I’ve been using Yoast SEO Free for a long time now, it was my go-to SEO plugin which I installed and configured on most of the websites I’ve built, even if it’s a landing page, you still need an SEO plugin to set the previews correctly.
When I started working on Woocommerce shops on a regular basis, while always learning SEO, I’ve noticed there’s a big difference between what you can get from Rank Math compared to Yoast Free;
Product Schema Options
Yoast Free is very reliable and a veteran in the SEO field, but for Ecommerce purposes you have to buy the premium addon, which is quite expensive (about $178 a year) just to gain a few functions which are lacking in the free version, it kept me on the fence for a long time because most of the website and SEO strategies I do, don’t really require a complex SEO plugin.
The problem “began” when I realized my Schema is missing and lacking with Yoast SEO Free, while with Rank Math SEO Free I can get both a better Schema markup which will transfer info to Google and other search engines about the shops products and a few other features that were very limited with Yoast SEO Free.
More Keywords to Optimize
Let’s make it clear – a good article may have several long tail keywords that we want to rank for, and having just 1 keyword per page limit by Yoast SEO Free – we were able to optimize the page just for one keyword and guess the others.
With Rank Math SEO Free you can optimize each page with up to 5 keywords.
What Made Me Make The Switch
Eventually I had to make the switch with two clients of mine that were “suffering” from lacking Schemas, one for a shop that now enjoy a Product Schema that appears on Google Search console and bumps up the websites in the results. And the other website is a local service that gained the ability to make a correct Service and Local Service schema for better optimization compared to the competitors in the field which invest greatly in SEO.
Why I Bought The Minimalistic Subscription on Rank Math SEO
While the free version was great for my needs, the cost of having more tools with the premium version was really appealing to me.
I bought the Pro license for about 96$ a year that gives me more tools that are meant to replace, in one way or another, a monthly subscription I had to SEMRush which cost about 135$ a month!