Rank Math Review
Summary:
Rank Math is the new best free SEO WordPress plugin for anyone that is building out their website. I have been running it across my fleet of sites for the last 9 months and have now converted all of my sites from Yoast SEO to RankMath.
View More DetailsWhat Will I Learn?
Are you wearing black?
Because today we’re holding a funeral.
It’s for a dear old friend of ours…
The Yoast SEO plugin.
It has been a relatively faithful friend and served us well for many many years.
It was there for the high rankings…
…and for the low ones.
But the time has come to say goodbye. Because there’s a new free SEO plugin in town…
What Will I Learn?
Rank Math creates the perfect foundation for increasing your search traffic.
In comparison to Yoast, it’s:
And it achieves all of this without slowing your website down. Just take a look at this side-by-side comparison:
Better still, it has more modern-day SEO features.
For example…
They have a 100-point page analysis test that goes deep into the needs of each page:
They allow you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free which you would have to pay for with Yoast-
And, they have a 1x-click advanced SEO analysis tool, to help you perform a site-wide audit in a jiffy:
And best of all?
Take a look at this quick video to learn more about Rank Math:
You can painlessly migrate to Rank Math in just a few clicks.
They have a comprehensive setup wizard that allows you to:
Meaning you could be up and running in the next 10 to 20 minutes.
The first step is to back up the current version of your site which you can do this using a free plugin like Updraft.
Once you have your backup, use a site audit tool like:
To perform a quick crawl of your site to get a snapshot of your current SEO situation.
This is so we can compare our site before and after the migration to make sure everything went as expected and we didn’t create any holes.
I noted down some random stats from my crawl in a Google sheet:
You can get your own version of the sheet by clicking here.
Keep this information handy because we’ll be using it as a benchmark to make sure your Rank Math deployment was successful (better safe than sorry right!).
Now let’s start setting up Rank Math…
If your site is currently using Yoast SEO or any of the other popular SEO plugins, you can quickly migrate everything to Rank Math.
This allows you to easily make the switch without:
Rank Math will automatically detect which SEO plugin your site is running and offer to migrate you.
Just go to-
Sidebar > Rank Math > Setup Wizard
And you should see this prompt:
Make sure the 4x import boxes are ticked. Then click “Start Import from Yoast SEO”
You can now start configuring your site…
If you didn’t import from Yoast…
Go to your WordPress dashboard.
Open:
Sidebar > Rank Math > Setup Wizard
You will see this page:
Click ‘Start Wizard’.
If you did import from Yoast…
You will already see the screen about website information. Either way, fill out the basic information for your site:
Click ‘Save and Continue’.
Now, connect your Google Search Console account:
*Save and continue.*
Now it’s time to create your sitemaps. You’ll want to turn ON:
And turn OFF anything else that isn’t required.
*Save and continue.*
On the SEO Tweaks page, leave everything as default. That should look like this:
*Save and continue.*
That completes the initial setup. On the final page click the ‘return to dashboard’ option.
Then go to:
Rank Math > General Settings > Images
If you are generally on top of your alt tags (which you should be) you can leave these two options set to off.
But if you want Rank Math to automatically generate them for you (not recommended), you can enable it here-
*Save your changes.*
Then go to:
Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta
On this page turn ‘Capitalize titles’ ON.
*Save your changes.*
Then head to:
Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta > Homepage
And fill out your homepage information:
*Save your changes.*
Finally, go to:
Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta > Social Meta
And fill out all of your social profiles:
*Save your changes.*
And…that’s it!
The final step is to see how migrating to Rank Math has affected your site.
Use the tool you used earlier to re-crawl your site and then compare the results-
Most of these changes for me were minimal and upon further investigation, they were nothing to worry about.
BUT…
Pay close attention If you see changes like this:
In this case, Rank Math made a HUGE change to my site.
It removed canonicalization tags from my tag archive pages because they were no-indexed but that’s OK because the pages aren’t indexed anyway.
If you see any radical changes your not sure of, let me know in the comments and I’ll help you out.
Overall, Rank Math is a competitor that must be taken seriously by Yoast SEO – the best SEO plugin for WordPress.
Yoast SEO plugin offers a free plan with some good features but they are limited, if you want to go in-depth, you need to buy the premium version.
While Rank Math offers the exact same features for free and more. Indeed, Rank Math gives you access to features that are not even included on the Yoast premium version.
Overall, there are 3 reasons why Rank Math is considered more affordable than Yoast:
Here are the headlines of my Rank Math review:
It can also INSTANTLY help you to fix many website issues.
For example…
My rich snippets were filled with errors and “bloat” from a third-party plugin I was using:
As you can see it produced a number of warnings and errors!
But after installing Rank Math and using their rich snippet feature these problems were solved instantly-
There was also a remarkable drop off in the errors on my site after installing:
So, the real question is…
Why pay $89 a year for Yoast when you can get the more powerful Rank Math for free?
Oh, and did I mention that they have excellent customer support?
What are you waiting for?
Download Rank Math now – it’s 100% free.
Rank Math is a great SEO plugin because it helps to optimize your website for better rankings in a couple of clicks. It is also easy to use, even if you are unfamiliar with SEO. They also have a great support team that is very responsive and they add new features constantly.
Rank Math Review
Summary:
Rank Math is the new best free SEO WordPress plugin for anyone that is building out their website. I have been running it across my fleet of sites for the last 9 months and have now converted all of my sites from Yoast SEO to RankMath.
View More Details312 Responses
Join My Facebook Group
Subscribe to my YouTube
Connect on Linkedin
Follow My Twitter Page
I am trying Rank maths – it does seem better than Yoast but there are more bugs for example I have to save a page maybe 3 or 4 times if I change the meta tags, they change on the page but rank maths thinks the meta description is blank until the 4th save attempt.The schema feature seems to help. I have noticed an improvement in ranks since implementing but issue with SEO is its hard to know what reasons are behind changes, maybe would have happened anyway etc
Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Adrian! Keep it up!
I switched all my sites to rankmath… there is no doubt it is a superior plugin. Although the equivalent Yoast cost is actually much higher as you would need to buy all the yoast paid plugins to get the same functionality that Rankmath provides in just 1 plugin, and almost all of it is in the free version.Even if pay for the Rankmath pro, it is only $59 per year for ALL functionality, so again still lot cheaper than Yoast, where you have to buy multiple plugins.Yoast definitely dropped the ball here and obviously thought they were untouchable, so did nothing to improve or be more competitive.The only really downside is the support.So far my experiences with Rankmath support have not been great. They kept deleting my posts on their facebook group, and then banned me from the group.When I asked why, they claimed the group was not for support and I was not allowed to post questions.This was of course total nonsense, as that is exactly what the group was used for, and people were posting questions on a daily basis and getting answers.Although my posts were questions to the group, not support requests.I believed they were deleting my posts because they were related to missing functionality and functionality that was not working correctly, which they did not want others to see.Despite that, I am still a paying customer.Although I cannot really rate yoast support either, I did find them rather arrogant.
Wow, thank you for this in-depth feedback! Sorry to hear that your experience with the support team wasn’t great…
In my Experience . Rank math is garbage plugin. Full of bugs. Why i still prefer yoast, it is because of their support and less buggy nature. Even other seo plugins better than rank math. Their schema has some issues, reported some time ago and that problem still not fixed (even though they claim it got fixed) and they not replying to support thread any more. That not how paid customer should be treated.. Rank math becomes popular because of their aggressive misleading marketing. That is what i think…
Thank you for giving us your point of view!
bad customer service, scam, they keep changing on the plans to his benefits one day u see the keywords limit 20000 the next day 10000 , and when you ask him politely, he gets violent . he doesnt know how to customer service
Yeah, they are making some changes and creating new plans. I’m sorry you had such a bad experience with them though.
Such an useful info that you shared with us.
Hope it helps!
The 404 page is not as good as in Yoast and neither is the redirects section. In yoast it automatically redirects when you trash a post ans then gives you a simple offer to send it. Rank math does not do this yet. You still have to do all this manually. I aslo found that this article is an old article as it does not seem to allow import of yoast anymore.
Hey Kevin! Thanks for giving us your opinion. I just wanted to remind you that Rank Math is free (unlike Yoast) and is constantly improving to offer the best services to their clients. So yes, Yoast has some features more “developed/advanced” than Rank Math, but do they worth all the money you have to pay for?
good post
Thanks! Always happy to help!
thank you so much I really appreciate your work here and you provide me best information which I need most thank you very much !!!!!
Cheers!
I just looked at the new pricing for RM Pro. The comparison chart seems to show that Free will have none of the features it now has. Is it a typo that the free column has X all the way down?
Hey Pat – I just checked as well, and if you click on “compare more feature” at the bottom of the comparison chart, you can see all the features it has now and that it’s going to keep- for free. Most of the features you can see at the top are news and will only be available for the pro & business versions.
Rankmath is far better than Yoast
I couldn’t agree more!
Thanks for sharing
No problem!
Thanks for sharing this interesting article, If it is really provides such information free as compare to Yoast premium I would definitely give it a try.
Yep! Try it and let me know what you think of it 🙂
It was a really interesting article, thanks for sharing it with us,.
No problem!
Thanks for the article Matt, i’m really confused right now because i have been using yoast for thr past one year but i’ll try out rank Math to see if it truly works for me.
Great – Let me know if it works for you 🙂
Thanks for the deep review. It’s time to quite yoast seo and move to rank math,,,
I couldn’t agree more, Abdul! You’ll see, it worths it!
this article is very helpful thanks a lot dear keep it up.
Thanks for reading my blog!
I like the helpful info you supply on your articles. I’ll bookmark your blog and check once more here frequently. I am relatively certain I will be informed a lot ofnew stuff proper here! Good luck for the following!
Thank you, Ansar!
Amazing article brother! Your big fan from India. I even gave you a backlink to this article.
Thank you Yash – I appreciate it! 🙂
Great article! I was searching for RankMath vs Yoast SEO and just found this post. Im definitely moving to RankMath now…
Good decision! 😉
Excellent post. thank you for this! This is very helpful.
No problem! Glad you enjoy my work 🙂
It was great and useful. Thank
Irritated that I opened your email this evening (the Pro Seo Tools from sept 15.). Now I see this:1: I’m behind on so many levels2: I have a lot less time to watch soccer on TV3: I have to clean my office, because I will be sitting there for hours when I crawl through all the information from your website.4: my plan on making an affilliate website will have to come on the table again.All and all – less sleep, and less leisure time. 🙂
Haha sorry, Lars… 😉 keep the hard work up – It worths it!
Yes, the article is very informative for those who wants to switch from Yoast to Rank math. I got to know benefits also from this website.
Thanks, Mohammad – Are you going to switch?
useful information seen on internet today. It contain very useful information. Article is nicely explained and easy to understand. Thanks for sharing this valuable information with us. Keep your good work.
No problem Kamran! Always happy to help!
Matthew, how about SEOpress? I’ve been reading some good stuff about it. But I can’t find a proper SEOpress vs RankMath review anywhere?
Hey Klass – I personally don’t use SEOpress but I heard good stuff about it too. Perhaps, I should add it to my list for an eventual article!
which seo plugin use your website
Please read the post – I use Rank Math on my website.
I’m not going to lie, I have to try it! Looks very interesting! Thanks!
Great! Try it and tell me how it goes! Would love to hear your feedback.
hye Matthis is good thought and i really inspire good job keep it up
Thank Mohsin!
Migrating from Yoast SEO Premium to Rank math! But… Did you find any feature that Rankmath lacks and still better in Yoast premium?Help me out, please..
To be honest, nop – Rank Math does a pretty good job.
I love this article it’s amazing and inspiring
Thank you Alisbha.
Thanks for the informationI hope this will help me
No problem Dev!
Hi Matthew,Awesome Post! I am great fan of your website and the case studies you publish on this. After reading this indepth post i am pretty much sure that RankMath SEO Plugin is way far better than Yoast SEO plugin. I totally agree with you that installing too many can slow down your website and here Rankmath does a great with lots of inbuilt features like Redirection, AMP and Analytics.Whereas while using Yoast plugin we need to install different plugins for doing AMP, Redirection and analytics. Thanks for sharing…Cheers,Abhay
Thank you for your comment Abhay! Keep up the good work!
Check out SEO Press. Premium is a one payment unlimited use and the depth is pretty good.
I will – thanks for the suggestion Olivier
best article thanks for sharing with us
No problem, Rajan!
That’s right information!! No need for extra Payment with yoast seo plugin.Thanks for sharing a great exprence!
No problem! Always happy to help!
Great piece with some compelling points.
Thanks, Shayur!
Thanks i using seo yoast with 3 add ons and now rank math handle alone for everything, Thanks for helping out take out time and share awesome review. have a great day
No worries! Happy that Rank Math works well for you!
It is worth to try using Rankmath, but to be sure we would apply in our non production site first.Thanks for sharing this Matthew!
No problem, Michael! Thanks for reading.
I’m using Yoast plugin for SEO but I’ve also heard about RankMath plugin, and your article just cleared my all doubts, I’ll use rankmath on my new travel blog.Thanks for sharing 🙂
Hey Jalaj – Glad I helped you make the right decision!
I was trying Rank Math at the start of building my website, but as a multilingual site (with translate press pro) I found that RankMath was not working perfectly. So I build with Yoast and (free option) and it looks to work fine. After reading your review I’m trying to come back to Rank Math but the plugin is not detecting my Yoast settings, so setup wizard starts from 0 and if I try to import before the setup wizard don’t take all data.
Hey Eduardo – Have you followed the process step by step? If you’re having issues, I suggest you send an email to Rank Math, they’ll help you out!
thanks for the advice, my website has just switched to rank math.
Great news!
Hi, Matt. Can I also follow the same steps here to migrate from All in One SEO free to Rank Math?
Hey Rabi – Yes, you can!
I agree with a lots of things here, Yoast was getting outdated. But there are not a lot many competitors for SEO Yoast…
Yes, you’re right! But Rank Math does perfectly the job – for free – so no need to look for hours for other competitors! 😉
I’m using Rankmath, not really fond of the Schema results though. And im also curious what Seopress can do :). Maybe in the next review ?
Hey Paul! Maybe, thanks for the suggestion!
I think rank math is much better than Yoast for beginners or new bloggers…
Totally right!
Is there any value in deactivating Yoast SEO, rather than deleting it on my website while I activate and test Rank Math?
Nop. I would suggest you follow my step by step process to have a successful migration!
Rank Math does make a lot of difference in rankings. Have been using it for quite some time now. The results are pretty good.
Glad to hear that! keep up the good work!
awsome guide matthew previously i was using yoast plugin but after reading your article i will go for rank math.thanks for such a informative guide.
Great news, Sunil! Let me how the switch goes!
Great post. I switched from Yoast to Rank math about 6 months ago and I have never looked back.
Nice! You certainly made the right decision!
I really like this content, I have learned by reading this content
Glad to hear that! Hope you’ll apply what you’ve learned.
Thanks for you recommendation, Matthew. I have made the switch tp RankMath. It was easy to do and I found the Schema much easier to configure than All in One SEO. This should now eliminate the errors on my store pages that I was getting warnings about from Google.
Hey Chris. That’s good news!