67. Let’s Pay Less: Do I Need to Pay for Yoast Premium?

[00:00:00] Stephanie: You likely already get a lot of value from the free version of Yoast. Will the premium version supercharge your SEO efforts? Let's talk about it. Welcome back to the podcast. It's the final week of the month, which means it's time for another installment of the Let's Pay Less series. If you're new to the podcast, once a month we look at common expenditures in the organic marketing space, and we decide if they're worth the hype or if your dollars are better spent elsewhere.

[00:00:42] Now, I don't make a recommendation one way or the other since only you know the status of your business budget. Instead, we discuss pros and cons so that you can either add or remove this tool from your wishlist. Since we've been diving into the features of Yoast all month, I thought it would only be appropriate to look into Yoast Premium for this episode.

[00:01:07] First, we need to address the fact that there is a lot of value in the free version of Yoast. If you don't already use an SEO plugin installed on your website, you really need to because here are three things that Yoast is doing behind the scenes of your website for free. And this goes well beyond the color coded smiley faces.

[00:01:28] First, Yoast maintains your site map, and a site map is something we can discuss in a future episode, but basically it's just a current list of all the indexable content on your website. Google uses this as part of the crawling and indexing process. The next thing that Yoast does for free is add relevant SEO code to your blog content.

[00:01:50] And so you know all of those little check boxes and fields that are in that easy to use Yoast menu at the bottom of your post editor. Well, that's not where the SEO information actually lives. The Yoast plugin takes the applicable information and places it in the code of your post where it actually belongs.

[00:02:14] So that Google can find it and so that you don't have to go digging through the HTML of your blog posts. And then the third thing that's helpful about Yoast is that it activates rich pins for Pinterest and you don't really have to do anything special for it. It just has to exist. Because the current way that Pinterest verifies your website for rich pins is different than it was in the past,

[00:02:37] and again, this is just as of today when I'm recording this. But you used to have to put code onto the back end of your website for Pinterest to find in order to activate your rich pins. But now, again, as of the date, I'm recording this, just having the free version of Yoast installed on your website is enough to activate rich pins.

[00:03:02] So those are just some of the reasons why it's so helpful to have an SEO plugin installed on your website. The other perks are the obvious ones of just having that support when you're working on your on-page SEO. The free plugin gives you space to add your meta description, adjust your slug and title, and all of those other important SEO tasks.

[00:03:26] As you navigate the free version of Yoast, you'll notice that there are additional features that are locked because they're part of Yoast Premium, which costs just shy of $119 per year, at the time of this recording. That's essentially $10 a month so really it's not a huge investment, but those fees can add up when you're paying for multiple $10 a month tools.

[00:03:50] But what do you get for your $10 a month? Let's dive into some of the features of Yoast Premium. At the top of the list these days, I feel like it's this way with all tools right now, but they have AI features at the top, and that personally is not a selling point for me. But Yoast says that there is AI support for title and meta description generation,

[00:04:17] they have content suggestions through AI, and then one click checks for SEO best practices. Next, they have a redirect manager, which is one of the more popular features of Yoast Premium, because they automatically create redirections for you when your content changes and updates. Yoast Premium also tracks your cornerstone content and lets you know if those important posts need just a little bit of extra TLC.

[00:04:47] And then if internal linking is a struggle for you, Yoast Premium gives you internal linking suggestions and also has an orphaned content finder so you can make sure all of your posts are linked sufficiently for SEO purposes. And if you're not sure what an orphaned post is, you can find more details about that in episode 44.

[00:05:11] Then Yoast Premium also gives you the option to add more keywords to make sure that you're also optimizing for synonyms related to your main keyword. So with the free Yoast, you know you have that section where you put in your focus keyword. That's one field that actually doesn't go into the code of your post.

[00:05:30] Like there's not a section in your H TM L that says Focus keyword this. Instead what that field does is it tells you and it tells Yoast like, what's the big picture here? And then the tool helps you make sure that you're optimizing the post for that keyword. And so basically the premium version allows you to add more keywords to do that process with.

[00:05:57] And this just helps you make sure you're casting, you know, a wider keyword net. And then finally they say that you'll have access to 24 7 support if you decide to upgrade to Yoast Premium. I know that was a quick overview, and those honestly were just the highlights of Yoast Premium. I know there are probably more features that I skipped over, but what I wanted us to kind of discuss is whether these features are worth an additional $10 per month.

[00:06:27] Do you need the premium version of Yoast in order to take care of these specific blogging tasks? So kind of going back through that list, I would say first you don't need Yoast Premium in order to access support from AI. If that's something that you use in your blogging workflow, you can easily copy and paste into chat GPT

[00:06:50] and get suggestions for your title and meta description. You can also submit your draft and get feedback from your AI platform of choice. Next, you don't necessarily need Yoast Premium to complete redirections for your website. There are free redirection plugins, but you do usually have to create those manually.

[00:07:12] And as we've talked about in the past, cornerstone content and internal linking are both things that you can track with your own content spreadsheet or a database if you have one. You can sort your list of existing blog posts by category, and then you can look for a related content to include in the blog post you're working on, and then make sure you're linking to your cornerstone content.

[00:07:36] And then when it comes to getting support and recommendations for multiple keywords, I just don't feel like that's totally necessary because if you target the right keyword to begin with, something that's not overly competitive, you're going to rank for that keyword, which then gives Google more context about your post,

[00:07:56] and over time, you are just going to naturally accumulate rankings for additional keywords. So to sum it up, you don't have to use Yoast Premium in order to access these features. There are steps that you can add to your workflow to take care of these tasks for free. But I do think in the case of paying for Yoast Premium, you have to decide if the time you save by having all of those features available in one tool

[00:08:24] is worth the money that you spend. And for some people it's absolutely worth $10 a month to not have to switch over to their blog post spreadsheet when they're working on their internal linking, or remember to redirect a post that they've rewritten, or to copy and paste their thoughts into chat GPT.

[00:08:43] But then for other people who are just getting started with their business and their website, they would much rather spend that $10 on a tool for a different part of their workflow and go ahead and manually take care of those other tasks. Ultimately, the choice is up to you because only you know your business budget and needs.

[00:09:05] But now I want to ask, do you keep hearing about a popular tool that everyone seems to be paying for and are you wondering if it's worth the hype? Tell me about it and I can dive into it on the podcast. Just head over to Stephanie royer solutions.com/podcast and use the submit a question form to let me know you'd like me to talk about that tool in the Let's Pay Less series.

[00:09:30] I can't wait to hear from you.