SEO for everyone
Grade: B — Score: 75/100
Free (WordPress): $0
Yoast SEO Premium: $118.80/year per site (ex. VAT)
Yoast WooCommerce SEO: $178.80/year per site (ex. VAT)
Yoast SEO AI+: $358.80/year per site (ex. VAT)
Yoast SEO for Shopify: $19/30 days (ex. VAT)
Consider switching to SEMrush: SEMrush offers more comprehensive analytics and competitive research tools.
Rank Math's free version includes redirect management, multi-keyphrase optimization (up to 5), and 18+ schema types, all of which Yoast reserves for its $118.80/year Premium plan. Rank Math Pro costs $59/year and covers unlimited personal sites, while each Yoast Premium license covers only one site. Yoast's advantages are its readability analysis with Flesch Reading Ease scoring, a larger ecosystem of tutorials due to 13+ million active installs, and the AI Brand Insights feature (in the $358.80/year AI+ tier) that monitors brand mentions across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Independent benchmarks also report Yoast uses roughly 4x more memory than Rank Math.
The free plugin handles single-keyphrase analysis, XML sitemaps, basic schema markup, and readability scoring. Premium at $118.80/year adds multi-keyphrase optimization (up to 5 per page), the redirect manager with 301/302 support, internal linking suggestions, orphaned content detection, AI-generated titles and meta descriptions, and bundled Local SEO, Video SEO, and News SEO plugins. If you publish frequently, manage URL changes, or need to build internal link structure across a growing site, Premium saves significant manual work. For a small blog with fewer than 50 posts that rarely changes URLs, the free version is sufficient.
Yes. Yoast SEO for Shopify costs $19/30 days (ex. VAT) and includes a 14-day free trial. It provides real-time SEO and readability analysis, AI-generated titles and meta descriptions, product schema markup for rich snippets (price, availability, reviews), and integrations with review apps like Judge.me and Loox. The Shopify app supports 27 languages and includes llms.txt generation. It does not include the redirect manager or internal linking tools available in the WordPress Premium version.
Yoast automatically outputs JSON-LD structured data as a unified semantic graph on every page, linking organization, author, article, FAQ, how-to, breadcrumb, and product entities. The free version covers basic schema types. Premium adds Local Business schema (via Local SEO), VideoObject schema (via Video SEO), and NewsArticle schema (via News SEO), all bundled at no extra cost. In March 2026, Yoast introduced Schema Aggregation, which consolidates all structured data into a standardized endpoint that AI systems can read efficiently.
Yoast has added several AI-readiness features since 2025. The free and Premium versions generate an llms.txt file that guides AI crawlers to key content. Premium includes Bot Blocker to block unwanted AI bots and crawl optimization settings that let you indicate which parts of your site should not be used to train language models. The $358.80/year AI+ tier adds AI Brand Insights, a browser-based dashboard that runs weekly analysis across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, tracking brand mentions, sentiment, citation sources, and competitor ranking.
Yoast is a feature-rich plugin, and multiple independent tests report it uses more server memory than lighter alternatives like Rank Math or SEOPress. The difference is measurable on shared hosting or resource-constrained environments. On modern managed WordPress hosting with adequate PHP memory (256 MB+), the impact on page load time is minimal for most sites. Yoast's Premium crawl optimization settings can also reduce unnecessary HTTP requests by filtering out overhead that search engines do not need.
Each Yoast SEO Premium subscription covers one WordPress site. If you run 5 sites, you need 5 separate licenses at $118.80/year each ($594/year total). Yoast offers bulk discounts on checkout for multi-site purchases. For comparison, Rank Math Pro costs $59/year for unlimited personal sites, and SEOPress Pro costs $49/year for unlimited sites, making both significantly cheaper for multi-site owners.
Yes. Yoast SEO Premium includes one free seat for the Yoast SEO Google Docs Add-on, launched in June 2025. The add-on provides real-time SEO and readability analysis directly inside Google Docs, so content creators can optimize before publishing to WordPress. It supports focus keyphrase scoring, meta title and description editing, and direct export to WordPress. Additional seats for the Google Docs add-on cost $5/month each.