Yoast SEO is like the OG of SEO plugins for WordPress. The only problem is, it sucks. Okay that was unreasonably harsh. Actually Yoast has always been a quality plugin, and for long time it seemed like the de facto choice.

The main reason I chose RankMath over Yoast is because I care about how things look. I’m supposed to be a developer, but I’m a designer at heart despite not having the skills for that work. I know when I like a UX. I know when something feels clean and smooth versus chaotic and cluttered. For me, Yoast just too often created messes in various part of the WP admin. And it’s own sections, the Yoast admin settings, just struck me as ridiculously poor. I mean after your plugin has been #1 for what 10-years or more in a really important category, you still can’t invest in a good UX designer and some CSS to clean that mess up?

RankMath just feels more organized than Yoast. So there it is, the real reason we switched to RankMath from Yoast. I know you’re expecting something, anything about the actual effectiveness of the tools these plugins provide. Well, to some extent these are helper tools. They are important, but if you actually know SEO well (and we do) then we’re not really relying on an SEO plugin to “make the SEO work”. That’s our job, using our skills and knowledge of the SEO factors. What RankMath does is assist us in our SEO efforts. And on that front, from that perspective, we consider it to be reasonably equivalent to Yoast. But with a much better UX!

Every website owner has heard it over and over again by now, make your website mobile friendly! It’s important to users, and yes, it’s also important to your search engine optimization. We categorize site mobile friendliness or mobile-optimization as a type of technical SEO.

Like anything else mobile friendliness is something we can measure on a scale. At least we can invent a scale to measure it, or use various testing tools and analyze the results. The point is mobile optimization of your website isn’t a one-off thing. Usually websites are not either terrible or perfect on mobile. There is a large spectrum in between.

1. Start with an assessment of your site on mobile. A thorough assessment will look at the site on a variety of devices.
2. From the technical SEO perspective a key factor is the mobile load speed. This is of course also important to your website users so you’re doing good things on both fronts when you can improve it.
3. Make a plan to address site mobile issues by priority. This often means getting a quote from a developer on implementing changes. It’s also wise to discuss with your site developer what the best approach to handling the work will be to reduce costs and gain the maximum impact. Sometimes mobile optimization like many aspects of technical SEO, require us to make substantial changes to the site content as well.

One of the tools we routinely use here at Eat/Build/Play to test mobile friendliness is the Hubspot Website Grader.