Rank Math Review: Is It Time to Leave Yoast SEO Plugin?

Are you confused about whether to use Rank Math SEO or not to optimize your WordPress website to rank higher on Google and other search engines?

Then let me give a straight answer to this which is “Yes“, and I gonna explain why I said yes in this full in-depth Rank Math Review.

Nowadays everyone is putting their best efforts into ranking their blogs and pages on Google SERP’s first page.

But here is a question: How to optimize your pages and blogs to the max so that it ranks?

Let me tell you the best ever practice i.e. Rank Math SEO Plugin, the most reliable and power-packed SEO tool that offers several features that improve your SEO score and optimize your WordPress site quickly.

Hence, I will share with you a comprehensive Rank Math Review after using it for more than 1.5 years and explain all the features in detail with images as we love to see infographics.

So, without any further talk, let’s get started.

What is the Rank Math SEO Plugin?

Rank Math is a free and paid WordPress SEO plugin that helps you to optimize your website content with built-in modules in terms of indexing, SEO settings, keywords, text content, etc. 

Rank Math comes with both free and paid versions. But, if you want to make the most of Rank Math, go for its Rank Math Pro version.

However, the free version is good enough for beginners.

Rank Math is not so old in the market. It was launched in November 2018 by Bhanu Ahluwalia, Nimit Kashyap, and Suraj Vibhute. Its headquarters is in New Delhi.

Though it is new in the market, as of April 2023, it has more than 1 million active installations with a 5-star rating on WordPress.

Now, regarding its features, it comes with several cutting-edge features that are being updated from time to time. 

Pro Tip: Rank Math’s free version provides all the features to improve your SEO. Whereas, other well-known SEO tools such as Yoast Pro, and WooCommerce charges a good amount of money for that. 

#9 Top Features of Rank Math SEO Plugin

But, now we will share 9 top-notch features that make Rank Math stand out from the ground among other WordPress SEO plugins. 

1. Great Rich Snippets & Schema Markup Support:

First, let’s know what Rich Snippets and Schema Markups are. 

Then we will discuss Rank Math‘s contribution to it.

• Rich Snippet:

We know that a SERP shows only three types of data: URL, Title Tag, and Meta description.

These are Normal Snippets. Here is an example:

Whereas Rich Snippets is a search result with additional data extracted from Structured Data of a page’s HTML.

• Schema Markup:

Schema Markup, a type of code in structured data form, which is known as structured data, is the language that search engine bots utilize to grasp the content on your pages and influence rich snippets.

Schema Markup plays a vital role in SEO as it increases Clickthrough Rates by influencing Rich Snippets. 

How does the Rank Math SEO plugin help users?

Rank Math lets users add accurate metadata for Schema Markup and make the job easier for search engine bots.

• As a result, bots get exact data while scanning your web page. And your web page gets a better ranking.

With the help of Rank Math, you can add different types of Rich Snippets:

• Organization Snippet 

• Movie Snippet 

• Review Snippet 

• Events Snippet 

• Recipe Snippet

• Music Snippet

2. 404 Error Monitor & Broken Link Checker

404 Error occurs when a user requests a page and the web server can’t find the page. 

This problem primarily happens when

• We do interlinking or external linking to the wrong address.

• A user types the wrong address.

• A page or file is deleted or it never existed.

Now, whenever a user clicks on those links to reach out to that particular web page, the user gets a 404 error.

As a non-techy, you may feel fixing 404 errors is confusing. 

But it is not when you use the Rank Math SEO plugin.

If you go to Rank Math‘s 404 Monitor Section, it will provide 3 types of data regarding 404 errors:

• URI:

This option provides information about typing mistakes in the URL that is creating 404 errors.

• Hits

Hits tell how many times an error URI has been accessed. 

It is a vital number for a site owner because you as a site owner immediately want to fix the most number of hits.

• Access Time

The Access Time option tells the last time when the last Hit occurred on an error-causing URL.

Pro Tip: Other top-class SEO tools like Yoast don’t provide 404 support with their free version. But Rank Math lets you sort and redirect 404 errors absolutely for free. 

3. Redirection 

As our website grows over time with numerous pages and posts, we delete web pages for some particular reasons.

Now, if you do interlinking or external linking of those pages, users, as well as crawlers, will not be able to reach your page and land on a 404 page because that page is already deleted.

With the help of Rank Math‘s Redirections feature, you can construct custom 

• 302: Temporary Move

• 301: Permanent Move

• 307:  Temporary Move 

• 410: Content Deleted, or 

• 451: Content Unavailable for Legal Reasons Redirection.

And you can redirect your visitors to any destination URL.

4. Instant Indexing

If you want to get massive organic traffic from search engines like Google, Yandex, or Bing, the first thing you want is for your web pages to get indexed right away after publishing.

But, often we see that our web pages face indexing issues.

Normally, to index the pages we send requests to the search engine bots manually and repeatedly until the pages get indexed.  

Moreover, the manual indexing process wastes our time as well.

Here is a solution 

• Rank Math provides an inbuilt element IndexNow API for Instant Indexing.

So, as a web admin, you can feel free about indexing as Rank Math indexes the latest versions of your content instantly.

5. Rank Math Analytics:

One of Rank Math’s unique and favored features is Rank Math Analytics.

With the help of its Analytics feature, you can thoroughly monitor 

• How your content is performing on SERP.

• Your site’s SEO Performance: Content Score, SEO score, page speed.

• Your site’s current position is organic traffic.

• Index status, Mobile Usability, Rich Result, robot state, sitemaps, crawl errors.

• Keywords’ history: ranking keywords, impressions, clicks, average position, position history, CTR, etc.

• Top Winning and Losing Keywords.

• It shows your website’s performance after an algorithm update in Analytics Graphs.

6. Rank Math SEO Analyzer:

Doing proper SEO on your website is a must-do thing nowadays if you want to get massive organic traffic.

But, to say frankly it can be confusing and time-consuming because there are:

• Off-page SEO, 
• On-page SEO, and
• Technical SEO

that you have to optimize properly by spending time.

But, if you utilize the Rank Math SEO Analyzer module, doing SEO becomes a walk in the park.

Here are the parameters it analyzes

• Website Analyzing

Rank Math takes only a few seconds and analyzes your whole site and provides an SEO score out of ten.

Additionally, it tells Passed tests, Warning, and Failed Tests.

• Competitor Analysis

Its Competitor Analysis feature examines and provides all the data of your competitor site regarding how they optimized SEO.

• Common Keywords

Another unique feature of Rank Math is the Common Keywords which shows those common and unique keywords that crawlers look at when they crawl your website.

• SEO Description 

This option checks your Home Page’s SEO description and tells whether it is good or not.

It checks and optimizes your description, and  

• makes it Search Friendly,

• maintains the Character length, short or long (50 to 160 characters),

• includes important keywords to your website’s meta description.

3. Robots.txt Editing by Rank Math

Robots.txt is a website file that indicates web crawlers and web robots which portion of your website is allowed to crawl.

The Robot.txt file holds a lot of vital information about how search engine bots will crawl your site.

In one word, through the robots.txt file, we can allow/disallow search engine crawlers to crawl our site.

So, you can understand the importance of the robots.txt file. 

Now, if you use Rank Math plugin, it generates a virtual file and lets you edit the robots.txt file without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

Additionally, Rank Math adds a set of rules to the robots.txt file as well as Sitemap that you can add or edit flexibly.

8. Automatic Video Schema Generation

Video schema helps search engines understand better a video inside a blog post.

• Where videos are placed,

• Title of a video,

• The length of a video, 

• A thumbnail of a video,

• URL, and

• Date of publishing.

There are many WordPress SEO plugins on the market. But Rank Math is the only plugin with inbuilt features for Video SEO optimization and that is also absolutely free.

If you have several posts on your blog, manually adding videos will take time. 

• But, with the help of Rank Math’s pro version, your videos will be robotically detected.

For that, you have to enable Schema Module, then follow some steps.

9. WordPress Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs in WordPress are navigational links that come up at the top of the page and tell the visitors where they are on your website so that they can navigate back to the previous page.

• Most eCommerce sites use Breadcrumbs.

If your WordPress theme is not providing Breadcrumbs, you can precisely use Rank Math to start the Breadcrumbs function to

• make your site more navigable for the users, 

• make the content of your website easily consumable for the visitors,

• tell the search engine bots that your content is categorized.

Moreover, Rank Math comes at absolutely zero cost.

How to Install RankMath on WordPress Free Step-by-step?

The installation and activating process of Rank Math on WordPress is very easy.

You can do that in two ways 

1. You can download it from wordpress.org’s plugin library:

Just go to Google and search “Rank Math Plugin download”.

• In the very first result, you will get WordPress.org‘s official site. 

• Click on that result. You will land on WordPress’s plugin library with Rank Math’s downloadable link.

• Simply download this zip file, and extract it.

• Then go to the WordPress admin dashboard. Click on: Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin > Choose File > Install Now > Activate it.

2. From the WordPress admin‘s dashboard.

This process is straightforward.

• Just go to the “Plugins” section. 

• Click on add new and type Rank Math in the search box.

• It will provide the Rank Math plugin. Install it and activate it.

RankMath Free vs Pro: Comparison?

Both Rank Math’s free and pro version is worthwhile for the SEOs if you compare this plugin to other SEO plugins. 

The main reason is that Rank Math’s free version offers such features that other plugins offer with their pro version.

Here is a full comparison:

Rank Math’s Free Version:

• Focus Keywords:

You can optimize your article by adding multiple focus keywords that enhance the chance of ranking on Google.

• Schema:

18 predefined schema types absolutely free of cost.

• Meta Title, URL & Description 

You can add custom Meta titles, Permalinks, and Descriptions very easily by using their Gutenberg Block editor.

The best thing is it checks your character length in character and pixels and tells the limit.

• Custom XML Sitemap:

Creating a sitemap is a vital part of getting your page discovered by the search engine.

With the help of Rank Math’s SetUp Wizard option or Rank Math’s WordPress menu, you can create XML Sitemap manually if you don’t want to use the default sitemap created by WordPress.

• Knowledge Graph and Local SEO:

If you have a local business website and you want your site to appear to the searchers who are searching for things related to your business, then this option is very useful for your business site.

By utilizing Rank Math’s Local SEO setting, Google will show your site in Search Engine Result Pages on any search engine.

• Internal Link Suggestions

Rank Math suggests related links that you can add to the current page.

Here are some more free features by Rank Math:

• Link counter

• Basic WooCommerce SEO

• 404 monitor

• Breadcrumbs

• Redirects

• Complete Divi Integration

• Complete Elementor Integration

Rank Math Pro:

• Keyword Rank Tracking: The Rank Track feature tells the keywords’ performance of your focused keywords. For that, you have to enter keywords in Rank Tracker and you will get all the data.

• Advanced Google Analytics 4 Integration.

• Google Video SEO sitemap.

• Sitemap Google News SEO.

• Advanced Image SEO Module.

• Earning of Google AdSense.

• Export 404 Log

• SEO Performance Email Reports

• Speakable Schema

• WooCommerce SEO PRO

• Advanced HowTo Schema Options

• Watermarked Social Media Images

• Advanced Quick Edit Options

• Detect Orphan Pages

• 840+ Schema Types Supported.

• Complete EDD SEO

• Add Custom Schema Using JSON+LD/HTML.

• 840+ Schema Types Supported.

• Automatic Q&A Schema for bbPress

• Carousel Schema

• Podcast Schema

• Fact Check Schema

• Mentions & About Schema

Rank Math Pricing & Plans?

As you know Rank Math’s free and premium pro version will level up your SEO practices.

But now we will detail all about the Rank Math premium version:

• Plans,

• Pricing,

• Features,

• Benefits you will get, and

• Recommended plan for your needs.

Rank Math offers three premium bundles:

1. AGENCY: $499 Per Year: This plan is recommended for Agency owners that support many clients’ websites.

2. BUSINESS: $199 Per Year: This plan is appropriate for Freelancers, small to mid-level businesses, and agency owners.

3. PRO: $59 Per Year: This plan is suitable for bloggers and independent site owners.

How to Activate Rank Math Pro?

Now I will share with you how to activate Rank Math Pro.

1. First, you need to buy a license for Rank Math Pro. Get it from here

2. Now create an account in the My Account area: https://rankmath.com/my-account/

3. Then, purchase a pro plan and download the zip file. 

4. Now go to the plugin section on your WordPress dashboard and upload and install that zip file.

5. Now enable the Rank Math SEO PRO plugin.

6. If you have already downloaded the free version, don’t delete it. And after installing the Pro version, you will not lose any settings in the Rank Math free.

7. If you haven’t installed the Rank Math free version, Rank Math SEO PRO will automatically install it.

• Lastly, activate the Rank Math SEO Pro plugin

8. And connect your account.

Rank Math Pros & Cons:

Now we will share the best and worst things about the Rank Math plugin keeping both its free and pro plans:

Final Thoughts:

If you are in the SEO world, the Rank Math SEO plugin can be your best assistant for sure. 

And the best thing is that its free version provides a ton of features absolutely for free that other SEO plugins offer in their premium plans.

Therefore, I can say Rank Math is the best-ever SEO plugin in the market that is free, cost-effective, user-friendly, and multiple-featured.

This was a full Rank Math review in terms of its plans, pricing, and features. 
So, comment below are you going to use the Rank Math SEO plugin to improve your site SEO and rank higher on Google?