5 Best Yoast SEO Alternatives and Competitors

Yoast has long been the go-to WordPress SEO plugin for users looking to improve their website’s search engine visibility.

The SEO plugin has one of the most robust content analysis tools, providing real-time suggestions to improve your content’s readability and prepare it for search engines.

But that doesn’t mean Yoast SEO is best for everyone.

If you’re looking:

• For a feature-rich FREE WordPress SEO plugin
• A lightweight SEO plugin
• An affordable paid SEO plugin

Yoast SEO is not the best option for you.

In this guide, I’ll help you find the best Yoast SEO alternatives that you can use to optimize your WordPress site for search engines without breaking your bank account or compromizing your site perfomance.

Why Look for Yoast SEO Alternatives

Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins. At the time of writing this post the SEO tool had garnered a massive 5+ million active installs.

If you are new to WordPress SEO, chances are you’ve read a particular SEO guide recommending you to install a WordPress SEO plugin, and Yoast is one of the tools that most SEO experts recommend.

There’s a reason it’s the go-to SEO plugin, and particularly it’s a no-brainer why the 5+ million users have it installed on their website.

However, that doesn’t mean Yoast is the best WordPress SEO tool.

Regarding pricing in relation to its features, you’ll quickly realize that there are far better alternatives that offer way more features, even in their free versions.

To start with Yoast has one of the most expensive paid plans. Their premium plan costs $99 per year for a one-site license.

And even after paying that fee, you still can’t optimize your web pages for local SEO.

Oh! Do you own a local business? Sorry to burst your bubble, but you have to pay an extra $79 per year to optimize your website for local audience.

And so is the case if you want access to tools like:

• Video SEO: costs $79 per year for one site
• News SEO: costs $79 per year for one site
• WooCommerce SEO: costs $79 per year for one site

That’s a rip-off.

Another thing that’ll push you to look for a Yoast alternative is its disappointing performance.

Yoast SEO is not the most lightweight SEO plugin. It has more lines of code, large file size and a higher memory usage affecting your overall website speed performance.

In fact, according to Online Media Masters, Yoast is one of the slowest WordPress plugins affecting your speed performance.

I’m pretty sure you don’t want to use an SEO plugin that will slow down your website, do you?

5 Best Yoast SEO Alternatives for WordPress SEO

There are many Yoast alternatives available, but not all are the best. In fact, some of them could be way worse and more annoying than Yoast’s ridiculous ads that appear in your WP dashboard.

I didn’t want to include just any SEO plugin under the sun: only the awesome ones that I felt deserved consideration.

So, here are the best Yoast SEO alternatives you can use to optimize your WordPress site for SEO.

1. Rank Math

Rank Math is the Swiss Army Knife of WordPress SEO and the best Yoast SEO alternative overall.

The SEO tool comes packed with many features that allow you to eliminate most SEO-related plugins you must have installed.

For example, when using Yoast free, you’ll need to install a redirection plugin to redirect any URL.

This is not the case for Rank Math. In fact, you get a way more sophisticated redirection management tool that allows you to manage your URL redirects, and avoid dead links on your site.

Rank Math has an intuitive user interface. Their launch wizard is straightforward.

If you’re a beginner, you just need to select your experience level as “Easy”, and Rank Math will do the heavy lifting for you.

That way, you don’t have to do much or get confused in various configurations.

Moreover, you can easily import your SEO settings from Yoast in one click.

What Makes Rank Math the Best Yoast Alternative

Rank Math, free and pro versions, come with many features not found in Yoast. Here’s why Rank Math is a good Yoast SEO alternative.

• Rank Math is more affordable than Yoast SEO: Rank Math FREE is more robust and feature-rich than Yoast’s free version. For paid plans, Rank Math costs $59 per year for unlimited websites, while Yoast costs $99 per month for just one site. Yoast also makes you pay an extra fee of $79 per year in case you want to use either of their add-ons—tools that are all included in Rank Math Pro.
• Rank Math is more lightweight than Yoast: as far as a website load time is concerned, Rank Math is created to provide many tools without compromising your site’s performance. It has fewer lines of code, is smaller in size and has a very low memory usage than Yoast SEO.
• Rank Math has a powerful content analysis tool: unlike Yoast that uses color code to score your content, Rank Math gives an overall SEO score on a scale of 100 which is better. The SEO tool performs 21 real-time tests to see if your content is optimized for search engines and follows the best SEO practices.
• Content AI by Rank Math: Rank Math’s new Content AI helps you research keywords and gives intelligent suggestions for focus keyword optimization. Once enabled, the Content AI analyzes your piece and offer suggestions like the keywords you need to include, how many words, links, headings, and media you should use in your content based on what is currently ranking for that keyword.
• Advanced schema generator: With Rank Math’s Custom Schema, you can create a custom Schema, fill it in, and add it to a page. You can also create a blank Schema structure and save it as a template on multiple pages.
• Great redirection tool and 404 Monitor: Unlike Yoast, Rank Math allows you to redirect your URLs using 301, 302, 307, 410,451 redirection types in all their free plans. You also get access to a 404 monitor that tracks all your broken links, which you can redirect to new live links allowing you to improve your website user experience.
• Edit .htaccess file: In all the Rank Math plans, you can access your .htaccess editor. To prevent issues, Rank Math automatically backs up your .htaccess before you modify it. So, if you accidentally mess up your site, you can roll the changes back using the backup.

Rank Math Pricing

Rank Math’s free version is enough to help you begin optimizing your website for search engines.

However, if you want to access more advanced features and enjoy top-tier benefits like Content AI or an Advanced Schema Generator, you need to upgrade to their paid plans.

Here is the pricing for Rank Math.

• Pro: costs $59 per year
• Business: costs $199 per year
• Agency: costs $499 per year

2. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

All in One SEO is another Yoast SEO alternative that has proven its effectiveness and performance in WordPress SEO.

Since being acquired by Awesome Motive (the company behind WP Beginner and Optinmoster), All in One SEO has been undergoing huge improvements and adding new features that allow you to up your SEO game.

Like Rank Math, AIOSEO has an intuitive installation wizard that allows you to easily configure the plugin settings and get your site ready for search engines.

What Makes All in One SEO a Great Yoast Alternative

AIOSEO provides out-of-the-box optimization features such as XML sitemaps, default SEO content settings, robots.txt files, and so on. Here is a rundown of outstanding features that make AIOSEO a good alternative to Yoast.

• A smart on-page SEO checklist: All in One SEO has a fuss-free on-page optimization tool they call TruSEO. TruSEO does a comprehensive analysis of your content and gives you a checklist that’ll guide you into what your content needs to be search engine friendly. You get suggestions for; focus keyword ,SEO title tags, content readability, meta description and canonical URL.
• Link assistant tool: as interlinking is important for both search engines and people ,while editing or updating a post in WordPress, All in One SEO’s sophisticated Link Assistant provides suggestions for relevant posts to link to. You can also check how many internal and external links used in your post and how well they performed, and use that information to improve your link-building approach.
• Advanced Woocommerce SEO: if you have a WooCommerce eCommerce site, AIOSEO makes it simple to optimize your online store for search engines. You can use the SEO plugin to improve your product titles, images, meta descriptions, and dynamic tags.
• Powerful site audit: AIOSEO offers an SEO Audit that analyzes your website for any problems that can hurt your SEO. After the analysis you get  a checklist with the best recommendations and instruction on how to fix the issues to improve your site perfomance.
• Rich snippets schema markup: All in One SEO has a powerful schema markup than Yoast. AIOSEO simplifies setting up your Knowledge Graph, schema markup, and local SEO data to help you

AIOSEO Pricing

As a great Yoast competitor, All in One SEO offers affordable pricing for its premium version. 

Although the free version has all you need to optimize your website for search engines, if you want to access their advanced features like the advanced redirection tool and content analysis, you need to upgrade to their paid plans.

Here’s AIOSEO premium pricing.

• Basic: costs $49.60/yr for one website license
• Plus: costs $99.60/yr for up to 3 websites
• Pro: costs $199.60/yr for up to 10 sites
• Elite: costs $229.60/yr for up to 100 sites

3. Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO is more of a WordPress SEO plugin. As a terrific Yoast competitor, Squirrly SEO is an AI-powered, all-in-one SEO suite that combines the aspects of an SEO plugin, a content optimization tool, and SEO software.

The SEO tool uses AI to give you expert-level SEO advice on improving your SEO performance and ranking higher on the SERP.

Consider Squirrly SEO as a virtual expert guiding you through how to make your website SEO-friendly. What’s more, through its real-time SEO suggestions, you can create content that ranks on the first page of SERP.

The SEO plugin offers over 650+ features, most of which are preconfigured once you install it. And despite having such a massive pool of features, the plugin is wickedly fast.

That’s because most of Squirrly SEO’s processing, data storage, and other activities are on their cloud servers, loading the plugin code super fast.

What Makes Squirrly SEO a Great Yoast Alternative

Besides being a superfast SEO plugin, Squirrly SEO comes with a ton of features that put Yoast to shame. Here’s what makes Squirrly SEO such a great alternative to Yoast SEO.

• SEO Live Assistant: this Squirrly SEO feature allows you to write content friendly for both readers and search engines. The SEO software analyzes your content and suggests a list of keywords you need to include to ensure your content is optimized for user intent. Squirrly SEO also analyzes your content for keyword stuffing and repetition, which can affect your rankings.
• Focus Pages: This tool shows you critical requirements that your pages/posts need to attain to rank on the first page of search engines instead of making an oversight. For example, the SEO plugin analyzes the keyword you want to rank for and shows how easy or hard it is to rank for it. You also get recommendations such as your site’s technical issues preventing you from ranking on the first page of SERP. 
• Excellent site audit tool: the Squirrly Audit analyzes your site and shows you what’s affecting your site’s ranking and performance. The tool analyzes your site for technical SEO issues, such as page load time and URL indexability, analyzes on-page SEO and social signals as well as the overall health of your links, both outgoing and inbound.   
• Customizable open graph:  Squirrly SEO lets you preview your page appearance metadata on social media platforms. The plugin also allows you to use your custom SEO snippets to quickly personalize the text that will accompany your page when shared on social media.
• SEO tracking tools: Squirrly makes it easier to visualize and monitor your site’s SEO performance. From the WordPress dashboard, you can see your page traffic and authority progress, SERP ranking positions, and several social media shares your page is receiving over time. These are features that you’ll not find in Yoast SEO. 
•  Inbuilt keyword research tool: finding quality keywords your site can rank for is a huge pain. Squirrly SEO plugin simplifies that. The tools enable you to find untapped keywords to rank for as well as local keywords that are easy to rank in 140 countries. You also get a list of longtail keywords and semantics that you can include in your blog post to make your content SEO optimized.

Squirrly SEO Pricing

Compared to most SEO plugins, Squirrly SEO is not the cheapest SEO plugin. Their prices start at $71.99 per month. That’s almost the same price you pay annually for Yoast SEO.

But considering the set of tools that Squirrly SEO offers, the SEO software is very much worth it. Take Squirrly as a combination of Yoast Premium, KWfinder, and Surfer SEO.

Here are Squirrly SEO pricing packages. 

• Business: costs $71.99 per month for seven sites.
• Agency: costs $75.99 per month for 50 sites

4. SEOPress

If you want a white-labelled and feature-rich WordPress SEO plugin, then you’ll love SEOPress.

Unlike Yoast SEO, you get everything in SEOPress pro version.

You don’t have to purchase four more plugins to get WooCommerce SEO, Video SEO, News SEO, and Local SEO.

And if you want to import settings from other SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, or AIOSEO, you can easily do it in one click, saving you time configuring most plugin settings from scratch.

Unlike Yoast’s content analysis tool, which only allows you to optimize your content for five keywords in their paid plans, SEOPress enable you to optimize your content for unlimited keywords.

What I loved most about SEOPress is their Google Indexing and NowIndex API that allows you to ping Google, Bing, and Yandex to index your site in case you make a change, such as publishing a new page or editing an existing one.

The SEO plugin is compatible with most WordPress page builders, like Elementor, Oxygen, BeaverBuilder, and Divi.

What Makes SEOPress the Best Alternative to Yoast SEO

• Compatibility with most page builders: Unlike Yoast that supports a few page builders, SEOPress is compatible with most page builders like Elementor, Beaver, Brizy, Oxygen, Block Editor, Bricks, Divi, and Thrive Architect, to mention a few. This allows you to effortlessly optimize your content on your page for SEO and add the meta metadata directly from the user interface of the page builder of your preference.
•  White label SEO plugin: Yoast SEO has intrusive ads appearing in your WordPress dashboard, convincing you to upgrade to their paid plans or one of their add-ons. In SEOPress, you get a clean interface without distractions from ads.
•  Sophisticated image SEO tool: This feature makes SEOPressor a great Yoast SEO alternative. SEOPressor enables you to optimize your media content for SEO by automatically adding target keywords as alt texts for missing image attributes. The plugin also ads missing image titles based on your image file name or alt texts. 
•  E-commerce SEO: Unlike Yoast SEO, you don’t have to pay for an addon to be able to optimize your online store for SEO with SEOPress. Their free version effortlessly integrates with WooCommerce allowing you to optimize your online store for search engines. Their premium version offers advanced ecommerce SEO tools such as advanced analytics to up your e-commerce SEO game.

SEOPress Pricing

SEOPress offers a premium plan starting at $49/year. They also offer an addon they call SEOPress Insights that allows you to monitor your backlinks and keyword rankings. The SEOPress Insights costs $99 per year per site. You can also decide to use their SEOPress Bundle, including a SEOPress Pro and SEOPress Insights combined, costing $128/year.

5. Slim SEO

Looking for a Yoast SEO alternative that’s wickedly fast, minimalistic, and less bloated. Slim SEO is your ideal WordPress SEO plugin.

Slim SEO is developed with performance in mind. The SEO plugin has a smaller code base making it as small as 40KB.

In fact, I did test the plugin myself to see its effect on speed performance against Yoast SEO.

So I created a demo site using the default Twenty Twenty-Two theme and installed Slim SEO as a stand-alone plugin. 

After that, I ran a speed test using Pingdom. Here are the results for Slim SEO.

And here’s what I got after doing the same for Yoast SEO.

As you can see, there’s a tremendous difference in speed perfomance between the two plugins.

Another thing I love about Slim SEO is that it does most of the heavy-lifting for you.

For example, the plugin auto-generates the meta tags for your posts so that you don’t have to modify them manually, like in Yoast SEO.

What Makes Slim SEO a Good Yoast SEO Alternative

Now, here’s why Slim SEO is such a fantastic alternative to Yoast SEO.

• Super lightweight SEO plugin: Slim SEO does not take a website’s performance with a pinch of salt. The SEO plugin is well-coded using modern and modular code featuring a small code base, creating a super fast plugin.
•  Autoconfiguration: unlike Yoast SEO, where you need to manually configure the plugin using their setup wizard, with Slim SEO, you need to install the plugin, and upon activation, it’ll configure all the settings for you. The plugin automatically toggles the features needed to optimize your site for search engines.
•  Add redirects: Slim SEO allows you to redirect a page to all the redirect types ( 301, 302, 307, 410, and 451). This is available in their free version, contrary to Yoast SEO, where you need to upgrade to their paid version to access the feature.
•  Image SEO: the SEO plugin automatically adds your image alt texts for missing images allowing you to optimize your images for search engines.
•  Header footer code: Slim SEO enables you to easily verify your website ownership. Using the header footer tool, you can add your Google Tag Manager instead of going through the tedious process of adding a DNS record to verify your ownership. You can also insert code for Facebook pixel and Google analytics for better analytics and tool integration.

Slim SEO Pricing

Generally, Slim SEO itself is 100% FREE. But they have an addon called Slim SEO Schema that handles your site’s schema markup. 

The addon comes in three plans, all priced based on the number of websites you can use for the license.

• Personal: costs $39/per year for one website
• Freelancer: costs $59/yr for ten websites
• Agency: costs $79/yr for unlimited websites

Generally, Slim SEO is a great Yoast alternative if you’re looking for a plugin that’s less bloated and doesn’t compromise your website speed performance.

Find the Best Yoast SEO Alternatives for Better SEO Performance

Yoast is a popular and powerful SEO plugin for WordPress, but it’s not the only option out there.

There are several other alternatives that offer similar features and can help you optimize your website for search engines. The five options we’ve discussed in this post are all worth considering if you’re in the market for a new SEO plugin.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Do you use Yoast SEO? What do you love about the plugin. Or are you using either of the five alternatives I’ve covered above? Share your experience down in the comments section.

Yoast Alternatives: FAQs