Yoast SEO Premium vs Free Plugin : Detailed in Depth Review of Best SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO Premium vs Free

The Yoast SEO free version is sufficient for SEO beginners. If you’ve been blogging for a while and want to boost your search traffic, go for Yoast SEO premium.

Are you seeking SEO plugins? Did you know Yoast SEO is a top WordPress SEO plugin? A true Yoast SEO Premium vs. free plugin comparison is here.

We all know search engine traffic is crucial.

The best traffic is via searches because

• It increases the conversion rates of your website.
• increases the overall sales of your website
• If searchers find the correct content, they are willing to pay money.

Although there are many SEO techniques you may do, there are usually one or two that offer you the best returns. This is the point at which on-page optimisation is useful.

Fortunately, Yoast SEO is a plugin that is available for WordPress users. Even the free edition is well worth the money because it has a tonne of incredible features that can improve your SEO. Ever curious what the Yoast SEO premium plugin has to offer? Let’s discuss both in our in-depth Yoast SEO premium vs. free plugin review.

Let’s compare Yoast SEO premium and free plugins.

Yoast SEO Premium vs Free plugin review (2023 Edition)

While Yoast SEO Free only allows you to optimise your content for one keyword, Yoast SEO Premium offers you features like social network previews, one year of support, intelligent link suggestions, the ability to target multiple keywords with each article, and the ability to quickly switch old URLs to new ones.

Yoast SEO Premium Plugin: Worth It?

Let’s start with Yoast SEO premium to see if it’s worth it. In this Yoast SEO free versus premium plugin review, we’ll also discuss the free plugin. Let’s begin.

There are several advantages to utilising Yoast SEO premium plugin to boost SEO.

Yoast SEO Premium Benefits

• Helps optimise keywords, synonyms, and related keyphrases
• Shows how your post will look on social media
• Internal link suggestions for content
• Checks content for broken links
• Adds schema markup to content.

1. You can use multiple focus keywords

Yoast SEO Premium allows 5 focus keywords. See the graphic below to understand this feature.

You may increase search traffic from different keywords by focusing on several keywords. However, exercise caution when utilising several keywords; otherwise, your material may appear entirely search engine optimised and be of little value to readers.

When you Google both keywords, you should typically find the same results, or what’s known as search intent. Thus, use your major keyword as an exact match and your secondary keyword as a partial match when crafting the headline for your post.

The secret is to intersperse specific words from your secondary phrase within the snippet and text.

Many of the bullets in the content analysis tab won’t be green because Yoast only finds exact keyword matches, and you will only be utilising partial matches for your secondary keyword.

Thus, Yoast SEO Premium’s multiple focus keyword feature isn’t really useful for content optimization—rather, it’s just useful for monitoring secondary keywords.

Make sure to use Mozbar to ensure that your primary and secondary keywords are not very competitive and use Google Autocomplete to investigate them both to see whether they are being searched.

The following advice will assist you in focusing on several focus keywords:

• Do the same research on secondary keywords as you would your primary.
• The search objective of secondary keywords ought to align with that of the core keyword.
• Make sure to incorporate keywords and write a well-read headline, SEO title, and meta description.
• The use of partial matches for secondary keywords keeps the title free of keyword stuffing.
• Ignore the content analysis for secondary keywords as incomplete matches are used.

Why should you use multiple focus keywords?

You should conduct some study before selecting your focus keyword. Selecting just one emphasis keyword can be challenging if you want your post to rank for several of that specific keyword.

Multiple target keywords come in handy if you’d also wish to rank for a somewhat different term.

These four instances demonstrate why it’s best to optimise for several keywords.

1. Synonyms: Searchers use different phrases. Users may search for travel destinations. Vacation, holiday, or trip are alternatives of road trip. Make sure your post ranks for various keywords to reach different audiences.

2. Multiple subjects: Some posts include multiple topics or subtopics. Example: “yoga for spinal cord” and “yoga for back pain”. Both subjects might be covered in one article.

You want your content to rank for “yoga for back pain” and “yoga for spinal cord”. Ranking for your most crucial keyword “yoga poses” is also possible.

3. Long tail keywords: If you want Google to rank your content, use long tail keywords. These are usually easy to rank for due to low competition. A content that ranks for numerous long-tail keywords would be much more successful.

One good strategy is to target numerous long-tail keyword variants. Optimise your post for long tail variations to be found for more search phrases.

4. Key phrases: Users utilise key keywords for specialised searches. Sometimes word order and stopwords matter in essential phrases. You should optimise your post for different permutations of your focus keyword.

Google searches for exact matches, thus word order matters. Google handles stopword searches differently.

Yoast SEO Premium makes multi-focus keyword optimisation easy. Just click the Yoast SEO Premium box option to enter a term.

Enter your second focus keyword in a new box to optimise your post. By checking the content, Yoast SEO guarantees your post is optimised for all your focus keywords.

2. Orphaned content

Instead of using internal links, orphaned material is content that is not linked from anywhere on your website and is not easily available to search engines and website users.

Orphaned content is blog content without internal links to your site.

Thus, “orphaned content” refers to blog postings without external links.

Yoast Premium’s #1 benefit is that it shows you which blog posts have “orphaned content” so you can improve them to rank higher in search engines.

This is the dashboard view.

Yoast SEO Premium’s “orphaned content” function and internal linking feature can instantly repair all your internal linking and orphaned content concerns. Only Yoast pro users can utilise this functionality.

3. Redirecting the old URLs to new ones

You must delete posts or pages when cleaning up, transferring, or restructuring your site. It’s risky since visitors to the previous URL will get a 404 not found error.

You should redirect the old URL to a new one with the most relevant information, especially for a regularly viewed website. Give visitors a warning that material has been erased or redirect them to another page. Yoast SEO Premium lets you accomplish all this from your WordPress dashboard.

You can fix those with their redirects module. Choose from these Yoast SEO Premium redirect types in the redirects module.

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

Yoast SEO Premium lets you construct REGEX (Regular Expressions) redirects to redirect multiple URLs with a certain term or expression.

4. Incredible internal linking

Did you know Yoast SEO premium plugin provides great internal linking suggestions? The following screenshot illustrates my point.

The Yoast SEO premium plugin delivers internal link suggestions for your content, as shown in the screenshot above. This feature is great because appropriate internal linking boosts SEO. Free Yoast plugin lacks this capability.

Internal links to linked posts are difficult to maintain. This SEO strategy is crucial. You must write high-quality, relevant, and useful material regarding keywords to rank.

How do you tell Google which posts are significant and related?

Our internal connection tool helps. Yoast Internal Linking is a new box on the right side of your site for premium customers. It displays verifiable connections related to your text. It analyses the most popular words from Yoast SEO Insights to discover content with similar words.

5. Social preview to boost your social media activity

When a post has many images, you may pick the wrong one. Your blog article sharing should seem attractive to attract readers.

Yoast SEO Premium lets you preview your Facebook or Twitter post without visiting them. Upload the image to the Yoast SEO meta box and check its appearance.

Premium Yoast SEO plugin features

• On an individual basis, you can modify a post’s meta description and SEO title for author, tag, and category archive pages.
• You have the ability to control the permalink settings and modify some parameters, such as canonical settings, redirects, and stop words removed from slugs.
• Previews of Google search result snippets are available.
• It can validate Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Webmaster Tools.
• With the help of Yoast SEO Premium’s robust redirect manager, you can rapidly set up redirects and designate 404 issues as repaired in Google Search Console, thereby resolving them.
• The simplest and fastest method for your material to be indexed and search engines informed about it is through sitemaps. Adding XML sitemaps to WordPress is really simple with Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin.
• The plugin’s ability to integrate your website with Google+, Facebook, and Twitter is one of its best features.
• You can optimise a post for numerous focus keywords by utilising the feature of multiple focus keywords.

Pros of Yoast SEO Premium

• It is frequently updated, and because of its large community, finding recommendations, advice, and how-tos to maximise the plugin’s functionality is simple.
• Since the premium edition has a few more features, it can be fixed by using other free plugins.
• It incorporates functionality from some of the most well-known plugins, such as RSS footer and Robots Meta.
• With Yoast SEO, you can provide every post in your RSS feed a backlink to your own website.
• It raises your search engine ranking.
• For premium customers, it provides email assistance; for free users, it offers a WordPress help forum.
• To improve SEO visibility, Yoast offers a number of premium modules along with a premium SEO plugin.
• You can occasionally find it handy to display items with a specific status using Yoast SEO’s Bulk Editor.

Cons of Yoast SEO Premium

• Many security risks. It frequently becomes susceptible, allowing hackers to access your website.
• No option to reroute if a link changes.
• When every function is turned on at once, the speed of the website could decrease.

Yoast SEO Free Plugin Review

Yoast SEO Free Plugin Benefits

• It assists you in search engine optimising your material.
• It’s totally free!
• It gives your website an XML sitemap.
• lets you make changes to your robots.txt file
• You can make SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions with the Yoast SEO free plugin.

1. Best for optimizing search friendly content

In terms of content analysis tools, Yoast SEO is among the best available. Yoast’s content analyzer is located in a meta box that sits just beneath the WordPress text editor. Verify that it is turned on.

You may modify and get a preview of your content as it appears in the SERPs with the Snippet Editor. It allows you to alter your meta description and SEO title, both of which are important for increasing click-through rate (CTR).

Enter your focus term on the Content Analysis tool’s interface. The plugin’s free edition allows users to enter only one keyword.

Yoast SEO will evaluate your content against 12 SEO “best practises” after you provide your keyword. For instance, the quantity of outbound links, readability, and keyword density. It also checks to see if your term appears in the content’s SEO title, meta description, and opening paragraph.

It evaluates everything and uses a handy “traffic light” rating system to make it simple for you to see where you need to make improvements. Yoast SEO uses the same traffic light approach to display an overall content score, with green being the desired outcome. There’s no way your content will fall in the SERPs thanks to this feature.

2. The ability to use XML Sitemaps

Google finds your website’s pages more easily when it has an XML sitemap. Whatever SEO tactics you employ won’t help if search engines aren’t indexing your material.

Yoast SEO has XML Sitemap capabilities built right in. With it, users can create a sitemap that is updated automatically each time a new page or post is published. By going to SEO and selecting “XML Sitemap,” you may activate XML sitemaps. Simply choose this checkbox.

Yoast SEO alerts search engines each time you post new material as soon as the sitemap feature is enabled. In order for your content and images to be indexed, you may appear in Google Image searches.

3. Yoast is built-in with social media

You can use Yoast SEO to inform Google the URLs of eight well-known social networks by going to SEO and selecting “Social.”Four widely used social networking tools—Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Pinterest Open Graph, and Google+ Publisher verification—can be integrated with your website.

The content analysis meta box also has social media functionality. You may choose how your content displays on the social media channels under the “Social” page. You have the option to submit a custom image, change the title, and provide a meta description.

Free Yoast SEO plugin features

• It offers general SEO capabilities that you can modify to fit the requirements of your website.
• It has a strong content analysis tool that aids in the optimisation of each and every post and page on your website.
• Additionally, it provides built-in robots.txt and.htaccess editors, open graph meta tags, and breadcrumb navigation. With the help of the breadcrumbs feature, you can tell visitors exactly where they are in your blog’s hierarchy.
• Additionally, Yoast SEO provides a few premium add-on plugins for specialty websites with particular SEO requirements. News SEO, Local SEO, and Video SEO are these add-on plugins.
• After you save a draught of your content, Yoast SEO provides a traffic light system. If it’s green, your SEO is doing well. Orange indicates that there are still one or two things that require attention, while red indicates that everything is subpar and needs to be changed.

Pros of Free Yoast SEO Plugin

• You may check whether your title is too long or too short, how your post or page will appear in the search results, and whether your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result by using the snippet preview.
• Yoast SEO prevents subpages of archives from being indexed, which removes a significant amount of duplicate content.
• To let Google know which social networks are part of your website, you can add as many as eight of them. Social media sites will comprehend the precise topic of your content as well as the title, image, URL, description, and more, enabling them to present it accurately on sharing platforms.
• Yoast SEO will examine your content for over a dozen SEO best practises and provide you with an easy-to-understand traffic light rating system that shows you how well you are doing for each one.
• If you are switching from another SEO plugin, Yoast SEO can import settings from that one as well as from other websites. It can, of course, export them as well.

Cons of Free Yoast SEO Plugin

• There is no support available for the Yoast SEO basic plugin. The Yoast team does not promise to respond to you officially. You will need to purchase Yoast SEO premium if you want expert support.
• The free edition doesn’t provide many SEO advantages (such using multiple keywords, internal link suggestions, and other features that can really help you improve your SEO).

Yoast SEO Premium: Is Yoast Premium Worth It?

Does Yoast Premium make sense then? Yes, Yoast SEO premium for one site only costs $99 for a full year, during which time you’ll receive regular feature updates. Having said that, Yoast SEO subscription is still well worth the money because to these additional outstanding capabilities.

Yoast SEO Premium keyword analysis

Yoast SEO premium allows you to easily optimise for keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords, and more, whereas the free version can only target one keyword.

Here are a few things you can do with Yoast SEO premium keyword analysis;

• Optimise for word forms, synonyms, and related key phrases.
• Make your page optimised so that search engines like Google will rank it for synonyms as well.
• Adding relevant keyword phrases is simple.
• Different word forms are not even a concern for you.
• To better optimise your content, you may quickly evaluate the distribution of your keyword phrases.

In case you are wondering in the functioning of keyword analysis, let us examine its process;

For example, you might utilise any dog-related sport, like agility trials, dock jumping, etc., as relevant synonyms occasionally if you want to optimise for German Shepherds.

It facilitates easy content digestion for your readers, which is beneficial for improved content optimisation. You can add these synonyms for your main keyword phrase to the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, and it will notify you if you’ve used those synonyms in

• your meta description
• Introduction
• Subheadings
• image alt text and so on

Above all, their keyword phrase distribution check can assist you in better optimising your blog posts by allowing you to use your keyword phrase and synonyms across your content in an alternate manner.

Content insights

Yoast SEO Premium allows you to see the top five terms or phrases used on your website and determines whether they are related to the keywords you have selected. Yoast SEO premium users are the only ones with access to the content insights tool.

In other words, these keywords for content insights indicate the main topics of your material. You might only want to rework your content to reflect your original topic if the words significantly deviate from what you’re covering on your website.

Focus keyword export

Once more, Yoast SEO premium users are the only ones with access to the “focus keyword export” option. Using this tool will help you get a tonne of new and highly relevant keyword ideas so you can decide what to optimise next.

You can download a list of all the focus keywords you’ve used so far in Yoast SEO Premium.

You are free to select any keyword data that needs to be optimised, such as the title, readability score, URL, and keywords. After that, all you have to do is download your overview as a CSV file.

That’s really cool. With just one click, Yoast SEO Premium enables you to quickly export your focus keywords, scores, URLs, titles, meta descriptions, and more.

Readability check

You may quickly determine the Flesch Reading Ease score and assess the readability of the material you prepared using the Yoast SEO premium plugin.

What is Flesch Reading Ease score anyway?

The complexity of English text is gauged by the Flesch reading ease score. In other words, it indicates to you how simple or complex your content is to read.

Text that has a Flesch reading ease score of 100 or above is characterised by short sentences and no words that are longer than two syllables, making it incredibly easy to read. Nevertheless, a reading comfort score of 60 to 70 is regarded as typical for reading on websites and other online content.

To gain further insight into it, view the accompanying illustration.

PRO TIP: To guarantee that 80% of Americans can read your content, try aiming for a reading level of grade 8.

This is where Yoast SEO comes into action; it shows you your content’s total reading score and also writing recommendations for raising it.

This is how it appears in the Yoast SEO backend:

As you can see from the image above, Yoast SEO offers you a readability score (which is better if it is displayed in green) along with a tonne of recommendations for raising the readability score of your content.

FAQs About Yoast SEO Premium Vs Free

Here are some key Yoast SEO Premium Vs Free questions to help you decide.

Conclusion of Yoast SEO premium vs. free plugin review

Yoast SEO is WordPress’s most complete SEO plugin. A single plugin has many SEO-boosting features.

Free SEO edition of Yoast is enough for beginners seeking for an SEO tool.

If you’ve been blogging for a while and want to increase search engine traffic, Yoast SEO subscription is worth it. It’s worth every cent at $99 for a year.