If you own a business website then you probably already know how important SEO is for your site’s performance and your potential sales. Many business owners swear by YOAST for all their SEO needs, but is it really the best SEO tool on the market? It’s certainly not the only SEO tool you can use.
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Last Updated: May 26, 2023
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There’s a lot of buzz surrounding Rank Math and all of its SEO features. But does it live up to the hype? We’ll tell you everything you need to know about Rank Math in this Rank Math review, including all of its features, its reputation, and its drawbacks.
We’re going to start this Rank Math review by explaining what Rank Math is. Rank Math is a plugin for WordPress. If you’re familiar with SEO tools and using other WordPress plugins like YOAST, then you generally know what Rank Math does.
Rank Math analyzes your whole website and then gives you an SEO score for each page. The score is based on 100 different SEO factors, which is nice for a free service.
However, Rank Math has several features that other SEO plugins don’t, which we’ll cover later in this Rank Math review.
It wouldn’t be a comprehensive Rank Math review if we didn’t tell you about how Rank Math was started. It was first launched in 2018, though it had been in existence for years before that.
The plugin was created by Bhanu Ahluwalia, Nimit Kashyap and Suraj Vibhute.
Since its launch it has gained massive popularity, and it has the potential to become the second-most-popular SEO plugin for WordPress.
Currently, that title goes to All In One SEO Pack because it has the highest number of active installs, but Rank Math boasts more new downloads.
When it was first launched Rank Math had pretty minimal download numbers, but now three years later it’s used on more than 500,000 different sites.
While we were researching the plugin for this Rank Math review, we discovered that Rank Math’s lengthy feature list is the reason for its widespread popularity.
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering if Rank Math is right for you, then it’s a good thing you’re here.
We’ll tell you who can benefit from Rank Math without giving you the generic “Everyone can use Rank Math!” response that you’d typically find in a Rank Math review.
Here are some of the people that could benefit from using Rank Math:
This is likely something that everyone reading this Rank Math review is curious about. Will Rank Math actually increase the traffic to your website? The short answer is no, it doesn’t do that.
What it does is provide you with analytics and SEO suggestions. If you use the SEO suggestions to make changes to your site, then you have the potential to increase the traffic to your site. However, you have to put in that work. Rank Math doesn’t do it for you.
Now we get to the meat and potatoes of this Rank Math review: the features list. We know that’s what many people are here to find out about, and we won’t disappoint! Here’s a list of all the features you can expect when you use Rank Math:
Rank Math is easy to use, which is great for those of us who aren’t so technologically inclined. It makes sense for Rank Math to be user-friendly because it’s a WordPress plugin, and WordPress is designed to be easy to use and to learn.
It’s easy to learn Rank Math’s layout and each option is well-defined so you don’t have to wonder what something does.
One of the most important features we found while learning about the plugin for this Rank Math review is its ability to perform an automated site-wide SEO analysis.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, simply click the “SEO Analysis” button and it will begin to analyze your entire website, rather than you being required to specify which pages it analyzes.
It performs more than 70 different tests to analyze your site’s SEO score. Once the analysis is finished, it will provide you with an overall SEO score (which goes up to 100).
It provides you with a chart that shows how many tests your site passed, which it feels the need to give you warnings about, and which aspects of the analysis your site failed. And of course, the most important of these are the tests that your site failed.
One of the most exciting features we wanted to mention in this Rank Math review is the ability to optimize for up to five different keywords.
Why is this exciting? Other SEO tools such as YOAST only allow you to optimize for one keyword, unless you pay for their premium services. This feature is incredibly useful when you’re using more than one keyword and want to properly optimize your site.
We found during research for this Rank Math review that you have the ability to track the position of your keywords in search results with Rank Math.
Rank Math integrates with Google Search Console (GSC). After you’ve connected your GSC account with the Rank Math plugin, you’re offered a wealth of information that you can access from the Rank Math dashboard. Some of the things you can access include:
We learned while researching Rank Math for this Rank Math review that if you use this plugin you won’t need to use a third-party plugin for Rich Snippets.
Rich Snippets or Schema Markup come in several forms, and can provide additional information about your website in search results, such as star ratings, product markup prices or video markups.
Rich Snippets or Schema Markup make search engines better understand the nature of your website, so if you’re running a WooCommerce store, a review website or a blog, RankMath can accommodate it with various Schema Markups.
Rank Math allows you to add an incredible 14 different types of Schema Markup.
One of the most attractive features to Veteran SEO plugin users who are reading this Rank Math review is that Rank Math provides a redirection manager.
Many other SEO plugins provide this as well, but you usually don’t get this service unless you purchase their premium service packages. But Rank Math provides you with the redirection manager from the start. The types of redirection that Rank Math offers are:
It’s also worth mentioning in this Rank Math review that you’re able to edit the two most important files on your website: .htcaccess and robots.txt.
You can access and edit the .htcaccess file from the WordPress dashboard, and Rank Math creates a backup of the file before it saves your edits to any catastrophic accidents. You can create or update your robot.txt file from the WordPress dashboard, as well.
Rank Math offers social media integration, which many people reading this Rank Math review will be excited about.
You’ll notice a “Social” tab on Rank Math’s meta box and there you can see that it currently integrates with both Facebook and Twitter, which are two of the most popular social media platforms.
The integration allows you to add pictures and then helps you to create enticing titles and descriptions that will grab the attention of your audience.
Rank Math offers LSI keyword suggestions or Latent Semantic Keyword suggestions. You can use these LSI keywords to rank for multiple keywords on the same site.
Rank Math makes it easy to use multiple LSI keywords without having to stuff your content full of keywords in an inorganic way.
One of the exciting features we found during our Rank Math review is the ability to get Local SEO and a Local Knowledge Graph. You can search one location with the free version of Rank Math. This is a great feature for local businesses or blogs that focus on a specific place.
Rank Math provides a more robust and detailed XML sitemap than the basic one that WordPress offers.
Many people reading this Rank Math review who are using similar SEO tools will be surprised to learn that Rank Math uses a modular framework, which means that you can use the modules you want and then disable any modules you don’t find useful for your site.
Other SEO tools (such as YOAST) don’t offer this particular feature. Rank Math offers a wide variety of modules, so it’s nice to be able to pick and choose which ones are most useful to you.
Another set of features that many entrepreneurs reading this Rank Math review will appreciate is all of the features surrounding links. While you’re working in the editor, Rank Math will make internal link suggestions, which are suggestions about content that you could link to your site.
You can use Rank Math to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. And there’s a link counter that lets you know how many links are on your site, both internal and external.
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering if it’s good for eCommerce shops, the answer is yes. Rank Math has WooCommerce SEO features. These will help you to optimize your product titles, descriptions and more.
We wanted to tell you a bit about Rank Math’s User Interface as part of our Rank Math review. It’s important to know whether the interface is easy to use or not, and of course every tech review will typically tell you that it’s easy to use.
So rather than giving you a blanket statement about the user-friendliness of the interface in our Rank Math review, we’ll go into more detail.
Rank Math integrates with WordPress’s Gutenberg block editor, rather than the old-school “meta box” design of the classic editor. To access the Rank Math tools you click on the Rank Math icon at the top of the WordPress toolbar.
When you click it, the Rank Math toolbar appears on the right side of the screen and displays four tabs: General, Advanced, Schema and Social.
The General tab allows you to edit the details of snippets, look at analytics and set a focus keyword. Under the Advanced tab you’re able to customize certain robot metadata, which means you can do things like include a noindex tag.
The settings in the Schema tag allow you to customize Schema data. And under the Social tag you can input and set up social information so that you can receive analytic graphs from Facebook and Twitter.
Another part of Rank Math’s interface that we want to include in our Rank Math review is the Analytics interface. This shows up on your WordPress dashboard, so it’s quite easy to find it.
Some of the things you can find on the Analytics interface include keyword rankings and performance, traffic statistics from Google Analytics and Search Console reports that tell you about keyword positions and search impressions of your keywords.
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering if there’s a free version, you’re in luck. Rank Math is by default-free. This is great for people who are on a budget, or for skeptical consumers who would like to try it before they make any sort of purchase.
We always look for services that offer either a free version or a free trial, so we were pleased when we were researching the plugin for this Rank Math review and found that there was a free version.
Because YOAST SEO is such a popular WordPress SEO plugin, we know that many readers are wondering how Rank Math compares to YOAST, so we’re going to provide you a comparison of the two as part of our comprehensive Rank Math review.
Here is a table that describes the difference between YOAST SEO and Rank Math SEO:
| YOAST | Rank Math |
| Total Files: 1075 | Total Files: 415 |
| Total Lines of Code: 95k | Total Lines of Code: 29.6k |
| Size of Plugin: 26.4 MB | Size of Plugin: 8.5 MB |
| Variety of Features: Less | Variety of Features: More |
You can see from this Rank Math review comparison table that Rank Math is a more lightweight plugin that requires fewer files to install it, and it doesn’t require as many PHP requests, which will make your website load faster.
Aside from that, the real difference lies in the features. A lot of what YOAST only offers through paid subscriptions is provided by Rank Math for free, so that makes Rank Math a more cost-efficient option than YOAST.
You can optimize for up to five different keywords with Rank Math, whereas YOAST only lets you optimize for one.
And Rank Math gives you an SEO analysis score in numbers (up to 100) so you can get a good idea about how you’re doing, while YOAST simply tells you that your site is either “Good” or “Bad”.
It’s also worth noting as part of our Rank Math review that there are some major differences between YOAST and Rank Math when it comes to pricing.
Rank Math’s most expensive subscription plan isn’t nearly as much as YOAST’s, which makes it the more cost-efficient option of the two.
Also, Rank Math’s Pro subscription plan allows you to use the plugin on an unlimited number of personal websites. YOAST doesn’t offer unlimited use of its products on any of its subscription plans.
We also want to point out that Rank Math allows you to access different Schema markups in its free version, which isn’t an option with YOAST.
One of the most important aspects of this Rank Math review for some people is finding out how much it costs.
Of course, there is a free version so you aren’t required to sign up for their subscription plans immediately. However, there are perks to the plans that might make them worth your while.
Pro: Rank Math Pro costs $59 per year and can be installed on an unlimited number of personal sites, however you can’t use it on client sites. Here are some of the features you can expect with Rank Math Pro:
Business: If you need to use Rank Math for client websites, then the Business option is right for you. It’s $199 per year, and you can use it on up to 200 client websites.
It comes with all the features of Pro, but includes the ability to use it on client websites and track up to 20,000 keywords.
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering why someone would choose Rank Math Pro over the free version, don’t worry. We’re going to tell you all about the benefits and features that are included in Rank Math Pro.
Rank Math Pro comes with integrated Google Analytics, and it’s conveniently displayed right on your WordPress dashboard.
This means that you’ll see a list of posts on your dashboard with an SEO score, whether that score is good, fair or poor, Schema types associated with the posts, and information about the links in the posts.
We found while we were researching Rank Math Pro for this Rank Math review that you can track 500 keywords with the Pro plan.
The Rank Math Business plan allows you to track 10,000 keywords. If you need to track more keywords, you can email them at support@rankmath.com and they’ll create a customized plan just for you.
We wanted to include a bit about the keyword tracking that comes with RankMath Pro in our Rank Math review.
This provides you with an in-depth analysis of the keywords that you can access conveniently from your WordPress dashboard. It gives you a look into various factors like impressions and clicks, as well as the overall position of keywords.
But the most impressive part of this feature is that Rank Math will show you whether these statistics have gone up or down during a specific time period.
This means that you can use this information to determine whether the changes you’ve made to the keywords on your site have performed well or if you should try something else.
One of the best features of Rank Math Pro that we found while writing this Rank Math review is their advanced Schema generator.
One particularly useful benefit of this feature is that you don’t have to download or install a separate plugin to use it. It’s integrated into the Rank Math plugin itself. Here are some of the things you can generate Schema for using Rank Math Pro:
We also discovered during our research for this Rank Math review that Rank Math Pro provides you with image SEO. Rank Math allows you to add ALT attributes and tag titles to images for SEO optimization of images.
Even better, once you’ve configured your settings to include image SEO, it will automatically add ALT attributes to any images that don’t have ALT tags.
You can also turn on a feature in the settings that allows the plugin to automatically add title attributes to any images without title attributes.
One of the best Rank Math Pro features that we discovered while writing our Rank Math review is their 404 monitoring feature.
When people try to visit a page that doesn’t exist they get a 404 error code, and these errors are bad for SEO rankings because 404 errors create a bad user experience.
The 404 monitor quickly identifies and helps you fix 404 errors on your site. We found during our RankMath review that the monitor has two separate modes: a basic mode that only identifies the errors, and an advanced mode that identifies errors, the referring page and some user information.
Because Rank Math provides you with a list of all of your 404 errors, you can fix them all in bulk, which is quite useful.
The best, most unique feature that we found while writing this Rank Math review is the content AI that Rank Math developed for its plugin.
What this means is that the content AI will learn about your website and then provide you with intelligent suggestions tailor-made for you based on what it learns about your site.
It will provide you with dynamic suggestions and keywords, intelligent questions (complete with Schema markup), suggestions for smartlinks, more details about keywords over time, and related keywords.
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering about what happens if you don’t like Rank Math Pro, then there’s no need to worry. Rank Math has a 30-day money-back guarantee.
No matter what the reason for your dissatisfaction, they will provide you with a full refund so long as you request it within 30 days.
All you have to do is email support@rankmath.com. They won’t even ask you any questions about why you want a refund, so it doesn’t get any easier than that!
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering about the fact that you’ve already got an SEO tool plugin installed, there’s good news. You’re not limited to the plugin you initially chose.
You will need to disable it, however. If you have another SEO tool plugin activated while Rank Math is active, it will almost certainly cause incompatibility issues. However, if you have either YOAST or AIO, you can import your data from them over to Rank Math.
If you’re reading this Rank Math review and wondering how difficult it is to configure the plugin, you’re in luck. It’s quite simple to get through the startup process.
There are two separate sections to the setup process, and they’re fairly automated. Here’s everything you need to know about the setup process:
Upon launching the Rank Math plugin, a setup wizard will pop up and walk you through the configuration of all the basic settings. This is also the time to link your free Rank Math account with the plugin.
This is optional for some reason, but since we found out from writing this Rank Math review that if you don’t link your free account with the plugin you won’t be able to unlock all of the features, we strongly advise that you do it.
Some of the settings it guides you through include things like inputting some Schema information, setting up the optional Google Search Console and Google Analytics integrations, the XML sitemap, and other various settings.
You’ve also got the option to go through some advanced settings, such as setting up a Role Manager to control who has access to Rank Math on your WordPress site, redirection, 404 error monitoring, and some more Schema settings.
Once you’ve completed the setup wizard process, you’re guided through the module manager.
We found as part of this Rank Math review that if you’re still on the easy settings during this part of the setup process you won’t have access to all of the modules, so you’ll want to click over to the advanced setting.
The module manager lets you enable or disable each module and configure modules after you’ve enabled them.
Of course, we could simply end this section of our Rank Math review about the setup process right here. But because we want to provide a comprehensive Rank Math review, we’re going to tell you about the third stage of the setup process: importing.
If you’ve used a different SEO plugin (like YOAST) prior to installing the Rank Math plugin, then the last step of the setup process for you will be importing the data from that plugin to Rank Math.
You access this feature by following this path: Rank Math > Status and Tools > Import and Export.
This feature allows you to import information about keywords you’ve previously optimized using other SEO plugins, and if you have the Rank Math Pro you can also get keyword tracking tools that you can use to track the keywords you previously optimized on other SEO plugins.
It would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t tell you some more about the Schema Markup in our Rank Math review. RankMath provides some Schema options even with the free version of their plugin, which is a feature that you don’t get often with an SEO plugin.
To access the Schema tools, you click the Schema tab on the Rank Math User Interface, which should be on the right side of the screen.
When using the free version of the plugin, you get one schema per page. Under the Schema tab you can edit various aspects of your Schema markup, as well such as the type of Schema it is and the Schema’s title and description.
If you’re using Rank Math Pro, you get the option to validate Shema markup code, as well.
| Pros of Rank Math Pro | Cons of Rank Math |
| + Integrated with Google Analytics + Keyword tracking over time + Advanced Schema Generator | – Not compatible with other plugins |
In an effort to provide you with an unbiased Rank Math review we’re going to tell you about the drawbacks of the plugin, rather than just telling you about all of the good features. Here are some of the drawbacks of the Rank Math SEO plugin.
As of right now, if you choose to go with a different SEO plugin later it’s not going to be compatible with Rank Math.
Most other SEO plugins won’t allow you to import the settings and work that you’ve done on Rank Math. This can be such an incredible turnoff for some people that it could prevent them from using other services even if they may be a better fit for them.
We won’t use this Rank Math review to tell you that it’s the best tool for everyone. The fact is that not every person is going to require the same services and while Rank Math will meet the needs of most people, it may not meet all of yours. Here are some alternatives to Rank Math:
SEMrush is great for not just SEO purposes, but also for marketing purposes. You can use SEMrush to check out the keywords that drove visitors to your competitors’ sites.
This information can really make or break the success of your own site.
They recently partnered up with YOAST too, so between the two you can have all of the SEO tools that YOAST provides, as well as the marketing tools that make SEMrush an attractive choice.
It’s typically $119.95 per year for SEMrush Pro and $229.95 for SEMrush Guru, but you can get a 7 day free trial.
SerpStat is an SEO tool that can help you with various aspects of your website like backlinking, keywords, marketing and researching the competition.
It’s been named the #1 best-selling SEO tool of all time on Appsumo, which is a pretty big deal and lends to its credibility.
Another great feature that SerpStat offers is the ability to track up to 15,000 keywords on its entry-level plan.
They have plans that range from $69- $499 per month, and you can get a 20% discount if you pay annually rather than monthly. There’s a free version as well, which means you can try it before making any financial investments.
SpyFu is another SEO tool that allows you to check out the keywords that your competitors are using.
It has lots of useful features, such as no limits on domain searches so that you can look up every keyword that a competing site has ever bought using Adwords and all of their ads from the past 12 years, keyword searches, the permission to track thousands of keywords even on the basic plan, backlinks searches, and SEO and Adwords reports.
There’s a free version of SpyFu, as well as paid subscription plans which may be more to your liking depending on your needs.
The first plan is the Basic plan which costs $39 per month and you get 10k rows of keyword search results, data exports and more.
There’s also the Professional plan which costs $79/month and includes unlimited search results, data exports, over 10 years of historical data, API access and custom branding reports.
KWFinder is a keyword research tool. Here are some of the features that KWFinder boasts: search results that include thousands of long-tail keywords, search keywords by their domain so that you can find out about which keywords competitors have used, find out about the monthly search volume of keywords and their trends, CPC value of keywords, keyword difficulty score that can help you determine whether keywords are low competitive words, and a feature that gives you the option to search keywords in bulk.
There’s a free version of KWFinder, and you can get a 10 day free trial of their premium services, during which you can do five keyword searches per day which gives you 10 competitor keywords and 25 related keywords per search.
Their plans are as follows: the Basic plan for $29.90/month which provides you with 100 keyword lookups per 24 hours, the Premium plan for $39.90/month which provides you with 500 keyword lookups per 24 hours, and the Agency plan which provides 1,200 lookups per 24 hours.
SmartCrawl isn’t as well-known as some of the other alternatives on our list, but if we’re going to add a list of good RankMath alternatives to our RankMath review, we would be remiss if we didn’t include SmartCrawl.
Their standout feature is their excellent, user-friendly and easy-to-use interface which was designed using WMPU DEV, and WMPU DEV plugins are known to be well-developed.
SmartCrawl offers some similar features to RankMath, such as the ability to scan your website and offer SEO suggestions, and a score that allows you to make changes to raise your SEO score.
There’s a 21-day free trial, as well which is better than the average 7-day trial. They have three subscription plans: Pro is $60/year, the SEO & Marketing Pack is $90/month and the Personal plan is $190/year.
Rank Math is a great alternative to YOAST SEO because it offers more features and costs less than YOAST.
With its content AI, Schema markup and keyword tracking, it has many other SEO tools beat in the features category. There aren’t many SEO tools that give you Schema features on the free version of their plugin.
And many SEO tools don’t provide you with the same sort of detailed analytics to track keywords and let you know if changes that you’ve made to your site are working.
Although some people may decide that RankMath isn’t for them, or they may feel a sort of brand loyalty to YOAST, RankMath is definitely worth a try!
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Rank Math is an SEO plugin that works for WordPress websites. Rank Math is great for anyone who wants to boost the SEO of their web pages to rank on Google and other search engines. Bloggers and other websites with lots of content benefit the most from Rank Math.
Rank Math only works with WordPress sites. Luckily WordPress sites are incredibly common so Rank Math is a solution that works for many people.
Rank Math has a few pricing tiers:
Rank Math is easy to use. The set-up is guided clearly and once you have the plugin running on your website it's easy to take Rank Math's lead to optimize your pages.
You can download Rank Math for free and get a demo. Plus you can try the Rank Math plan for 30 days with a money-back guarantee if you aren't happy with the plugin.
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