If search engine optimization immediately makes you think of a language from another galaxy, you should know that there are tools that allow you to get the basics without being a seasoned expert.
You certainly know how frustrating it can be to spend months building a beautiful WordPress site, but which attracts only a few visitors after its launch.
It’s clear that not working on your SEO means missing out on a large chunk of traffic from search engines. Nobody likes wasted effort, do they?
You’ve probably heard of Yoast SEO and you may already be using it. But there are also interesting alternatives that are worth a look.
Rank Math, the plugin that is hunting directly on Yoast’s territory, and which has established itself as one of its most serious competitors, is packed with free features that you can’t find anywhere else.
However, quantity does not always equal quality. So, what is this plugin really worth? How do you configure it and use it efficiently to optimize the SEO of your WordPress site?
Find out the answers in this informative and practical tutorial.
Overview
To learn how to optimize your WordPress site for SEO, check out our free guide.
Your best WordPress projects need the best host!
WPMarmite recommends Bluehost: great performance, great support. All you need for a great start.
What is Rank Math?
Rank Math is a freemium plugin that aims to help you optimize your WordPress website’s SEO. It is characterized by its very wide range of features, right from its free version, and by the fact that it utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize your content.
Officially launched in November 2018, Rank Math has grown ultra-fast in just a few years.
According to its official website, Rank Math SEO now has “over 1.5 million satisfied users.”
This makes it one of the most popular SEO plugins in the official WordPress directory, just behind the indisputable Yoast SEO (5M+ active installations) and All in One SEO (3M+ active installations).
Developed and maintained by a team of about 20 people, Rank Math is one of the products of MyThemeShop, a solid platform with more than 700, 000 users, 14 plugins, and 8 quality themes.
Built on a freemium model, Rank Math targets two types of users:
- Beginners creating their first website for its free version
- Experienced users for its paid premium version, offered since 2020
What are the main features of the plugin?
The range of features of Rank Math SEO, even in the free version, is quite impressive; you usually have to pay for these features in its competitors.
It’s impossible to list them all here, as the list is as long as the arm. The page presenting the features of Rank Math lists 90 of them!
That’s enough to get tendonitis in your wrist if you plan to scroll to the bottom of the page. ^^
To spare you all that, here is a summary of the features to remember:
- Express SEO audit: you can see your optimization score at a glance and the points to improve.
- The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to write SEO optimized content (it is currently the only SEO plugin to offer this).
- Option to connect the plugin to Google Search Console and Google Analytics to see your traffic statistics from the plugin interface.
- Monitoring and correction of 404 errors with a monitoring tool.
- Generation of rich snippets.
- Suggestion of internal links and keywords with a similar semantic field (LSI keywords) to improve the visibility of your content to search engines like Google.
- Suggestion of automatic keywords from Google.
- Monitoring of your keywords and their positions on search engines.
- Link counter to count outgoing and incoming links (the famous backlinks).
- Local search engine optimization.
- Easy redirects to avoid link errors (301 and 302).
- Management of sitemaps.
- SEO automation of your images (automatic filling of ALT and Title texts).
- Integration of the plugin with page builders like Elementor or the Divi Builder to allow you to modify your on-page SEO from the interface of these two page builders.
- Instant indexing of your content on Google, Bing, and Yandex.
- Option to proudly display your SEO score on your site’s pages (well, that’s not really useful).
Note that it is possible to import data from Yoast (the creators of Rank Math have really planned everything, or almost!).
Rank Math uses a modular organization
The plugin is organized into modules that can be accessed from your dashboard. Modules are options that you can enable or disable, depending on the nature of your site.
If, for example, you have a blog, you don’t need to activate the WooCommerce option. Similarly, if you are already using the Redirection plugin, there is no need to activate this option.
These modules need to be activated to be able to use them fully from your administration. 18 modules are available in the free version, with 3 more in the Pro version of Rank Math (News Sitemap, Podcast, and Video Sitemap).
Note that this module management allows you to have à la carte functionalities, adapted to the nature of your website, without cluttering your site with dozens of irrelevant options. You keep the control on the options of your choice, without sacrificing the loading speed of your site.
Let’s now see how to install the plugin step by step.
How to install Rank Math in five steps
When you activate the plugin, Rank Math will suggest that you create a free account with its service in order to benefit from keyword suggestions from Google, as well as its SEO analysis tool.
If you wish, click on the “Connect Your Account” button (you can also skip this action by clicking on “Skip Now”):
Follow the instructions to connect a free account, which can be done in one click if you have a Google account, for example.
A configuration wizard will then appear on the screen. Let’s talk about that now.
Step 1: Launch the installation manager
The adventure with the plugin starts pretty well. The installation goes smoothly, with the help of a very clear tutorial.
To begin with, Rank Math lets you choose between three types of modes:
- Easy. Rank Math will apply most of the settings for you. Choose this mode if you are new to SEO (you can switch to another mode whenever you want).
- Advanced. For people who want to control all aspects of their website’s SEO. This is the default setting, which I will use for this test.
- Custom. For Rank Math Pro users only, this mode allows you to select whether you want to use a custom Rank Math settings file.
Once you have chosen your mode, click on the “Start Wizard” button:
Step 2: Fill in details about your site
Here you must first choose from seven options to identify your site:
- Personal blog
- Community blog/information site
- Personal portfolio
- Small business site
- Online store
- Other personal site
- Other business website
It is wise to stick as closely as possible to one of these seven categories in order to be able to choose the options related to it. For example, additional options are provided for e-commerce sites, such as WooCommerce.
You must then fill in the following elements:
- Name of your site and its alternative version
- Name of your company
- Logo
- Default sharing image for social networks
Step 3: Connect Google services (Search Console and Analytics)
This is one of the plugin’s key features, being able to read Google Search Console and Google Analytics data directly from your WordPress administration. It would be a shame to miss out on this!
Here are the advantages of the connection provided by Rank Math:
- You can check the ownership of the site on Google Search Console in one click.
- The connection allows you to track page and keyword rankings with the advanced statistics module, directly on your WordPress dashboard.
- You don’t need to activate a third-party plugin (like Monster Insights) to set up Google Analytics on WordPress.
- You will be able to automatically submit your sitemaps to Google Search Console.
To get started, click on the “Connect Google Services” button:
A window will open where your Google account will appear. Click on your account to select it:
Continue by authorizing the connection:
Rank Math will then have connected your site, or ask you to choose the website and Analytics property you want to associate with your WordPress site.
Step 4: Choose your sitemaps configuration
A sitemap is a file that lists all the contents of your site so that Google indexes it as well as possible. Note that Yoast generates this without you realizing it.
The publication types to be indexed are checked by default. Uncheck any content types that do not need to be indexed.
Choose the types of content relevant to your site that must be indexed.
Step 5: Optimize the SEO options
This part will save you a lot of time. If the jargon scares you, leave the default options.
Let’s look at the different options:
- Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives: avoids having taxonomy pages indexed without an article: Choose “On.”
- Nofollow External links tells search engines not to follow backlinks in your content. Set to “Off.”
- Open External Links in New Tab/Window speaks for itself. Set the slider to “off” to give you the choice while writing your content.
When you’re done, click “Save and Continue”:
If you need to change any of these options, you can access them from the dashboard to enable or disable them.
This completes the initial configuration of Rank Math.
You can activate many additional features from the dashboard, depending on the nature of your site.
We’re not going to be able to go into all of them in detail or you might spend all night reading this article. ?
Let’s take a look at how to use the plugin on your site’s pages.
Join the WPMarmite subscribers
Get the last WPMarmite posts (and also exclusive resources).
How to use Rank Math to optimize content
On each page or post of your WordPress website, you can access the Rank Math plugin interface via the top toolbar of the content editor (Gutenberg).
Two menus dedicated to Rank Math are displayed:
- A general menu to set up the basic SEO (number 1 on the capture below).
- A menu to use the Content AI feature, based on artificial intelligence (number 2).
Let’s start by looking at the most important menu, including the general settings for optimizing your on-page SEO.
The basic settings of Rank Math
This menu is divided into four tabs, which we will detail just below.
The General tab
This first tab allows you to perform several operations. First, you can edit your metadata (<title> and <metadescription> tags) for search engines.
By clicking on the blue “Edit Snippet” button, a snippet editor will be highlighted, with which you can also directly edit the permalink of your publication type.
Rank Math encourages you just below to fill in the main keyword of your page or article. It can also make suggestions based on Google search.
The plugin runs your content through the mill and gives you your score (out of 100) with points to improve:
Once your keyword is filled in, Rank Math shows you the errors to correct on four different levels:
- “Basic SEO” shows you whether your main keyword is included in the important areas (title h1, URL, metadescription, within the content, etc.).
- “Additional” checks that you use external and internal links and verifies the presence of the keyword in the subheadings and its density in the body of the text (among other things).
- “Title readability” helps you make your title search engine optimized.
- “Content readability” tells you if your content is readable for humans, among other things.
As with Yoast SEO, you don’t have to get a score of 100 to get good SEO results.
Keep in mind that it’s also not helpful to follow all the advice to the letter, such as adding a number in your content title (unless that’s relevant).
And overall, think about making your content interesting to your readers first before you focus on Google’s robots.
The Metadata for robots tab
The “Metadata for robots” tab allows you to give specific guidelines to search engines. If you are a beginner and are not sure of yourself, don’t touch anything.
For the more technical readers, you should know that this is where you can:
- Tell the search engines not to index your content (No Index).
- Tell Google and others not to follow the links in your article or page (Nofollow).
- Set up a canonical URL.
The Schema tab
Let’s move on to the “Schema” tab. This is where you can configure the Schema.org markup to be integrated into your content, using structured data.
Structured data (information included in the HTML code of your page in the form of semantic tags) allows you to display rich snippets in search results pages.
Google offers dozens of categories of rich snippets, allowing you to give additional information to your visitors.
For example, the rich snippet for cooking recipes can provide the cooking time, the number of calories of a dish, etc.
Rank Math allows you to generate several types of rich snippets, even in the free version:
The Preview tab of the snippet editor
Finally, the last tab, “Preview Snippet Editor” allows you to customize the title, description, and images of your publication used when sharing on Facebook and Twitter:
Content AI
Without transition, let’s move to the second major menu offered on the content editor: Content AI.
Here, artificial intelligence helps you optimize your content for search engines, without any effort on your part.
But there is a trade-off: the system works on the basis of paid credits. The free version of the plugin offers you only five credits, and one credit corresponds to an analysis based on one keyword you enter.
There is no offer where the Content AI system is totally free. Even if you use one of the three Rank Math Pro licenses, you have to pay to get more credits.
Basically, the more expensive your license, the more credits you get (600 maximum with the Agency license).
How does it work?
Rank Math says that its system uses a credit when you search for a new keyword. It then stores the searched data on your server.
Thanks to AI, Rank Math is able to provide you with the following data:
- The number of words, links, topics, and media based on the current ranking of the analyzed keyword
- Relevant keywords to use, their advertising competition, CPC, and search volume
- Related questions to answer and external links you can add to your content
To take advantage of this, enter your target country (e.g. United States), the main keyword you are targeting (e.g. local by flywheel), and then click on the “Research” button:
Some of the results are not necessarily very relevant and you are of course not obliged to apply everything to the letter. But it can be a useful tool to improve your content and its semantics.
A closer look at Rank Math modules
As you read at the beginning of this article, RankMath also offers modules that you can activate/deactivate as you wish.
Here are some of them that meet classic SEO needs:
404 Monitoring and Redirects
This module records URLs where visitors and search engines encounter 404 errors, and shows them to you in the form of a log.
I hope you encounter as few of these as possible, as it’s a bad signal to Google and diminishes the user experience.
But this is not an end in itself either, since it happens to everyone and you can fix them.
To do this, activate the Redirections module of Rank Math. Thanks to a very simple menu, all you have to do is:
- Fill in the source URL (the one you want to redirect)
- Specify the destination URL (the new address of the page or article)
- Indicate the type of redirection to be performed, such as the classic 301 redirection, for example
Instant indexing
The Instant Indexing module allows you to automatically submit your URLs to search engines compatible with the IndexNow indexing system. Thanks to this, the crawl is faster and more efficient.
But for the moment, only Bing and Yandex support it. Google has agreed to test this system, but does not yet support it officially (this may come after the release of this update).
If you want, it is also possible to send your URLs manually, one by one:
SEO Analysis
With the “SEO Analysis” module, Rank Math analyzes your website and its content using over 70 different tests, to provide you with a customized SEO analysis.
SEO images
Finally, let’s take a look at the “SEO images” module. It is very useful because it is able to automatically add ALT attributes and missing title tags to images that do not have them.
Before concluding, I’d like to give you an overview of Rank Math’s prices, and the paid licenses.
How much does Rank Math cost?
Rank Math has a very complete free version, as you have seen. You can activate it from the administration interface of your WordPress site.
To benefit from additional features, you need to purchase one of the three licenses of Rank Math Pro:
- Pro ($49/year) is for bloggers, individuals, and solopreneurs.
- Business ($159/year) is for freelancers, businesses, and agency owners.
- Agency ($399/year) is for agency owners who manage multiple sites.
The license you choose depends primarily on the number of sites where you plan to use Rank Math. The more expensive the license, the more sites you can activate the plugin on.
The same goes for Content AI credits and the number of keywords you want to track.
As with the free version, there are a lot of features in the paid version of Rank Math. The easiest way to get a concrete idea of the differences between the three versions is to visit this page.
Our final opinion on Rank Math
The challenge for the contender Rank Math was certainly to do much better than Yoast and to create a “wow” effect to clearly distinguish itself from its competitor.
For a user who already has some basics in SEO, this plugin offers an interesting experience in terms of usability and customization.
However, the multitude of options and settings can be a drawback for a novice user: where Yoast SEO makes decisions for you without using jargon, Rank Math requires more knowledge.
Despite this, Rank Math manages to pull off a coup d’état:
- Its free version is already very comprehensive and should be enough for a beginner audience.
- The basic installation is quick and easy, guided step by step.
- Its modules allow you to activate only the options you need, without overloading the settings menus.
- The user interface is very clear and ergonomic.
- The list of features is impressive.
It remains to be seen whether Rank Math or Yoast is more valuable, based on a central question: can we expect better results in terms of positioning with Rank Math than with Yoast SEO?
In my experience, if you already have some SEO basics, it’s hard to rely on a single tool or plugin to rank on the first page of Google.
To date, neither Yoast nor Rank Math support all the parameters that count for Google’s algorithms (such as image size, page load speed, or the quality of incoming links).
Unfortunately, the magic tool to reach the first position does not exist yet, because SEO requires a lot of knowledge.
In conclusion, if you are already a satisfied user of Yoast, switching to Rank Math will probably not revolutionize your positioning in the search results.
On the other hand, if you are building a new WordPress site, testing Rank Math is an interesting alternative.
Download the Rank Math plugin:
But like any good SEO trainee, don’t rely on only one plugin; complement it with other content optimization tools.
Have you tried Rank Math? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!