Google PageSpeed Insights vs. Yoast

It should be an essential tool for all website owners - everyone should care about page loading time from the CEO down to the junior web developer. Page speed is a factor that hugely affects visitor satisfaction, and Google takes it seriously by offering PageSpeed Insights. If you work in a larger organisation and focus on one particular part of website development and maintenance, such as a content writer, then this tool won't be as useful. It's intended for users with development or marketing-related responsibility

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For quick WordPress installations and configurations, Yoast is fast to set up and helps guide you through the common configuration options. It tries to be helpful whether you are coming at things from a technical or non-technical background. The emphasis on white hat SEO topics like improved content, keywords, descriptions, and titles is really appreciated by someone like me who doesn't utilize gray and black hat SEO tactics.

If you are an SEO expert, and you want finite control of each individual aspect of your site, Yoast, like most plugins, engines, tools, etc, hides a lot from you or gives you limited options. It really is meant for someone who wants to apply a general strategy to a whole site. That being said, you can manage Yoast per page on a WordPress site, but even then, I know some SEO experts prefer other tools that are meant for very specific purposes.

Overall, Yoast is the best plugin for SEO in WordPress when applied as a whole.

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• Straight to the point
• Valuable feedback on performance
• Provide optimized assets (CSS, JS and images)

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• Readability - makes it easy for you to assess the reading level of your piece to ensure it is correct for your intended audience.
• SEO tips - red/orange/green traffic light system to provide tips on what aspects need improving to be SEO-focussed.
• Redirect tool - easy, automated detection and setup.

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• PDF reports
• Sending to someone else
• Setup monthly report running would be cool

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• Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin is really good at copy and link scanning and optimizing, however, I have not been able to find any assistance on image optimization on our pages and posts. That would be a good update!
• Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugin is good at ranking pages and posts individually. I would like to see an overall dashboard of your entire website/blog's SEO health according to the software.
• N/A

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I see no reason to discontinue using Yoast as it has been very beneficial for my website and my business.

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It's a free, easy to use tool

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It's super easy to use. Really, it requires little-to-know tutorials or walkthroughs at all — it explains everything you need to know in the description and tooltips built straight into the tool. I've never had to google a how-to or tutorial to use Yoast — it just works, and it works well

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There is no support from Google for the tool.

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I gave it a 4 just because it is helpful if you are just getting started with SEO, it guides you and shows you what you need to do in order for your website to be up and running properly. As a seasoned SEO analyst I wouldn't recommend it just because I can do things better my way.

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I've never used any software beyond PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse (the source of the PAgeSpeed Insights software.) I've used similar programs like Hummingbird for WordPress that pulls the same data using the same engine, but its really the only game in town as far as I'm concerned.

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Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins was a little easier to understand and offered a real-time guided plugin that helped me write throughout my drafting process. Semrush was much more helpful as a reporting tool, not so much in content creation. Both tools are useful in different ways, it is just a matter of knowing each one's strengths and weaknesses.

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• Positive! It's easier to communicate with our clients where they are today with site speed and the steps needed to improve.

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• Findability: I love few things more than hearing, "I just found you on Google!" and knowing that they found us on Google because our SEO is on point.
• Using the Yoast SEO Plugin over time has taught me to create better, more optimized content from the start, rather than having to edit that content after I realize it's not very SEO friendly. This saves a lot of time and lets me put my energy into other things.
• The plugin has helped us make our sometimes-dense content more readable and sharable, which absolutely improves stakeholder engagement.

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