You may wonder if SEO plugins are essential. They really are, especially if you are interested in getting your pages and posts ranking well on search engines. Search engines are key sources for generating organic traffic, leads and customers for any website; for this reason, using a plugin to help with SEO is vital.
Two of the most popular SEO plugins are All in One SEO Pack (3+ million active installations) and the venerable Yoast SEO (5+ million active installations). Choosing which to use may be difficult, as both plugins offer a great deal of functionality to help with SEO. Read on for a brief description, feature list and comparison of Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the best-known SEO plugins. It is a powerful tool that offers a wide variety of functions. It handles basic SEO settings such as titles, permalinks & meta description, and it has a robust keyword and readability analysis tool. Unfortunately, it also shows a few ads in the free version. The main features found in Yoast SEO are:
- Snippet preview that displays how your page or post appears in search engines
- Social media preview (Premium version)
- Page analysis: contains powerful keyword and readability analysis and feedback tools (Premium version)
- XML Sitemap generation
- Canonical URLs support
- Breadcrumbs
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is similar in many ways to Yoast SEO. This plugin is simple, clear, concise, and also includes several extras. For instance, this plugin supports WooCommerce out of the box and includes Google AMP support. It has the following features:
- Automatic titles optimization
- Automatic META tags generation
- XML Sitemap generation
- Canonical URLs support
- Google AMP support
- Google Analytics integration
- WooCommerce support
Comparison
Installation
Upon installation, both plugins do a decent job with no special configuration required. Therefore, they’re equally suitable for beginners. Advanced users will want to do a fair bit of configuration, and both plugins are extremely flexible.
- Yoast SEO has a simple step by step setup wizard to guide through the setup process. The settings section in this plugin is divided into pages, and each page has a separate tab for different settings.
- All in One SEO Pack has all settings on a single page; this looks daunting, but we find it less confusing than Yoast SEO’s many tabs and pages. The settings page is divided into different sections, and each section controls the settings of a specific feature.
Daily SEO tasks
SEO is a continuous process, and every new post/page has a separate score. Using an SEO plugin makes it extremely easy to work on each post and page in order to get the best possible results.
- Yoast SEO has a snippet preview which displays how your site’s title and description appears in search engines and also helps analyze your content for specific keywords.
- All in One SEO Pack comes with a similar section to edit SEO settings on a post by post basis. It is well integrated and simpler to use than Yoast SEO’s but lacks the search engine preview.
Support and Add-ons
Both plugins are fairly easy to use and come with free documentation but have limited support.
- Yoast SEO has no support for its free version. To obtain support, you will need Yoast SEO Premium. Pricing is $89 for a single site license, and the price increases as more sites are added. This only gives you one year of updates and support. The Premium version allows you to manage redirects (something you can do easily with the free plugin Redirection) and gives you an extraordinarily useful content analysis tool that allows you to quickly optimize your content. You also get internal linking suggestions and an ad-free experience.
- There is no support for the free version of All in One SEO Pack. The All in One SEO Pack Pro version comes with one year of professional support for $68 (single site). Unlike Yoast SEO, they have sizeable discounts for those needing multiple licenses. The Pro version comes with extra features like advanced WooCommerce support, optimization for categories, tags and custom taxonomies and a video SEO module.
All things considered, All in One SEO Pack is our favorite. It’s simple, efficient and the free version has all the features we need. Yoast SEO is still a strong performer, but the ads in the free version and its overall clunkiness are hard to miss.
