There are a lot of SEO helper tools on the market. And it’s getting more difficult to try them all. In this article, you will get a closer look at the Rank Math SEO plugin for WordPress and how it can help your website pages and posts make a better showing for search engines.
How SEO Tools Can Help
SEO tools provide a standard feature set of tools, tweaks, and options that help your pages make a better showing for search engines. Many of the tools on the market do approximately similar things, but it’s in the gray areas that you will find difference. Small differences in interface, organization of features, a balance between free and premium, are all individual markers you may note. This is why it’s important to try many different SEO tools and read reviews like this one.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is like a bot-friendly listing of your site pages. They have been part of the SEO landscape almost since the very beginning. In the old days, you had to code this page yourself. Eventually, content management systems helps simplify the process. But as search engines have gained in sophistication, so too have the standards for XML sitemaps. SEO plugins help configure industry standard sitemaps for you.
Rank Math is no exception. In addition to basic page and post sitemaps, Rank Math helps you set up an image index. This helps with image searches. Likewise, you can choose types of content to include or exclude from your sitemap.
Schema Markup
Schema markup has become more necessary as rich snippet search results are common. Many SEO tools, including Rank Math, help you set up proper schema, so you don’t have to code it yourself (which is quite difficult).
Learn more about Schema markup on the official Schema.org website.
So whether you’re writing blog posts movie reviews, or recipes, Schema markup helps search engines identify the content of your post quickly and easily, to encourage rich results.
SEO On-page Analysis
SEO tools also help with writing content that can be easily digested by search engines. The way most tools accomplish this is by having the user put in a target keyword and then scanning the content for usage of the keyword.
Rank Math allows for this and much more. Rank Math will also score the content itself for length, readability, and other points of interest you will want to consider when composing content for your site. Likewise, keyword targeting can help you make sure you don’t have one or more pages competing with each other for the same keyword (a big SEO no no).
Rank Math Plugin Features
But now, how does Rank Math distinguish itself from Other SEO Tools?
Easy Cross-site Signing for Google
As you first install Rank Math, you will be guided through a setup wizard which can facilitate your connection to Google products. This is especially important if you are using Google Search Console or Analytics. These are standard industry tools, so it’s likely you would be using them. You can probably recall having to verify ownership of your properties by placing a piece of code somewhere in the file hierarchy or verifying through other means. Rank Math can handle that verification for you, which is a huge added bonus.
In terms of security, Rank Math lets its users know it does not store any Google data on its servers:
We do not store any of the data from your Google account on our servers, everything is processed & stored on your server. We take your privacy extremely seriously and ensure it is never misused.
This might be a tad nitpicky, but the second part does not need to be said. It does quite well to simply say Rank Math does not store the data. To go beyond the obvious to assure the user again that Rank Math takes privacy “extremely seriously” erodes confidence (to a small degree) rather than building it up.
Automatic SEO Improvements
Rank Math can automatically update certain pages according to SEO standards. For example, Rank Math has a feature switch that automatically added a rel="nofollow" and/or target="_blank" to external links. This is a little SEO guideline you’ll often see recommended by the pros, and here Rank Math will do it for you, automatically.
Rank Tracker
Rank Math also boasts a handsome rank tracker feature that will analyze your page positions based on keywords you have provided. While you can easily find this information in your Google tools, having the interface available in the WordPress dashboard may be an added bonus for some users.
Compared to Other SEO Tools
It would be nice if Rank Math offered a more private non-Google option. There are many people who are either unfamiliar with Google tools or choose not to use them. And some extra steps must be taken to make sure that Google is anonymizing data in compliance with current data privacy regulations.
If you are interested in a more private option, check out Koko Analytics for WordPress. All of the analytics collected by this tool are anonymous and give you much of the same engagement metrics. Likewise, you could still use the on-page SEO reporting tools provided by Rank Math.
Also, Rank Math allows you add more than one focus keyword for your page analysis. This is currently a premium feature in Yoast SEO, but available in the free version of Rank Math. Often, it can be difficult fitting keyword variations into your content and getting “credit” for it when doing your page analysis. Being able to add multiple target keyword is a must-have feature.
Extend Your SEO Knowledge
Check out these other SEO resources from the blog:
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