Yoast or Rank Math: what an SEO plugin should do, and what it must not

“Yoast or Rank Math?” is the question I get most often from webshop owners on WordPress and WooCommerce. The answer disappoints most of them: it matters less than you think. Both do what is necessary. The difference lies in what you switch off and how you set it up. Here is how I do it.

What an SEO plugin does

An SEO plugin does not write content, build links or lift rankings by itself. It does five technical things that WordPress does not do well enough on its own:

1. Controls the title tag and meta description per page, with templates for products, categories and articles.
2. Sets canonical tags so filters, parameters and duplicates point to the right URL.
3. Generates an XML sitemap that can be submitted in Search Console.
4. Writes structured data, schema markup, for articles, products, breadcrumbs and the organisation.
5. Controls indexing: noindex on tag pages, author pages, attachments and search results.

Everything else is accessories. That includes the green light, the readability score, keyword density and the AI assistant. The accessories are what sell the subscription, and what most often do harm.

Yoast: strengths and weaknesses

Yoast has been on the market longest, and it shows. The defaults are sensible, the documentation is thorough, and almost every developer and hosting company knows it. The schema implementation is strong and built as a connected graph, so organisation, author, article and breadcrumb fit together in one piece.

The weaknesses: the free version has narrowed over the years, and several functions, such as redirect handling and multiple focus keywords, require payment. The interface takes up room in the editor, and the traffic light in green and red makes writers write for the plugin instead of the reader.

Rank Math: strengths and weaknesses

Rank Math arrived later and won users by giving more in the free version: redirects, a 404 log, several keywords per page, schema types, and a setup wizard that imports settings from Yoast in minutes. The interface is more modern and easier to survey for someone managing a whole site.

The weaknesses: there are many switches, and many of them should stay off. The modules for Content AI, rank tracking and internal link suggestions rely on external services and on the server. And because Rank Math offers so much, it often ends up configured by whoever installed it rather than by someone who understands what the settings do.

What I switch off in both

The SEO score. The coloured light measures whether a word appears in the heading, in the first paragraph and a certain number of times. Google does not measure like that. Writers chasing green write worse texts. Turn it off, or teach the editorial team to ignore it.

Auto-generated meta descriptions. The template “first 155 characters of the text” gives a description that rarely sells the click. Write it yourself on the pages that have to rank. Leave the template as a fallback on the rest.

Indexing of tags, date archives, author pages and attachments. They create hundreds of thin URLs that compete with the real pages and eat crawl budget. Noindex on all four unless there is a concrete reason.

Anything that phones home. Rank tracking inside the plugin, analytics integration in the dashboard, Content AI. It is data you already have in Search Console, and it costs speed on a site that already has too many plugins.

How I set it up

One SEO plugin. Never two. Run Yoast and Rank Math at the same time and you get duplicate title tags, two sitemaps and conflicting schema, and Google picks at random.

Sitemap submitted in Search Console and checked so it only contains pages meant to be indexed. Schema set up with organisation or person as publisher, with logo, and breadcrumbs enabled. Title templates with the page name first and the site name last, and a firm rule that the most important pages get hand-written titles.

For webshops: product categories are the landing pages, so they get hand-written titles, descriptions and an intro text. Product pages get the template. Filter pages and sorting parameters get a canonical to the category. Those are the three settings that give the most on a WooCommerce shop, and they have nothing to do with which plugin is installed.

Switching from Yoast to Rank Math

Run the import wizard in Rank Math, but check three things afterwards. That the title templates were carried over and did not fall back to defaults. That the noindex settings came along, otherwise the tag archives suddenly become indexable. And that old redirects, if they lived in Yoast Premium, have been recreated. Keep Yoast deactivated for two weeks before deleting it, so you can roll back.

My recommendation

If you have a site that works with Yoast, stay. The switch gives no measurable gain in itself. If you are starting fresh on WordPress or WooCommerce, choose Rank Math for the redirect module and the fewer limits in the free version, and switch off half of it. And either way: what moves rankings is the things the plugin cannot do. Content that answers, internal links that point the right way, and a site that is fast. That is what an SEO audit is about, and there a plugin is never the answer.