If you’ve been building websites for a while, you’ll know that Yoast SEO was the undisputed king of SEO plugins for years. Everyone was recommending Yoast, but, as we’ve seen with a lot of other highly-favored plugins, a new champion has risen to take its place: SEOPress.
What happened to Yoast?
Before we tell you about SEOPress, you might be wondering “So, what’s wrong with Yoast?” In short, bloat.
Once upon a time, Yoast was a lean, mean, SEO machine. Over time, the plugin has become cumbersome and inconvenient. The biggest complaint we have personally; the ads and upsells. This is particularly troublesome when working with clients.
Imagine trying to walk your client through a streamlined training process for their new site. You’re trying to show them the ropes of their SEO settings, but their attention is constantly being dragged away by banners promoting premium features or other products. With this happening in the interface, it can be difficult to get clients to see and remember the important stuff. For clients who aren’t so tech-savvy, it can be a real problem.
An outdated approach
Maybe the ads aren’t as big an issue for everyone as they are for us, but there’s also the problem of Yoast’s SEO approach, which is sorely outdated.
On the surface, Yoast’s “green dot” system seems very helpful, but it can often lead users down the wrong path, especially in a time when SEO is constantly shifting and evolving. The “green dot” system primarily focuses on a rigid interpretation of on-page factors like density and exact placement of keywords. Early on, this may have been a solid approach. But now modern search engine algorithms—especially Google’s—are far more sophisticated.
Modern search engines prioritize:
- User intent and semantic SEO The meaning and context behind a search query matter, not just the literal keyword matches.
- Readability for humans Keyword-stuffing creates stilted, hard-to-read content, which search engines flag as less valuable.
- More than keywords It’s also about user experience, site speed, if a site is mobile-responsive, and more.
Many SEO professionals have raised concerns that the “green dot” recommendations can lead to users creating content that is over-optimized and unnatural. Good content is created with a goal in mind and then optimized in a strategic way, not blindly pressed into a mold that fits some narrow definition of “good SEO.”
SEOPress, the current reigning champ
While it isn’t the only alternative to Yoast by a long shot, we’ve found our favorite SEO plugin in SEOPress. This plugin offers tangible strategic advantages that directly translate into better SEO results for our clients… and yours!
We love SEOPress for:
- So many features Right out of the box, SEOPress offers tons of options that you’d otherwise only be able to create with a number of plugins working together.
- Clean code You can look at the code for SEOPress and tell that it’s been thoughtfully constructed and maintained.
- Intuitive user interface No upselling banners here! The interface is easy to navigate and that makes it easy to explain to clients.
A modern approach for real results
With a more holistic approach, SEOPress is forward thinking and has managed to keep up with an ever-changing SEO landscape much better than Yoast has.
- Advanced schema markup for rich snippets The enhanced search results that show ratings, prices, FAQs, etc. are vital for standing out and increasing click-through rates. Without writing a single line of code, SEOPress allows us to easily implement various schema types (e.g. Article, Product, FAQ, Local Business, Recipe, etc.). This directly improves visibility and provides valuable context to search engines, which in turn leads to more qualified traffic to the site.
- Comprehensive technical SEO control SEOPress gives granular control over aspects that significantly impact crawlability and indexability, including:
- Flexible XML and HTML sitemaps
- Advanced redirection management
- Robots.txt and .htaccess editing
- Google Search Console integration with insights
- Focus on performance and Core Web Vitals The lightweight code for this plugin and its modular design keep it from bogging down a website. When Core Web Vitals, Google’s metric for user experience, impacts result ranking, this is especially crucial.
- AI integration You can connect SEOPress to OpenAI and generate page titles, descriptions, and more. While this isn’t a foolproof way to meet best standards, it can help fill in the gaps, especially larger SEO projects are on the horizon.
- Future-proofing Over time, SEOPress has been able to nimbly adapt to Google’s algorithm changes and SEO best practices. Features are updated and revamped when the new SEO climate calls for it, and that kind of forward-thinking enables your clients to create a more sustainable long-term SEO approach.
In short, SEOPress has become a Valerian favorite and is our first recommendation for our partners.