in One SEO’s Redirection Manager is that you can filter your redirects by type.
This helps you manage and keep track of your redirects.
In addition, it also comes with a Check Redirect button, which makes it quick and easy to test if your redirects are working.
And if your redirects don’t work properly, you can edit them straight from the Redirect Table.
And that’s not all!
AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager comes with a URL Slug Monitor that detects any changes to a URL or if a URL has been deleted. When this happens, the Slug Monitor prompts you to add a redirect. This helps you prevent 404 errors.
Finally, the Redirection Manager also enables you to automatically redirect some pages to the homepage if there are no relevant pages to redirect to.
Pretty cool!
Schema Generators
Schema generators are a powerful SEO tool that help search engines better understand your content. They also result in rich snippets on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Yoast’s Schema Generator
Of the 3 SEO plugins, Yoast SEO has the most basic schema generator.
It has a limited catalog of schema types you can use. However, you can add custom schema using filters and hooks. This method can be a bit technical for those without coding and technical knowledge.
Rank Math Schema Generator
Unlike Yoast, Rank Math’s schema generator is more user-friendly and has a more modern interface.
It also makes it easier to add custom schema if your schema type isn’t included in the catalog.
AIOSEO’s Next-gen Schema Generator
AIOSEO’s next-gen Schema Generator Schema Generator is a revolutionary tool that makes it super easy to add schema markup in WordPress. This used to require a level of coding and technical knowledge. But with AIOSEO’s Schema Generator, you can add any type of schema, even if you have no coding knowledge.
All you have to do is go down to the AIOSEO Settings section at the bottom of the page and click on the Generate Schema tab. This will open up the Schema Catalog, where you can choose the schema type.
For detailed instructions on how to use this powerful tool, check out our step-by-step guide here.
Unique Advanced Features
Each of the 3 SEO plugins in the spotlight today has its own unique superpower. In this section, we’ll look at what makes each different from the other.
Yoast SEO’s Unique Feature
Slack Sharing
Yoast SEO includes a dedicated feature to optimize how your content appears when shared on Slack, ensuring it stands out and encourages interaction. When someone shares a link to your website on Slack, Yoast SEO helps generate a visually appealing preview, including a title, description, and thumbnail image. This not only makes your content more attractive but also provides essential context for viewers, encouraging them to click through.
Rank Math’s Unique Features
Google Trends Integration
Rank Math’s Google Trends Integration empowers users to create timely, relevant, and high-performing content by leveraging real-time insights into trending topics. This feature directly connects your SEO workflow with Google Trends, enabling you to identify popular search queries and rising keywords in your niche.
By understanding what your target audience is searching for, you can craft content that aligns with current interests and stays competitive in ever-changing markets.
Content AI
One of Rank Math’s standout features is its Content AI. This is a suite of 40+ tools designed to help you create content right inside your WordPress editor. Some tasks it can help with include blog post ideation, outlines, intros & outros, and more.
AIOSEO’s Unique Features
Author SEO
One of AIOSEO’s most loved features is the Author SEO module. This helps you easily E-E-A-Tify (demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T signals) your content. It does this by making it easy to enhance author profiles by showcasing expertise and authority, aligning with Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines.
The Author SEO module also outputs JSON schema, making it easier for search engines to better understand your expertise, experience, authoritative ess, and trust factors.
AI Writing Assistant
AI Writing Assistant is a powerful writing tool that makes it super easy to craft SEO-friendly content right in your WordPress dashboard. Powered by SEOBoost, it gives you additional keywords you can use in your content and even shows you examples of how top-ranking sites have used those terms in their content.
AI Writing Assistant also helps with topic research and does competitor analysis, ensuring your content is primed to rank.
Check out our tutorial on using an AI writing assistant in WordPress for more information.
Search Statistics
Tracking SEO performance is an essential aspect of SEO. And AIOSEO’s Search Statistics makes this very easy—right inside your WordPress dashboard.
FYI, Search Statistics is AIOSEO’s Google Search Console (GSC) integration. It pulls your GSC data into your WordPress dashboard and presents it in an easy-to-understand format.
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This powerful module also has a keyword rank tracker and content rankings report, tools that give you a clear picture of your performance on search engines.
For more information, check out our guide on using Search Statistics to boost your search rankings.
Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. AIOSEO: Paid Plans and Pricing
All 3 WordPress SEO plugins we’re discussing have free plans. While the free versions have many great features, premium versions give you more ways to improve your SEO and increase your organic search traffic.
However, deciding on a plan can be confusing, and we’ll try to help make your decision easier.
Free Plans for a Single Website
When you’re just starting out, you can start with the Lite (free) version of your SEO plugin of choice to try it out. All plugins offer a Lite version.
For instance, AIOSEO’s Lite (free) version has over 3+ million active installations and over 4500 customer ratings on WordPress. This means that over 3 million smart website owners use All in One SEO to improve their rankings in search engines.
Paid Plans for Several Websites
AIOSEO Pricing
If you want to get access to more advanced SEO tools, you can start with AIOSEO’s Basic plan for $49.60 per year for a single site.
However, if you want to take your SEO efforts to the next level, you should consider buying the Plus version for $99.60 per year (up to 3 sites). Or the Pro version for $199.60 per year (up to 10 sites).
Better yet, the Elite version is for business owners with up to 100 sites and costs just $299.60/year. FYI, if you have a network of more than 100 sites, you can also get a custom plan to cater for them all. The best part is that the Pro and Elite versions offer 1 year of professional priority support.
Yoast Pricing
Yoast is priced higher than All in One SEO for all its versions. Pricing for a single-site license starts at $99 per year and moves up to $445 per year for 5 sites. And yet, these plans don’t even include many of the advanced SEO tools that AIOSEO offers.
Instead, you need to buy the different SEO features separately, which gets quite expensive since they start at $79 per year. If you want access to all features, the price increases to $1087.75 for 5 sites.
Rank Math Pricing
Rank Math starts at $96.46 per year for unlimited personal websites. However, if you want support for client and business sites, it goes up to $289.66 per year. Agency pricing starts at $689.86.
Pricing-wise, All in One SEO should be the obvious choice for taking your SEO to the next level. But if you’re still not convinced, AlOSEO also offers a 14-day no-risk money-back guarantee. If your plan isn’t a good fit, you can get your money back. Best of all, you don’t even need to give a reason for the refund.
Finally, let’s look at the support you’ll get from our contenders’ Premium and Pro versions.
Support: Free and Paid Versions
Although all three plugins are quite easy to use and come with extensive free documentation and video tutorials, your free support options are somewhat limited.
However, they do offer support for free users through WordPress forums.
Support for Paid Versions
For the premium versions of these WordPress SEO plugins, you can also get ticket support. You can expect a response to the support tickets within 1 business day.
On top of that, All in One SEO provides extensive documentation on how to configure all its SEO tools and features on the website, in Documentation.
Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. All in One SEO: Which Is Better?
We’re finally at the verdict of this review and the answer to the question: is Rank Math better than Yoast?
Or is All in One SEO simply the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
We’d say that Rank Math is better than Yoast since it has further developed its SEO features. The plugin’s lite version also offers more advanced tools for optimizing your website.
Although Yoast manages your optimization fairly well, it becomes quite costly if you want access to advanced SEO tools. You have to buy several add-ons, which will add up, especially if you have several websites.
If you want to dig in deeper and fine-tune your SEO without needing to be an SEO expert, then All in One SEO should be your #1 choice. Not only is it a powerful no-code SEO plugin, but it’s also the best when it comes to value for money.
So if you’re looking for the best SEO plugin for WordPress, you should definitely get AIOSEO! It can’t get much easier to manage your SEO and boost your rankings on Google.
Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. All in One SEO: Your FAQs Answered
What are the main differences between Yoast, Rank Math, and All in One SEO?
Yoast SEO is known for its comprehensive features but has a more complicated setup process.
Rank Math offers a user-friendly installation wizard and advanced features like Google Analytics integration.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) stands out with its straightforward setup and extensive customization options for sitemaps and breadcrumbs, making it beginner-friendly while also catering to advanced users.
How do these plugins compare in terms of on-page optimization features?
All 3 plugins provide an SEO meta box for editing titles and descriptions. However, AIOSEO’s meta box is noted for being user-friendly and visually appealing. Rank Math includes more variables for title optimization but lacks the intuitive interface of AIOSEO. Yoast offers basic functionality but is criticized for its outdated interface.
We hope this comparison of Yoast vs. Rank Math vs. All in One SEO helped you find the best WordPress SEO plugin for your website. Once you’re done installing and activating the plugin, you may also want to check out our guide on improving your organic CTR. You may also be interested in our tutorial on adding a table of contents in WordPress.
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