043: Do SEO Plugins Really Boost Your Rankings? Understanding the Role of Yoast and Similar Tools

In this episode, Jules dives into the world of SEO tools, answering the question of whether investing in tools like Yoast is really worth it.

Jules explains how these tools can help with on-page SEO, keyword research, and technical fixes, but emphasises the importance of human oversight and understanding the "why" behind the recommendations. She cautions against blindly chasing green lights and reminds listeners that Google values content written for humans by humans.

Key Takeaways:

• The Role of SEO Tools: Learn how plugins like Yoast and Rank Math function and what features they offer to aid your SEO.
• Limitations of Over-Reliance: Discover why achieving a 'green light' on Yoast doesn't guarantee higher search rankings.
• Importance of Human Insight: Understand why a human touch and foundational SEO knowledge are crucial for successful optimisation.
• Choosing the Right Tools: Find out why Rank Math might be a better option than Yoast and when it's appropriate to invest in paid versions.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Invitation-only Facebook Group: Join my free private group to continue the conversation and access exclusive content
• Free Beginner's QuickStart Guide to SEO: Get your copy of Jules’ popular guide to kickstart your SEO efforts
• Episode 13: SEO Basics: Listen to gain a deeper understanding of foundational SEO practices
• Keyword Map and Planner: Keep your keywords organised and plan your website effectively with The Website Success Hub's Keyword Map & Planner
• Rank Math SEO Plugin
• Yoast SEO Plugin
• SEOSpace
• Search Atlas
• Screaming Frog Website Crawler: 

If you're enjoying the show, please leave a review on Spotifyor wherever you listen - it helps the show grow!

Chapters

• 0:00 A Difficult Week & A Reminder
• 2:19 A Common Question
• 3:42 Types of SEO Tools
• 11:04 Green Lights and Fundamentals
• 17:07 Screaming Frog and AI
• 21:34 Key Takeaways

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

A Difficult Week & A Reminder

Good morning. It's um, it's been a strange week this week. It's been really a difficult and upsetting week, I think, for a lot of my friends, my close family in the US, and it's been election week. And, just wanted to acknowledge that, that actually I, it's, it's been really hard and very, very upsetting for a lot of marginalised groups and for women.

And I feel like the world has had a major setback this week in terms of equality and in terms of the safety and the security of us all, really. So I just wanted to acknowledge that before I talk about today's topic.

My mission is to help women to earn more money through their website, and it's never been more apparent than at the moment that men still do control the world.

So I think it's, it's just been a bit of a reminder to me that I need to continue doing what I'm doing. I've seen a lot of people on Facebook in, in entrepreneurial Facebook groups talking about having to push themselves to try and carry on and whether to shut up shop, even people who are in the US. And I think it's really sad, and I, so I think it's more important than ever that we as women do continue to take the steps that we need to, to be able to support ourselves.

And that we don't give up on our businesses right now. If women control money and if women have more money, generally, good things happen. Women are more likely to invest in their communities, invest in their family, and to look after the world in general.

I know that's a generalisation, but it certainly seems to be that when women are in positions of power, then better things generally tend to happen, really. So I, I hope that everybody's okay.

And I just wanted to just touch on that before I start talking about today's topic, really.

A Common Question

So today I'm going to talk about a question that came up in my Facebook group. So if you're not in my Facebook group, it's an invitation-only Facebook group. It's a free private group, and this is your invitation to join.

If you're a podcast listener and you would like to come over and join us in the Facebook group, then please do. We'd love to have you there. Just let me know on the intake form that you heard about it through the podcast.

Yeah, come over and join us. It's where these podcasts start, actually. They start as lives in the Facebook group, generally on a Friday morning, usually live. This one, ironically, isn't actually live because I'm going networking, and there's never any mobile signal here, so I'm recording it right now.

But yeah, come over and join us and let us know; introduce yourself when you come in, and we'd love to see you there.

But anyway, this question came up this week from the lovely Adela, and she said, "Hi, is it worth it to invest in a Yoast SEO subscription to help improve my website's visibility?"

This is actually a really common question. I often get this question from people after they've already invested and have been frustrated with why they're still not seeing the results that they want to. So they're saying, "I got green on Yoast, and it's still not working."

So before we dive into that a bit more on why that might be happening, I just wanted to touch on what these kinds of tools are, the kinds of things that I'm talking about, and how they can actually help your business.

Website or not, depending on how you're using them.

Types of SEO Tools

So there are tools like Yoast, Rank Math, what else have we got? I did have a little list here, so let me think about it. My brain's gone blank. So if we're talking about WordPress, we've got Yoast, Rank Math. There's one called All in One SEO. I mean, there are hundreds of plugins that will help you with your SEO on WordPress.

There's one on, if you're using a Squarespace website, there's one called SEO Space, which I've recently discovered. Squarespace isn't really one of my preferred platforms currently, just purely because the page load speed is not great. And that's something that's fundamental that you can't do a lot about.

But I am getting to like it more, really. And I discovered this plugin, and it's actually good. And it's certainly got a lot of potential. Essentially, what it does is it gives people who are using Squarespace the same kind of options as you have on plugins like Yoast and Rank Math.

And there's one called Search Atlas, which I think is really exciting.

There was the big Go High Level Summit last week, and they announced that they're partnering with Search Atlas. So they're bringing that to Go High Level, which is what I use FEA Create. So if you're using FEA Create, FG Funnels, Funnel Sketches, any of those kind of High Level white labels, then this is something that's going to be quite exciting.

I think there are definitely some dangers and some downsides with it as well, but I'm excited. I'm excited to see what happens with that and anything where it can give us some, let me just put my phone on silent, anything where it can give us some insights and some tools and just things to make SEO easier, I think, is good.

But there are definitely some caveats to the fact that these tools can sometimes lead us down the garden path or up the garden path and down a rabbit hole, maybe.

So there are many SEO tools out there that aren't the ones that I'm talking about today. So there are SEO tools that, as professional SEO people, we tend to use things like, uh, you may have heard of...

SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs. Um, Ubersuggest is the one that a lot of people have actually heard of. I use a couple of paid SEO tools for things like keyword research, website auditing, website tracking, rank tracking, those kinds of things. I use one called SE Rankings and another one, which is within the Website Success Hub.

So my own platform, and I use both of them. They've got their pluses and downsides, but that's not what we're talking about here today. So those are ones where they're more like keyword research tools. That's generally what people would think of, those ones like Moz and Ubersuggest, really.

There are also Chrome plugins as well.

And I use those every single day in my business. And there's a couple that I particularly use. There's one called All in One SEO, which is actually the same people who make the plugin for WordPress. And there's also one called Detailed.

So they're both Google Chrome plugins where you can literally click on it when you're on a website, and it will tell you things like whether you've got your heading structure in the right place, whether you've got links, whether you've got structured data on that page.

So all of the things that, that, uh, you can look for to tell you whether you're doing your SEO correctly, realistically, and that's what they're kind of for. And I use those kinds of tools literally every day. So if I hear of any, if I have a conversation with somebody, it's sometimes even if I'm sitting watching TV, I've done it with TV chefs where I've gone on and literally would have thought, "I wonder what their websites are like."

That's always one of my first thoughts when I hear about a business or see something interesting.

I'm like, "I wonder, I wonder what their SEO is like." So I'll just hop onto their website, load one of these Chrome plugins, and it immediately tells me whether they've paid any attention to their SEO or not.

So that's why I like them. They're also really good if you're working on your website and you just want something just to tell you, "Oh, have I looked at that page?"

"Have I optimised that page already? You know, what links has this page got coming in and going out?" And those kinds of things are really helpful for that.

But that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about the tools that you can actually have attached to your website that will help you with carrying out the tasks that you need to do your SEO.

So what these tools do and how they help is, it does depend on the tools; they all have different features, they all have different things available. Generally, they all have a free plan and paid plans, and the features that you get depend on whether you actually upgrade to pay for them.

They tend to make suggestions for on-page SEO.

So things like your page titles and descriptions, whether you're using the keywords. So generally, what you will do is you'll put one of these plugins onto your website, and then you will tell it, for each page of your site, what keyword or key phrase you're trying to rank that page for

And then it will tell you how you're doing. It will give you a score, essentially. And it generally, most of them do a bit of a traffic light system or something that's quite easy to read, which is good; it's good that it does that.

Some of the tools as well will actually do some of the work for you.

So it may, like, Rank Math is one that creates a sitemap for you. It will suggest technical fixes for your website. You might be able to add your structured data, your schema markup, through that as well, which are the things that tell the bots that are reading your website what it actually is all about.

So it's good 'cause it can help with the technical parts of SEO. And a lot of them now have AI integrated into them. And often that is a paid upgrade, but you can use that, use AI to actually help you write those page titles and descriptions. And some of them suggest links between your content as well, which can be helpful.

So if you tell the plugin that this is an important piece of content, it can make suggestions on other pieces of content within your website that you should link to, that you should be linking to, and also helping you to visualise that linking structure as well. So they help with that kind of stuff.

But this is where we can sometimes become a bit, or come a bit unstuck with it, really. Because I think the big thing with these is they need a human eye to understand the nuances of it.

So as much as they can help guide you onto what's happening on your site, because I think a lot of the time when people come to me...

They don't even, they don't know what they don't know, like with anything, really. Until somebody points something out to you in a way that is clear and simple to understand, you don't necessarily know what you're doing wrong. And these tools can sometimes guide you towards actually putting that right.

So helping you to understand, "Oh, your page descriptions are this length, and they should actually be this length." Those kinds of things.

But unless you know how to, you know what that should actually be, then you're kind of relying on the tool. And sometimes these tools aren't set up correctly, like, so for example, page description length. So your SEO meta description, which is the little bit that appears under the blue title, you know, if you're looking at a search results page, that generally has to be under 160 characters, but currently, the length that seems to perform best in searches is between 119 and 135 characters.

So if you can then adjust the tools and know little things like that, that can sometimes make a difference. And I think that's where having that human eye and that little bit more knowledge can make these tools more useful and less likely to trip you up along the way, really.

Green Lights and Fundamentals

One of the things that happens is people will say that they've optimised...

So I've got my green light on Yoast. And they, they then say, you know, "It's still not working." But the problem is you can very easily manipulate it. So you can actually stuff keywords in, and you might end up adjusting your titles and descriptions to make it fit the requirements, but that then doesn't read naturally for a human.

And that's what Google and other search engines want to understand. They don't want content that is written by robots. If it sounds like it's been written by robots, they want content that's written by humans for humans, ideally. Or at least that it sounds like something a human would say, a human would write.

And that's where I think it can often, by focusing on getting those green lights, it makes you ignore the fundamentals. And if you don't know what those fundamentals are, so you don't understand why page titles are description and descriptions are important. You don't understand why using even different similes and different versions and related terms for the keyword that you're optimising that page for, if you don't understand that to begin with, these tools can very easily lead you wrong.

Whereas actually, if you understand what are the important keywords or key phrases that we want to show up for on Google, and for each of those, which is the one page on our website that's most relevant to that, and then optimise that page just for that term. And over time, your pages will start ranking for other key phrases.

But actually, when we're first optimising, it's best to focus on one key phrase. Get optimised for that in the best way you can. And then go from there, see what happens, have a look at the results, see what other, like, move on to another page, another important page on your site.

So that's where I think that often people can get frustrated with them because they're not necessarily understanding the strategy behind it.

They're not necessarily understanding why you're doing the things you're doing, other than that little description that it's telling you, you know, "Your page title, 160 characters," or whatever. It's a bit more like just ticking those boxes and not necessarily understanding the why, really.

In terms of the different tools, if you are using them, then I tend to find that Rank Math is a little bit better than Yoast. The reason that Yoast is so popular is because it used to be, I'll say the reason, one of the reasons, and one of the reasons why it was always the one that was recommended to begin with, is because it used to be installed as standard with WordPress websites.

So it was the one that everybody used because it was just there, and you could use it and didn't have to think about anything else. But actually, I've used both.

I find they've definitely got their own features and their own ups and downs, but I find that the Rank Math interface is easier to use, and it doesn't add as much bloat to a website, which is really important.

If you're trying to optimise your website for SEO, the last thing you want is to add a load of code in that's going to then slow your website down.

And that's what these plugins do. They add code into the back end of your website, and if that then makes your website bloated and makes it slow to load, then that's going to affect your SEO as well, realistically.

It's the same with if you're putting anything on your site, if you're putting heatmaps or something that tracks how people actually interact with your page if you're putting videos in, if you're putting anything that's going to slow those pages down, especially for mobile, which is where Google is focused, then that's a big no-no, really.

So it's certainly worth, if you are thinking about using one of these plugins, looking at your page speeds before you use the plugin and then looking at it immediately afterwards as well and just seeing if it does actually affect your page load speed as well.

And keep an eye on that over time as well, because it might be something as well that it's fine to begin with, but then once you start actually optimising and start adding things into it, then that then slows your pages down. So that's really important I think to understand that and just to understand the limitations of them, really.

So, when do I think they're useful? I think it's really important to, for us to understand what's happening with things like our page titles and descriptions. And I think if we can have them laid out somewhere together, so you can see a list of literally all of your pages, what titles you've got on them and what descriptions you've got on them, that can be really, really helpful, and especially if you then have a list of what keywords you're trying to rank that page for.

I sell on my website my keyword map and planner, and that is essentially a Google Sheet that has all of this information in there. So you can put in there all of the URLs from your website, you can tell it what you're trying to rank that page for. You can put your page titles and descriptions, and it will work out if they're the right length or the ideal length for you.

And you can do that straight there in the keyword map and planner. And it's really helpful. I like it because it's not attached to the website. So it's somewhere separate that it's kind of like your database of, "Okay, this is what we're trying to achieve with the website." And then you can go and add that information into your website.

So with some of these, you can actually see that. So Rank Math does have a list on, so you can literally look at the front end of all of your pages of your website, and you can see that information, that page title and description. You can make edits to it right there, which can be really helpful if you understand why you're making those edits and you understand what you're trying to achieve with it, really.

And last time I used Yoast, I don't think I could find that feature somewhere. So that is another reason why I prefer Rank Math to Yoast. With SEO Space, I think you could do that with that as well, but I think that was a paid upgrade with that one.

So if you're using Squarespace, I definitely would recommend giving these tools a try. It's just making sure that you're using them in a way that's not going to then actually undo what you're trying to achieve with this, really.

Screaming Frog and AI

But the other thing you can do is there's a tool called Screaming Frog, which is a program, so it's like an app that you load onto your Mac or your PC, and you can scan your whole website.

And when you do this, it looks really scary because there's loads of data in there, but this will also give you loads and loads of data about your website and your page titles, descriptions, the length, your heading tags, and all of those things that give you it all together. And then you can then take that information out of Screaming Frog and put that into a planner like the Keyword Map and Planner or just into a general Google Sheet.

So you can then extract that information from your website and put it in there. And then you can then use things like ChatGPT to help you with this.

One of the things with the paid upgrades on the tools that we're talking about today is, if it's using AI to rewrite these descriptions, I often find, when with ChatGPT, I ask it to write a page title and description, I guarantee they'll be too long, always are, and I have to tell it, "Please make sure that you don't make it this long."

And that often they're not that good. So it's worth, if you're thinking about using these tools and using the AI part of it, making sure that you do just run it through that human sense checker, really, as well, and do check those lengths as well, because it doesn't always do the job exactly.

As we know, sometimes ChatGPT and Google Gemini hallucinate, and they don't do the job that you're actually trying to get them to do, really. So I would definitely say to do that.

You can use these tools to run reports as well, so you can use them to just give you a general overview of what's happening and kind of just direct you to understand what things maybe are missing as well. So I think they are useful, but I would generally say there may be other things that could be more useful. And if you don't understand why you're doing what you're doing, then that's where you can come unstuck, really.

I would definitely say, if you are going to use them, use the free version and use the free version for quite some time before you think about upgrading.

So making sure that the free version is doing what you want it to do. If you are going to try more than one, because that's another option, especially with WordPress, where you've got different options available, make sure you don't have more than one installed at a time. Because if you have two SEO plugins installed at the same time, that can cause issues with your site and cause all sorts of issues, really.

So I think the big takeaway from today is that these tools can be helpful. I wouldn't upgrade. I don't think I've, I'm trying to think if I've ever had a client who we've upgraded. I don't think I have, actually. I don't think I've had anybody who has been at the point where I've said, "Yep, this is going to be helpful for you to upgrade right now."

So it's something that these tools are all getting better. Everything's getting better with these kinds of tools with AI. So that may be something that changes in the future.

But generally, you can get some use and get some helpful insights from them without having to use the upgraded version, really.

So I will explore this later as well at a later date on the upgraded versions and whether actually it is worth doing that. But for now, I would say it probably isn't. I think especially if you're not already using them, so, like, as much as you can, if you're not already utilising those tools without the upgraded version, then I wouldn't sort of just dive in straight away with the upgraded version.

The sales pages will make it sound amazing, make it sound super easy and like it's just a piece of cake. All you need is this tool, and your SEO is sorted, and we all know it's not. It's not always that easy. SEO takes time. And if you don't understand the why of what you're doing, then you don't necessarily know why it's working or not working and what to do to fix that.

That's kind of the key takeaway from today is, yes, these tools can be helpful. If you're thinking about a WordPress one, I would definitely recommend trying Rank Math over, Rank Math. And don't take it as gospel. These, what they're telling you, don't take it as necessarily that, "Yeah, if I get all the greens, then I'm going to be fine."

Think about why you're doing what you're doing. Think about that key thing of, "What do I want to show up for? Which page of my website is most appropriate for that? And then how do I optimise that page?" And don't upgrade until you absolutely need to, definitely.

Key Takeaways

So I hope that's been helpful.

If you would like to find out more, get more tips, as I say, come and join my Facebook group. This is your invitation to come and join us over there. Listen to episode 13 of the podcast, which was SEO Basics. That can be really helpful in terms of actually just understanding those things, why you're using these tools and whether it can give you guidance on whether it's leading you in the right direction, essentially.

And I will link the tools that I've mentioned today in the show notes. So thank you for listening. I hope you have enjoyed the show, and if you do, I'd love you to go and leave me a review on Spotify or wherever you listen. I'd love it if you could leave me a review.

It helps the show so much. I'm trying to grow it without actually promoting the show on social media for now. I'm almost at 2,000 downloads, which is great. It's five months since I launched, and that's been amazing for me.

So if you are enjoying the show, I would love you to go and leave me a review.

That'd be amazing. Thanks a lot, then. Bye.