6 Best Yoast SEO Alternatives for WordPress Sites

When it comes to WordPress and SEO, the Yoast SEO plugin is the go-to solution for many of us. And why not? After all, this popular plugin is active on 5+ million WordPress websites plus it’s easy to setup Yoast SEO and new features are added regularly. It provides all the essential features to optimize WordPress SEO for free (though we highly recommend Yoast Premium if you’re serious about your site).

But that shouldn’t stop us from checking out the competition for the best Yoast SEO alternatives. And that’s what this post is all about – finding the best Yoast SEO alternatives. Perhaps you’ve been meaning to give a new SEO plugin a try, or you’re just curious. Whatever the case – here are our top picks.

1. All in One SEO

All in One SEO is quite the champion when it comes to communicating with search engines. It submits your sitemaps, including image sitemaps, to search engines and automatically updates them on any changes to your sites. Beginners can start off with this plugin without paying too much attention to settings. As for developers, they can fine tune settings to optimize SEO and extend functions via the built-in API.

Although All in One SEO is the first name to come up while considering Yoast SEO alternatives, you should know that its page analysis features don’t quite match up to Yoast. It doesn’t attach too much importance to keywords or readability. However, it can quite match Yoast SEO in optimizing titles, generating meta tags and detecting duplicate content on your website.

One area where All in One scores over many other SEO alternatives is in it’s support for Google Analytics and SEO integration for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce.

The plugin is available for free. But there’s a premium version too, which starts at $124/year for a single site (or just $49/yr when they’re running a deal). This entitles you to premium support, additional Google Analytics options, a video SEO module and social media integration.

For those who keep watch on website performance, you’ll be happy that All in One has a modular structure. This way you can turn off features you don’t need and prevent unnecessary drag on performance. You’ll also have more control over technical details by way of asking search engines not to index or follow or exclude some areas from your sitemap.

2. Rank Math

Rank Math is a totally free (for now) and comprehensive SEO plugin. And for $9 per year, you’ll also get support for the plugin.

It packs in a huge feature set (65+ features) and comes with smart automation features. At the same time, it’s lighter than most other plugins and easy to setup for WordPress. The default settings will be fine for most users, though you can change them if you like.

Just like Yoast SEO, RankMath offers on page SEO with easy options to help improve your content. These include  focus keyword tips, content length monitor, permalink evaluation and more. Beyond that, it allows you to include rich snippets, optimize each post for upto 5 keywords, integrates LSI keyword tool to suggest multiple variations of your focus keyword and pulls in keyword suggestions from Google.

Similar to other options, it integrates Google search console. This helps you to track site stats and performance right from your WordPress dashboard. Additionally, it packs in advanced SEO tools to conduct an SEO audit of your website, carrying out as many as 70 detailed SEO tests to come up with professional recommendations. Throw in support for local SEO and WooCommerce, and you have quite a winner here.

Other plugin features include tracking SERP, overlay GIF or video icon on your social thumbnails, SEO optimized breadcrumbs, Google crawl error monitoring, contextual tooltips, automated image SEO options, XML sitemap generator and more. You’ll also find 404 monitor and redirect manager as well as suggestions for internal linking. And finally, it allows you to import all your SEO data from Yoast and All-in-One SEO with a single click.

3. SEOPress

SEOPress makes it easy to stay on top f your SEO. Manage your metas (titles, description, Open Graph, Twitter Card, meta robots…) from each posts or globally, create your own XML sitemaps to improve Google bot crawl, track your visitors with Google Analytics (downloads tracking, affiliate links and more), make redirections, edit your canonical URL, and more.

SEOPress allows you to monitor all your 404 urls. As soon as a visitor requests an address from your site that does not exist (or no longer exists), it is automatically saved in your WordPress administration. If the url already exists, the visitor counter on the latter is incremented. So you can analyze traffic losses, user experience problems, generate redirects etc. SEOPress can also alert you by email of errors.

Broken links can greatly harm your visitors as well as indexing robots. In few seconds, the SEOPress robot lists them, so you can then see the source url containing the broken link, modify it, and repair it. This reduces your 404 errors in the Google Search Console.

SEOPress supports Google Local Business. By filling your geographic coordinates, opening hours, email and phone, you increase your visibility in search results by appearing in the right column. More visibility, more traffic and more sales!

The plugin also support WooCommerce! Quickly disable useless pages for search engines such as cart, checkout and my account pages, add Open Graph currency and price to improve sharing in Facebook et get more sales. And many other features are available in the PRO version.

4. SEO Tools from Jetpack

Last on our list of worthy Yoast SEO alternatives is SEO Tools from Jetpack. As all WordPress users know, Jetpack is a multi functional plugin from Automattic, the team behind WordPress. Most of Jetpack’s feature are available for free, though the SEO tools is a Paid option that comes with the Premium and Professional Plans.

Jetpack’s automatically generates an XML sitemap for you and can handle all basic SEO optimization requirements. It helps to customize the appearance of content titles and write SERP-boosting meta descriptions. These tools also help to optimize content for social forums and link to your Google Analytics account.

By default, the privacy features are turned off, but the premium plans will allow you to activate them. You’ll also be able to see live previews of how your site’s homepage and posts will look like on search engines.

5. Slim SEO

If you just want basic SEO optimization for your WordPress site then Slim SEO is just right for you. While there are a couple premium addons the free version does everything you need it to without overwhelming your dashboard with options.

Like Yoast SEO, it includes on-page optimization and XML sitemaps. Plus, it also includes options for defining breadcrumbs and adding proper schema markup (structured data).

Additionally there are standard features for on page SEO such as XML sitemaps, meta titles, descriptions and keyword optimization. You can also go on to to use snippet titles, description and image for Facebook and Twitter. And you can use Slim SEO to manage simple redirects too.

Considering the feature set offered by the plugin, it may be an ideal fit for websites that have a fairly straightforward website with a small to moderate amount of content to monitor and maintain SEO performance.

6. SmartCrawl

The final Yoast alternative is SmartCrawl. This SEO plugin can also be used for monitoring and is a great plugin to use in conjunction with other SEO services like Moz.

SmartCrawl offers many helpful options to optimize your page titles and meta descriptions for search results, a sitemap generator, smart page analyzer, proper schema markup, 301 redirect manager and support for breadcrumbs. Plus it integrates with Open Graph, Twitter cards and Pinterest for easy social sharing.

But SmartCrawl also offers cool features other SEO plugins don’t – a quick setup wizard and regular reports to see if your SEO has been improving. These are great for new users to setup their site SEO correctly from the beginning as well as to make tweaks as time goes on to ensure their site stays in search results.

SEO optimization plays a huge role in getting your site pages at the top of search engine results. And while Yoast generally does a great job of it, it’s always nice to know your options. This write up on Yoast SEO alternatives can help you start exploring your SEO options.