Hey guys, today we’re talking about the benefits of the Yoast SEO Premium plug-in but first we want to lay our cards on the table – we have no affiliation with Yoast other than the fact that we use it on our site and recommend it to our clients. So while this article might read like a gushing advertorial, if a better SEO plug-in becomes available we’ll be dropping Yoast faster than third-period French. And we dropped that rapiiiiiide. Êtes-vous prêt? Commençons!
As you’re reading SEO tips on our blog, we’ll assume that you should be doing everything possible to give your website an SEO edge. The landscape is getting more competitive by the year, the month, the week, the day, the MINUTE. The digital marketplace is still growing and developing, but one of the consistent factors are search engines. These provide most folks with their daily gateway to all aspects of the internet (including French to English translations, thank you DeepL); where you show up in these rankings is of critical importance. Where you want to be is obvious (numéro un, oui?), but how you get there is a little more complex. One of the tools that can help you scale the charts is Yoast SEO Premium. But what is Yoast SEO, and what exactly does it do?
Listen up, Yoast – if we find a better WordPress SEO plug-in, remember what we said about French class.
Yoast SEO is one of the most widely-used WordPress plug-ins around. In terms of SEO tools, it’s the coolest student in class…you know, the one that gets good grades without being a nerd and whose parents are always out of town. It can be utilised for anything from personal blogs to professional website SEO management. Essentially, it ensures that your site and blog content hits the highest possible SEO standards.
Yoast comes in two forms, Basic and Premium. The former is free, while the latter comes with a fee ($89 per year but you can usually find a discount code by fishing around the internet). However, it’s well worth setting yourself up with Yoast Premium, as it affords you far more options for optimisation.
This very post is using Yoast SEO Premium to get the most out of any potential SEO. The biggest benefit of Yoast Premium is that it allows you to pull out five keywords or phrases instead of one. You’re quintupling your chances to make a mark on search engine rankings. It also allows you to target one synonym for each keyword, turning that quintuple into a decuple (internet translation = 10X).
This is getting a little meta, but here’s a screenshot of the Yoast SEO Premium plug-in giving this post the green smiley faces for SEO and readability…no wonder you found us!
Yoast will also guide you through your SEO choices to make sure that you’re, well, optimising your optimisation. It does so in a really simple way, with three coloured faces; red is bad, orange is middling, and green is A-OK. This will be based on sentence structure and length, readability and keyword placement. So don’t worry if you’re not well-versed in SEO – that’s exactly what Yoast is for. It makes it easy for you to hit those targets (even if you don’t really understand how it all works).
Other benefits of Yoast SEO Premium include pulling out any redundant meta-descriptions (a snippet that summarises a page’s content) and customise slug-lines, which provides another opportunity for you to tailor your content around improved SEO. It also lets you optimise the text of your content for context; search engines are getting smarter by the day, and in 2020, they analyse the words AROUND the keywords, not just the keywords themselves. Yoast Premium makes it easy to optimise your text for synonyms and related terms.
Hopefully the above goes some way in explaining why Yoast SEO Premium is our favourite SEO plug-in for WordPress. There are other plug-ins available but we find Yoast the most intuitive and beneficial for a broad range of clients. And to any Yoast employees reading this, our threat is still very real – stay at the top of your game or you’ll go the way of our French class. Vous avez été averti.
