For too long a time, the WordPress SEO plugin market has been a one-horse or two-horse race, depending on whether you consider All in One SEO Pack a worthy competitor to Yoast. Finally, there is another player on the scene and it is a great one - RankMath.
As you will find out in the remainder of this review, RankMath is giving Yoast a run for its money and then some.
Who’s behind it?
The company behind RankMath is MyThemeShop, seasoned veterans of the WordPress ecosystem whose themes and plugins are used by more than 600,000 people around the world. According to them, they wanted to create a veritable SEO swiss knife and to give it to users for free. They did it and they did it in style.
So, what exactly did they do right?
Automated SEO for inexperienced webmasters
Let’s be honest, not everyone is that interested in SEO and many webmasters like to do as little of it as possible. They want to focus on producing great content and/or branding and they just want to make sure their optimization is not hindering them.
RankMath does this exceptionally well. It has a Setup Wizard which asks you only the very basics about your WordPress site and then it sets up its SEO automatically, ensuring that your website follows all the best practices when it comes to on-site SEO.
Of course, you can override this if you need something else for specific pages on your site.
Powerful SEO audit
RankMath also has a powerful SEO audit feature that looks at over 40 factors which can affect the search engine performance of your WordPress website. This provides you with a great overview of the current state of your site’s SEO.
In addition to this, you will also get recommendations on how to solve any issues that you might have, including permalink issues, keywords-related problems and even Caching plugin issues that might prevent your website from being as fast as possible.
Handy redirection manager
Improperly handled redirections can wreak havoc with any website, WordPress or no. If you were to analyze 100 websites that experienced severe organic traffic drops, you would find that badly handled redirections were the main culprit in at least 80 of them.
Redirections are particularly tricky to do right if you run an eCommerce website with thousands of products that come and go every day. In such situations, you can easily end up with pages with out-of-stock products getting traffic instead of those with available stock.
RankMath has a Redirection Manager feature which is exquisitely easy to use and which handles all of your redirections for you, making sure your website doesn’t have dead-ends and that the visitors end up exactly where you want them to end up.
In addition to this, RankMath also has a feature for redirecting attachments to parent pages or custom posts. For instance, if you have a particularly successful PDF that is getting organic links, you can redirect it to a page and give it link juice that way.
404 monitoring
Closely related to redirections are 404 errors, which tell you that an asset on your domain is not available - a post, an image or something else. Making sure you keep tabs on them is essential for good SEO and RankMath does this very well.
The Simple 404 monitoring feature simply informs you of 404 errors, so that you can remedy them in a way you find suitable. The Advanced version also informs you of the referring page, the time of the error, and even the user agent.
Support for rich snippets
The good people from RankMath realized that rich snippets are changing the SERP game, effectively serving only one above the fold result for many searches. Because of this, they have added powerful rich snippet support to their plugin.
With it, you simply choose the type of content for which you wish to create rich snippets and a simple fill-in process guides you through everything.
Pretty much all the types of content are supported - articles, books, courses, events, job listings, music, persons, products, recipes, restaurants, reviews, etc.
Of course, this does not mean that your snippet will automatically appear in the SERPs but it definitely increases your chances.
Search Console integration
Most webmasters use Google Search Console on a daily basis to track their keywords, backlinks, internal links, penalties, crawl rates and more. RankMath features an integration which allows you to keep track of all of this without having to fire up the actual SC.
This can save a ton of time, especially if you are just looking to check up on a few things.
Furthermore, with their in-built keyword analyzer, you can definitely save a bunch of time, identifying the keywords that are performing well and then cross-referencing this with how well your pages are optimized for them, discovering if you can make some improvements.
The “other” stuff
The “other” stuff here refers to things other than actual features that you can find in RankMath.
For example, there is the Yoast and All in One SEO Pack importer which enables you to switch seamlessly from those plugins to RankMath.
Also, there is the code which is lean and clean, meaning that the plugin will have a minimal negative influence on the performance of your WordPress website.
RankMath’s support people are also more than responsive, taking care of everything that is even remotely humanly possible within 24 hours. They are also extremely responsive to any new bugs that may appear (the tool is still relatively new) and they handle them in record time.
Finally, there is the price. The price for all of this is $0. As in zero dollars. Nothing. RankMath is a free plugin.
Closing Word
It has been a while since someone tried to challenge Yoast as a WordPress SEO plugin of choice. RankMath not only challenges Yoast, but surpasses it in many respects.
If you add the price into the mix, well, it’s a no brainer.
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