Rank Math SEO vs All in One SEO. Creating Big Problems for Yoast, or Just a lot of noise?

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Rank Math SEO vs All in One SEO review.

There have been many comparisons between Rank Math and Yoast, as well as Yoast vs AIOSEO. The majority opinion seems to be that Yoast is the winner.

In fact some people who have waxed lyrical about Yoast, were only newcomers to the blogging game, and were gushing about all the whiz bang tech stuff, not knowing the real life workings of that SEO plugin.

What those new users didn’t know, is that Yoast is regarded by many bloggers as a “heavy plugin”. Particularly affiliate or E-commerce site owners, because all the bells and whistles on Yoast slows page load times. (See comparison of Yoast – Rank Math below).

Slow loading pages is something the “big G” (Google), marks down, and worse, the reader or shopper moves on instead of waiting for the page to load!.

In spite of that, Yoast overtook All in One SEO as the go to search engine optimization plugin for WordPress users. AIOSEO, which had enjoyed the top spot for the WordPress user base over a period of many years is now also facing challengers from other SEO plugins.

Chief among them is Rank Math SEO, and to a lessor extent The SEO Framework

Rank Math SEO, has been making waves picking up users at a steady clip. It is now the number 3 SEO plugin for WordPress users. Picking up something like 300,000 users just in the past 6 or 7 months. It now has over 600,000 users and closing in on a million users at a rapid rate.

Needless to say, there is now much fiercer competition among SEO plugins than in AIOSEO’s heyday.

So lets take a look at AIOSEO

All in One SEO

All in One SEO was developed by Michael Torbert, and first released in 2007. It was sold to Awesome Motive in early 2020.

Awesome Motive is a company owned by Syed Balkhi, who has had years of experience with WordPress and developing plugins.

He has a knack for growing products on the WordPress ecosystem. Currently, over 14 million websites use at least one of his software creations. His first was WP Beginner, a free WordPress resource site, launched in 2009.

Since then, he’s launched other successful plugins including:-

• Optin Monster a conversion optimization toolkit. 
• WP Forms, a drag-and-drop form builder.
• Monster Insights, a Google Analytics plugin; and more.

In 2019, his company launched Raffle Press, a contest and giveaway plugin.

His history with SEO dates back to 2006 and since then, as well as developing plugins, he has also become friends with some of the leading SEO experts in the world like Neil Patel, Eric Siu, Harsh Agrawal, and others.

Some of those names would be familiar to many bloggers around the world.

Awesome Motive

Awesome Motive’s success has come about because it has some of the best plugin developers in the world working for it. Now, the entire AIOSEO team is also working for Awesome Motive. Some who were contractors, are now full time employees. So Sayed has consolidated some of the worlds leading plugin developers under one roof.

Needless to say, that since taking over All in One SEO, Awesome Motive has given AIOSEO a revamp in an attempt to breathe some life back into it. Although there have been some complaints about the Pro pricing, generally the new AIOSEO has been well received.

Currently, one of the worlds largest and oldest affiliate training platforms has All in One SEO as its default SEO plugin. So it must be doing something right.

What Features does AIOSEO have that will Benefit your SEO.

All up there are 12 hard core features to help get you ranking higher in Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines. I will look at other features and benefits further down.

SEO custom user roles	Smart XML Sitemaps
Local SEO	Google News Sitemaps
Rich Snippets Schema	Tru on page SEO analysis
Video SEO Sitemaps	Robots txt Editor
Social Media Integration	SEO Audit Checklist
RSS Content	Woo-Commerce SEO
No coding Skills are Needed	Easily optimize Your Pages for Higher Rankings.

Other Features and benefits Include…

New Breadcrumbs feature to Boost SEO & User Experience

Breadcrumbs are an essential part of SEO because they help search engines and users understand how your website is structured.

Breadcrumbs are a part of all SEO plugins tools, but now AIOSEO Breadcrumbs feature adds a visual breadcrumbs navigation to your website. All you need to do is make sure it’s enabled and add a code snippet or shortcode to your site depending on where you want to show the breadcrumbs navigation. 

The benefits of this are…

• Google can Better Understand Your Site’s Structure: Breadcrumbs give Google another way of understanding how your site is structured.
• Increased CTR (Click-Through-Rate): Since Google may show breadcrumbs in its search results, it’ll entice more people to click through to your website.
• Improved SEO Rankings: Higher click-through rate correlates with improved rankings in search engines. The more people who click through to your website, the more Google will favor your site in search results.
• Lower Bounce Rate: Breadcrumbs can lower your bounce rate since they’re offering visitors an alternative way to browse your site.
• You can see more in the video here

Installation and Set up of AIOSEO

All in One SEO is perfect for business owners, bloggers, designers, developers, photographers, and basically anyone wanting or needing a website.

The installation is painless and only requires you to download and install the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. From there scroll down your dashboard and click on All in One SEO. See pic below.

All in One SEO has made it easy to get your SEO optimization set up.

A video is available to guide you through the steps, or you can read the set up guide (link beside the green launch Setup Wizard).

Once you click on Launch the Setup Wizard you will be met with this welcome message. If your new to blogging or WordPress this set up is your most critical task.

Although you might be able to do it in 10 minutes… Take 20 minutes, or half an hour. Read the documentation and get a thorough understanding on setting it up properly.

The last thing you need is having to come back and rechecking “no follow” or “do follow” boxes for links in your articles, or trying to find where something is.

The Video on the All in One SEO set up.

Why use an SEO Plugin.

There are more than 75 million WordPress websites. Not all of them take the necessary steps to have their sites SEO optimized. Why they don’t is a mystery for many of us.

In fact, if you look at the total numbers of all downloads, and compare that to numbers of active SEO plugins for all SEO plugins (Yoast, AIOSEO, Rank Math and others), the total number of active SEO plugin installs is less than 10 million across all of those 75 million websites !.

Many of those 8 – 10 million active installs will just be free versions, for which the website will not be fully optimized. In fact, I am guessing many are not even properly set up.

The top 3 plugins, Yoast, AIOSEO and Rank Math SEO account for nearly 8 million of all active installs.

Obviously the majority of all those optimized pages will be in Google first 10 pages. A common saying these days is… “Google it”. Want to know who has the best hot bread in town?

The one showing up first or second in Googles local searches, and it is probably fully optimized for Local SEO by someone serious about their business. Guess who missed out and is complaining about slow sales?

All in One SEO offers complete support for Google Knowledge Graph and Schema.org markup for local businesses. This allows the user to add multiple business locations, opening hours, contact info (business email, business phone, business address, etc. ), and more with the AIOSEO Local SEO module.

Some key Benefits of using AIOSEO as your Content Assistant.

The pic opposite is from one of my travel sites using AIOSEO Pro ( I have a slice of each of AIOSEO and Rank Math’s cakes). The “H” is for Headline analyzer, and gives a score for how effective the headline of a business or blog article is likely to be ( anything between 30 and 60 is ok. 70 is great).

The headline analyzer is one of the Optin Monster’s tools, that is now integrated into AIOSEO since its take over last year by Awesome Motive.

There is a list of options in the headline analyzer you can use to improve your headline, or change it all together, using scores to help you assess your headlines SEO.

Also in the WordPress sidebar, is your SEO score (at the top (in this case), my score of 88 is good ), however AIOSEO has a list showing where improvements can be made in the content, as you can see in the screen shot opposite.

One of the reasons for this, is that early on Google made a lot of effort to distinguish good content from bad content. Repeated keyword stuffing, invisible text and other spam techniques are obvious, but more difficult is, measuring the quality of the content.

Today, instead of just looking at individual keywords on a page, Google and other search engines now look at the overall document, the relevancy of the search query and user intent.

Over a period of about 20 years, Google has become extremely good at this, with several algorithms updated on a daily basis, and millions of dollars devoted to language processing and semantic theory.

You will note that I have a couple of issues I can go back and improve, even though the page is a service list for a business.

Some more benefits of AIOSEO

At the bottom of each page you will find the AIOSEO SEO settings “box”. This tells you how your article will appear in the Google or Bing search pages

You will see I have 69 words in my title which is more than the max 60 suggested by the plugin. However Google does have some wriggle room with page titles, because a title is measured in pixels (about 600px), still mine is slightly long.

But your title can 500 words, they just won’t all appear in the Google searches.

As you scroll down from the snippet preview, you will see the Meta description and focus key phrase. All this is listed in bullet points for easy analysis. My focus keyphrase gets my SEO off to a good start.

My meta description has 147 out of the 160 maximum characters the plugin suggests. So it should show in the searches.

But as I mentioned above it could 500 words, it is just they will not all show on the search page, for obvious reasons.

Scrolling down the the AIOSEO evaluation of my page you can see I have a couple more things I could improve on.

I like to research keywords before I settle on a title using a Keyword Search Tool that gives me low competition, high quality keywords. Then I use the headline analyzer to refine it. Then check with Google trends and searches and if it looks ok, I use it. A little time consuming, but well worth the effort if you want your post or article to rank well.

Apart from having a good title with a high quality keyword, the end result needs to be, that your page be as informative, and as high quality as you can make it. This includes your headings as well as your content… And, refrain from stuffing keywords.

These day’s that trick just doesn’t work, Google, Bing and others will pick it easily.

Remember, Google wants the user to find the best and most satisfying result to answer their search query.

Final thoughts on All in One SEO

Is All In One SEO good?

There is a lot to like about having AIOSEO as a content writing SEO assistant.

However…

If you have the free version, you might find the constant self promotion advertisements by AISEO annoying. Plus many people may not be comfortable adding two more plugins for Analytics and Insights.

Since its takeover and makeover by Awesome Motive last year (2020), there has been some excellent additions to help content marketers, affiliates and users of Woo-Commerce.

There are many other features I haven’t mentioned, smart site maps for example, which is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.

Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently.

The Flesch writing score has always been one of my favorite metrics. As small a detail as that may seem, it is an important metric in the Google algorithms. If your article is difficult to read, Google will recognize this, and you will find it hard to get your article in front of the people you wrote it for.

As I said earlier, For more than 20+ years, Google has become extremely good at this, with several algorithms and millions of dollars devoted to language processing ( more than translations ), and semantic theory.

Combining easy to read content with keywords and other insights AIOSEO gives you, such as integrating Optin Monster ( and the option of integrating Monster Insights, a WordPress analytics plugin which helps you to connect your website to Google analytics, so you can see how people find and use your site), should help you get better website rankings.

AIOSEO, also just might start to claw back some of the users who switched to Yoast or Rank Math. As well as the free option , All in One SEO has 4 pricing structures for professional bloggers and business’s.

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Rank Math SEO

Some Background on Rank Math SEO

Rank Math was founded by Bhanu Ahluwalia, Nimit Kashyap and Suraj Vibhute in 2018.

The founders of Rank Math were all professional bloggers, so they knew what the limitations of other SEO plugins were.

Primarily they used Yoast, but they had tried others including AIOSEO as well.

In 2015 they decided to build their own SEO plugin for their own use, to solve issues and limitations they had faced using Yoast.

After about 3 and a half years of using their “secret plugin”, they had a stack of enquires from friends and others about their mystery SEO plugin. They then decided to make their plugin public.

In the beginning Rank Math was all about Speed

Their intention was to build it so that it was extremely user-friendly, even for beginners while having all the powerful features that SEO professionals need. The benefits included:

• Easily customize important SEO settings
• Control which pages are indexable
• How you want your website to appear in search with Structured data.
• Built so it didn’t slow the pages load times.

One of the first ways professional bloggers use to get traffic on the Internet is ranking in the search engines, and build up organic traffic, this has never been more truer than today, due to the costs of PPC advertising.

What features does Rank Math SEO have to Benefit your SEO

Currently Rank Math is the only SEO plugin that fully integrates with the leading WordPress page builder, Elementor.

The Elementor SEO functionality was designed to simplify SEO & content workflow, to create pages and posts by eliminating the need to jump between multiple browser tabs.

Rank Math has a ton of exclusive benefits, which is why it is known as the Swiss Army Knife of SEO. Many of them can be automated.

I will include a link at the bottom of this list for you to see more of Rank Math’s features and benefits.

• Instant Indexing. Directly Notify the search engines when you add a new post or update an old one.
• Analytics. Connect Rank Math with Google Search Console to see the most important information from Google directly in your WordPress dashboard.
• Link Counter. Counts the total number of internal, external links, to and from links inside your posts. You can also see the same count in the Posts List Page.
• Local SEO & Knowledge Graph. Dominate the search results for the local audiences by optimizing your website for Local SEO. It also helps you to add code related to Knowledge Graph.
• SEO Analysis. Let Rank Math analyze your website and your website’s content using 70+ different tests to provide tailor-made SEO Analysis to you.
• Video Sitemap. For your video content, a Video Sitemap is a recommended step for better rankings and inclusion in the Video search.
• Schema (Structured Data). Rank Math has complete and proper Schema Markup support for over 16 different Schema types, while most other plugins only support one, if any.

In addition to their extensive supprt for Schema, Rank Math also has extensive integrations for SEO Analyzer, Google Suggestions, AMP support, bbPress, BuddyPress, ACF, WooCommerce and others you can see in the link below.

Recently they have continued with tweeking and adding improvements primarily focused on Performance & Video Schema, including:

• Code improvements to make Rank Math even faster
• You don’t need additional plugins, unlike AISEO. Google Analytics is included in the pro version.
• Improved the entire Video Schema workflow to make adding Video Schema a breeze
• The Clip markup in Videos Schema is now supported
• Auto-fetch video data via the URL in the Schema Generator
• Improved cookie-less analytics tracking (hashing formula improvements)
• Content AI tool for selecting keywords, questions and links for your headings and content.

Installing and Setting up Rank Math SEO

If you think installing AIOSEO is a breeze, then Rank Math is going to be child’s play.

Rank Math practically configures itself. It features a simple 4 step installation and configuration wizard that sets up SEO for WordPress perfectly.

After installation, Rank Math verifies your site’s settings and recommends the ideal settings for best performance. The step-by-step wizard then sets up your site’s SEO, social profiles, webmaster profiles and other SEO settings. (Of course, you need to provide the URL’s for your social sites).

Rank Math also has a detailed explanation for the set up, including their recommendations for setting up the plugin. see it here.

Some Key benefits of using Rank Math SEO as your Content Assistant.

While the strategies and tactics to rank on Google have vastly changed over the past two decades, the end result for quality SEO and authoritative websites, has always been the same.

The trick though, is getting your site “Google ready”. That is what SEO plugins are about.

Rank Math is constantly working on new ways to help bloggers optimize their content for SEO.

Some of the latest additions are mentioned below.

Lets see how Rank Math SEO compares with AIOSEO in helping optimize your content.

Update Oct. 2023. Rank Math now has over 2.5 million subscribers and has created an SEO course to help people and companies who rely on good rankings for their business. You can see it here.

The basic SEO interface looks much the same as AIOSEO, neat, clean, however there is no headline analyzer though.

I am not sure it is necessary. We choose titles based on different systems, and the less robotic we can be, the better our content should be.

However, Rank Math does have a title readability test. Mine article has 3 “errors”. See below. Easy enough to fix.

It also has a content readability test as seen in the screenshot above I have 1 “error” there. So apart from the title, mine is all good so far.

My table of content (TOC) is added automatically when I hit the publish button., so Rank Math isn’t picking up on that.

Note:– Rank Math does not have a Flesch ease of reading score but it does give a green light for content readability.

Also as I mentioned above, these day’s Google, instead of just looking at individual keywords on a page, now looks at the overall document, the relevancy of the search query and user intent.

A relatively new feature from rank math is a Content AI. This trawls google looking for similar content and selects headings and related keywords from high ranking articles, which we can include in our articles.

It also includes questions and links we can use.

It also gives an approximate counts for number of words, links, images, and links.

Previewing How your Site will Look on Google

Unlike AIOSEO you don’t have to leave the sidebar interface and scroll to the bottom of the page, to see how your site will appear on Google.

So for a preview of your snippet, just move across to the right and click on where you want to go (Note the word count is already done for you).

Next:- The boxes marked in red are Social, Schema, and News ( if you submit your articles to Google news).

Lets have a look at the screen shots. On the right, by clicking on the Schema box we get article and video

By clicking on the edit box in article we get the pop up ( below) Just fill out the details, enable Speakable. Speakable tells Google your article is speech friendly. Once enabled Rank Math adds the appropriate mark up to the post.

Below that, there are check boxes if you want to have your post in an article or news category.

All of this is done just moving between the sidebar interface and the article page.

Keywords using Rank Math SEO

On the sidebar of your content, both the AIOSEO and Rank Math SEO preview look similar, except AIOSEO has a headline analyzer. Rank Math has a key word analyzer (circled in red).

Clicking it gives us Google trends for the keywords during the last 30 day’s (Screen shot below).

 Rank Math lets you add unlimited keywords – although the default is set to 5 – 

There is also a tight integration with the Google Search Console. This allows a clear overview of several key performance indicators, such as total clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average position, total keywords, and more.

Final Analysis

Both AIOSEO and Rank Math SEO are excellent search engine optimization plugins.

I am comparing the pro versions of both and I lean slightly towards Rank Math. To understand its full capability you need to check out the links I have included.

The most popular SEO plugin is still Yoast, but with both AIOSEO and Rank Math hitting their straps, Yoast could follow the path of the dinosaurs, if it does not keep an eye on these two.

The Yoast plugin was the one primarily used by the developers of Rank Math, and originally, it was the base to understand its limitations and ask themselves “how could we improve on this?”.

These days Yoast and Rank Math bear little resemblance to each other.

Rank Math SEO was built to remove the cumbersome facets of Yoast and improve the loading times of webpages.

Now, Rank Math has many features in its Pro version not included in either Yoast and AIOSEO.

All in One SEO is still in a redevelopment phrase and will have constant updates for the next little while. However I have no doubt that over the next 12 months or so, we should see a really improved good SEO plugin from them.

There will be some glitches, but these should be rectified quickly, especially now that the original AIOSEO team, has joined forces with Awesome Motive.

That one thing alone puts some of the worlds best plugin developers under one roof.

The hardest thing for Yoast and AIOSEO at the moment, is matching the free version of the Rank Math plugin. There is so many features in their free version, many of which are only found on the pro version of Yoast.

Upgrading to the paid version of Rank Math is be a no brainer for many bloggers and business’s, as it has moved search engine optimization to a another level with constant features and benefits that do not impact site loading times and making it easy for bloggers and others to deliver good content that should meet Googles best practices, and help rankings.

So much so, that other SEO plugins will have to really lift their game to catch up.