If you’re starting a new business or you’re gearing up for a big 2025 for your existing business, you’re probably wondering how Google or Bing are going to find your site. You might want to make the Yoast SEO Plugin part of your plan.
When Google does find your website, you’ll want to be in control of what content shows up on the search engine results page. Add-on WordPress tools, like the Yoast SEO Plugin, are one of the easiest ways to tackle these challenges and help you win the SEO game.
Key Takeaways
Yoast SEO Plugin benefits:
- Keyword Optimization: Ensures balanced keyword use without stuffing.
- Google SERP Previews: Lets you control meta titles and descriptions easily.
- Schema Markup Support: Helps Google understand your content for better ranking.
- Boosts Technical SEO: Creates sitemaps, updates URLs, and aids Google crawling.
Explore our comprehensive guide: Dominate WordPress SEO.
The Yoast SEO Plugin strengthens your search engine optimization efforts by adding an easy-to-use guide directly into your WordPress website. Yoast can then help you write quality content and much more.
Once the Yoast is installed on your site, you can enter focus keywords or phrases for each webpage and blog post. Yoast will analyze your text as you go, providing SEO recommendations and ensuring you’re following best practices.
The Yoast SEO Plugin boasts a number of additional benefits which include:
- teaching you how to optimize pages and posts for SEO,
- providing internal linking suggestions,
- checking for audience readability,
- boosting your technical SEO,
- providing insights, and so much more.
You can get a lot out of this plugin whether you opt to use the free or premium version of the plugin.
So what does the Yoast SEO Plugin offer?
Included in the Free Version of the Yoast SEO Plugin
Keyword Optimization
Once you know what keyword or phrase you want your site to rank for, the Yoast SEO Plugin checks that your focus keyword and its natural variations appear contextually throughout your content. The free version allows you to optimize for one keyword.
It also checks that you are not “keyword stuffing” which is when you’re using a keyword too often. Not only does this make content less readable but Google sees it as an attempt to manipulate the search rankings. Additionally, the plugin is built to analyze your content for similar variations of the chosen keyword. That’s a huge win!
Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Previews
How does Google know what to show in the preview snippet? With the Yoast SEO Plugin, you have total control over what appears in the search results.
Does your SEO title get cut off because it’s too long? Does your meta description show compelling and relevant content to entice users to click your link over others?
The snippet editor feature takes the guesswork by showing you what a Google user sees and allowing you to edit the meta description and meta titles on the spot.
Use Schema Markup to Informing Google What Your Page is About
Yoast SEO has a user-friendly Schema feature. If you’re new to SEO, you may not be familiar with “schema markups.” In short, schema.org code describes what type of content you have on your webpage and communicates that information to search engines like Google. In turn, this helps Google rank your page or post to the most relevant audience.
Rank Math does a great job with Schema Markup as well.
Audience Readability Checks
Have you ever noticed what happens when you search for something and click on the most relevant article? Chances are you aren’t actually reading it word-for-word. Most users will scan a web page for the information most applicable to them at any given time.
You can help your website visitors find information quickly by using short paragraphs and sentences, adding subheadings, or connecting words.
The Yoast plugin team leverages established readability research and advanced language models to help you craft content that’s easy to scan and understand. The plugin highlights long sentences, complex words, and even suggests improvements for paragraph structure and flow, supporting a wide range of languages.
Looking for SEO Copywriting Tips?
Check out our Copywriting for SEO Guide.
Full Control of Your Breadcrumb Trail
In the well-known children’s fairytale, Hansel and Gretel leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them in order to find their way back home. This is exactly what website breadcrumbs help your site visitors do!
But it doesn’t always work out perfectly. The breadcrumb can get messy if a blog post has multiple categories, pages, or other attributions.
With the Yoast SEO Plugin, you can assign a Primary Category for each post. It also gives you the ability to determine the taxonomy (related to URL structure) for each page. This keeps your breadcrumb clear and simple while helping your visitors (and Google) navigate the site more easily.
Resolving Duplicate Content Issues
The Google algorithm tries to crawl for distinct content. If it crawls your website and finds big blocks of repetitive information, it’ll get marked as a “duplicate content issue,” which can potentially lower your rankings.
The Yoast SEO Plugin resolves this issue by letting you indicate which URL is the preferred to direct users to. This is otherwise known as a “canonical URL.”
In my experience, this is one of the biggest issues we need to resolve when we bring on a new SEO client. Yoast makes it much easier to resolve this issue.
Boosts Technical SEO
When Google’s robots crawl websites for content, an index is created in Google Search Console to keep information organized. The Yoast SEO Plugin makes it easy for these robots by updating URLs and creating xml sitemaps automatically. But if you’re a techie who wants to tweak some of that information, the plugin gives you easy access to do so.
Gets along with Google Algorithms
Google now rolls out several major core algorithm updates each year, along with ongoing minor tweaks. The Yoast team keeps pace by updating the plugin every two weeks, ensuring your website stays aligned with the latest SEO best practices and search engine requirements.
WordPress Editing Made Easy
When you install Yoast, the plugin gives you recommendations right in the editor interface. The built-in guide makes content creation and SEO optimization a smooth, integrated process. So whether you want to write your blog post all at once and optimize it later, or optimize as you are writing, Yoast will be there for you.
Additional Benefits with the Yoast Premium Version
Optimize More Keywords and Related Terms
The Yoast SEO Premium lets you target up to five keywords or phrases per page, including synonyms and related terms. This helps you reach a broader audience and ensures your content feels natural to both readers and search engines. Optimizing related keywords can help you reach a wider audience with your content. For example, if you have a cooking blog and want to optimize for “best pans,” the plugin allows you to optimize for “best pots” in the same article.
Internal Linking Suggestions
Internal linking is crucial for helping search engines understand your site’s structure and for keeping visitors engaged.
Yoast SEO Premium now uses AI-powered suggestions to help you add relevant links. It also identifies orphaned content-pages that aren’t linked from anywhere else on your site. With this info in hand, you can update your link strategy to ensure all your valuable content gets discovered.
Page Previews in Social Media
You’ve probably seen it before: You tried to share a link to your website on
Facebook or Twitter but the preview doesn’t look quite right. The thumbnail image is wrong or completely missing and the specific description doesn’t show up.
The Yoast SEO Plugin Premium version provides an easy fix for this by giving you an option to create a template for your posts. In the Yoast settings, you tell the plugin what the title should be and the image to use when shared on social media and it’ll be applied to each post or page.
Providing Content Insights
Since the plugin is constantly scanning your website, it can offer you insights and suggestions for compelling content. The latest version now provides AI-driven insights and suggestions. For each page, you can see your most common words and phrases, helping you ensure your content aligns with your SEO goals and resonates with your audience.
This is a highly valuable feature which is only available with a Premium upgrade.
Redirect Manager — No More 404s!
Imagine the search result description is exactly what you’re looking for, but the content can’t be found. This is why landing on a 404 page is frustrating for your website visitors! They’ll leave your site instantly, which increases your bounce and exit rate, and look for something else that works.
At some point you will need to delete content from your site — either to update or consolidate content, or remove irrelevant content. When you delete or move content, the Yoast SEO Plugin’s Redirect Manager helps you seamlessly redirect visitors and search engines to the right place.
The tool includes visual regex redirect creation and improved automation, making it easier than ever to manage changes without losing traffic.
Reports for Focus Keywords
You’ve no doubt heard, “Content is King,” but did you know “Data is Queen?” In SEO terms, this means the more quality content you generate, the more analysis is done on your site, and the more SEO data you’ll have to direct your next steps. Together, the king and queen make a formidable team!
With the Premium version of the Yoast SEO Plugin, you can download a report showing keywords you’ve used and which pages can improve with more SEO work. The data variables you can choose to include are keywords, URL, and readability score.
BONUS: Yoast SEO Academy
Yoast offers free and premium SEO courses through the Yoast SEO Academy, including certification programs and live AI audit labs. Whether you’re a beginner or an advanced user, the Academy provides practical, hands-on training to help you master the latest SEO techniques.
That’s a Wrap
The Yoast SEO Plugin remains one of the most trusted and comprehensive SEO tools available for WordPress in 2025. While there are other great options like Rank Math and All In One SEO, Yoast stands out for its regular updates, AI-powered features, and user-friendly interface.
If you need help getting your site to the top of Google’s rankings, let us know. We’re happy to help.
