Is Yoast Premium worth it?

Yoast SEO is a Search Engine Optimisation plugin available on the WordPress platform. It is one of the most popular plugins available on WordPress.

How does Yoast work?

• After installation and activation, the plugin analyses your WordPress page or post for SEO and gives a rating of good, average or poor to the page or post.

• It suggests changes to improve the quality of the post in terms of SEO and also shares positive feedback about the post if any.

• It helps to set the length of tags or metadata and analyses the title of the post in terms of SEO utility.

• it also allows you to indicate to the search engine if the post has more than the average amount of importance on your blog by allowing you to set it as “Cornerstone Content”. 

• One of the most important features it offers is the keyword planner. Users can set the “focus keyword” and Yoast will tell you the related keywords and their daily search volume in a particular country.

• It does a readability analysis of your post and gives you a readability score about how easy or difficult visitors to your blog may perceive the post to be.

• It also asks you a series of questions and ensures that your website or blog meets all SEO parameters.

All in all, it is a comprehensive, must-have tool for WordPress users. Yoast SEO ensures that your website meets the highest SEO technical standards. All these features are available in the free version of Yoast SEO available on WordPress. They also have a Premium version for USD 99 per year. The question is if so many features are available in the free version of WordPress, do you need the premium version?

Yoast SEO Premium: Features

SEO Premium is available for USD 99 per year in the US, Asia and Africa and 99 Euros or Pounds in Europe and the UK. It offers the following features in addition to the ones offered in the free version.

• FULL access to Yoast SEO academy. It offers full access to all the courses on the Yoast SEO Academy. Users can undertake these courses and become SEO Experts.

• Optimize pages for more keywords. The premium version allows users to optimise blogs for more keywords and their synonyms. It allows for the analysis of the page in terms of more keywords and phrases.

• Preview results of Social Media posts. Yoast SEO Premium shows how your snippets will look in search and social media before you post them.

• Gives smarter content suggestions. It offers a more comprehensive analysis of the webpage than the free version.

• Automatically redirects URLs. It automatically creates redirects when users move, alter or delete content so that visitors don’t come across dead ends on the website.

• Allows keeping content fresh & findable. The plugin gives reminders to update cornerstone content and avoid orphaned pages.

• Advanced language analysis.

• Access to 24 * 7 Email and Live Chat support.

• It offers an ad-free experience.

• It allows users to automatically add related keywords and synonyms to posts without having to do it manually.

Is Yoast Premium worth it?

An Analysis of the additional features

Yoast SEO Premium is marketed by Yoast as a time-saving tool that automates several processes offered in the free version to save time.

• The Redirect Manager feature allows you to automatically redirect URLs to new links. This can be useful to prevent your website from displaying 404 Errors, in case you move or delete a page or post. Users can simply insert the new link where the deleted page is supposed to redirect and the problem of the 404 error gets solved.

• The Stale Cornerstone Content Finder reminds users to update the important content on their blogs. It helps to prevent the cornerstone content on your blog from becoming obsolete. Cornerstone content refers to the most important posts on your blog.

• Yoast SEO Premium helps users to build a strong site structure through internal linking suggestions and the orphaned content finder. Orphaned content refers to posts on your blog which are not linked to other posts through internal linking. A blog with good internal linking is perceived positively by search engines and it also helps visitors to find relevant content on your blog, easily. This feature is especially useful for large blogs with several posts.

• The advanced language analysis feature works through a “word forms support” tool which scans your post for all possible variations of the focus keywords and then gives a report about the quality of the post in terms of SEO.

• The feature which allows users to automatically add synonyms and related keywords to your post can also be very handy and protect users from a lot of manual labour and wastage of time. It helps to keep your blog more relevant to search engines. This feature is offered by Yoast in collaboration with Semrush and allows users to add related keywords to the post using a single click.

• The Social Preview feature can also be useful to understand how the post will look on social media like Facebook and Twitter before they are posted. This allows users to fine-tune the post before it is posted.

• Yoast SEO Premium offers full access to the SEO Academy. This can be useful for serious students of SEO but for the average blogger who won’t bother to go through reading and watching all the content on the SEO Academy, it may not make much sense.

Conclusion

Yoast Premium offers some very good features to improve the quality of SEO on your blogs. However, it comes with a significant cost. For bloggers and business owners who can afford to spend a hundred dollars every year and who are very serious about their online presence, it may be worth trying out the premium version for a year to see if it generates any real return on investment. For casual bloggers and others, especially users living in Asia and Africa and those working on a limited budget, a hundred dollars can be a lot of money and they may not want to try using this premium service.

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