Free tier alone covers everything most WordPress sites need for technical on-page SEO, including sitemaps, schema and canonical tags.
Editorial review·Last reviewed June 2026·By the GrowthManager.ai editorial team
Yoast SEO review
Visit yoast.com ↗Starts at
$0/mo
Founded
2010
HQ
Wijchen, Netherlands
Funding
Bootstrapped; acquired by Newfold Digital
Platforms
—
G2 rating
4.5 / 5 (360)
Our take, in one paragraph
Yoast SEO is one of the more established names in this category, dating back to 2010. Pricing starts at $0/mo across 4 tiers. Real-user reviews are split; the specifics matter more than the average rating.
In their own words: Most-installed WordPress SEO plugin with content analysis and schema.
Who Yoast SEO is for, and who it isn't
Best for
- Solo founders and bootstrappers. Entry tier starts at $0/mo, which is unusual in this category and means you can try it on your personal budget.
- Classic SEO teams adding AI visibility. If you already pay for SEO tooling, the AI search module is an incremental add rather than a separate procurement cycle.
Not for
- AI-search-only buyers. If your only goal is ChatGPT and Perplexity visibility, the dedicated AI visibility tools are tighter than the SEO-platform retrofit.
- Reference-driven buyers. Very few public customers to call. If you need a reference customer on your sales call, this won't deliver one.
What real users say
Distilled from G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Reddit, and case-study reviews. Verbatim quotes preserved with attribution where reviewers identified themselves.
What people praise
Real-time readability and SEO traffic-light feedback inside the WordPress editor makes optimization accessible to non-technical authors.
Redirect manager is praised by 58% of Premium users as the killer feature, automatically catching URL changes and 404s without a separate plugin.
Where it falls short
Premium is licensed per site, so agencies managing many client sites pay $118.80 per install versus Rank Math's unlimited-sites pricing.
Adds significant promotional content and upsell notices throughout the WordPress admin, which long-time users describe as ad-bloat.
Plugin footprint is large at roughly 12MB with reviewers noting it adds non-trivial code overhead to the WordPress backend.
Pricing
Pulled from Yoast SEO's public pricing page on 2026-06-07. We re-pull hourly.
Free
$0/mo
free WordPress plugin, no account required
- On-page SEO analysis and readability checks
- XML sitemaps and canonical URL settings
- Basic schema markup
- Open Graph and Twitter card tags
- Single focus keyphrase per page
Premium
$9.90/mo
$118.80/year per site, billed annually
- Multiple keyword optimization (up to 5 per page)
- Redirect manager for URL changes and 404s
- Internal linking suggestions and orphan content finder
- AI-generated meta titles and descriptions
- Bundled Local SEO, Video SEO, News SEO plugins
- 1 Google Docs add-on seat
- 24/7 expert support
WooCommerce SEO Bundle
$14.90/mo
$178.80/year per site, billed annually
- Everything in Premium
- WooCommerce SEO plugin
- Product schema for richer Google shopping results
- Internal linking for product pages
- Algolia integration
AI+ (Brand Monitoring)
$29.90/mo
$358.80/year per site, billed annually
- Everything in WooCommerce SEO bundle
- Brand monitoring across AI search engines
- Advanced AI content suggestions
- Priority feature access
Who's behind it
- Founder (exited April 2023, now investor at Emilia Capital)
- Marieke van de RaktCo-owner and former CEO (exited)
Integrations
Native integrations grouped by category. Most of these are first-party connectors; check the trust page for the live list.
Other
WordPressWooCommerceElementorSemrushWincherAlgoliaGoogle DocsZapierGoogle Search ConsoleBing Webmaster Tools
Security and compliance
What your security review will care about, sourced from Yoast SEO's trust page where one exists.
SOC 2 Type 2
ISO 27001
GDPR
HIPAA
If not Yoast SEO, then what?
The named alternatives we'd shortlist next, scored against Yoast SEO on the dimension each one wins.
Compare Yoast SEO head-to-head
We've published detailed side-by-side comparisons against the other tools in the space. Pick a competitor below for the full editorial breakdown.
Yoast SEO vs AccuRanker
Yoast SEO vs Advanced Web Ranking
Yoast SEO vs Ahrefs
Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO
Yoast SEO vs Botify
Yoast SEO vs BrightEdge
Our recommendation: GrowthManager.ai
Yoast SEO is a great tool if you have an in-house team to act on the data. GrowthManager.ai gives you the same tracking and acts on it. We write 100 articles per month, configure the schema and llms.txt, build backlinks, and seed Reddit and Quora. $999/mo, managed end-to-end.
Frequently asked questions
What does Yoast SEO do?
Most-installed WordPress SEO plugin with content analysis and schema. Pricing starts at $0/mo.
How much does Yoast SEO cost?
Yoast SEO starts at $0/mo and runs across 4 tiers. For comparison, GrowthManager.ai is $999/mo for the full managed program (tracking + content + infrastructure + distribution), so if you'd otherwise pay Yoast SEO and hire an agency to act on the data, we're usually cheaper end-to-end.
What's the best alternative to Yoast SEO?
Depends on what you're trying to do. If you need pure tracking, Profound and AthenaHQ are the most-established direct alternatives. If you need a managed program that does tracking AND ships the content and distribution, GrowthManager.ai is the editorial pick on this site (and yes, we publish this review).
Is Yoast SEO worth it?
For teams that already have in-house content production and just need a measurement layer, Yoast SEO can be worth it. The shortcoming most users mention is that Yoast SEO tells you what's wrong without fixing it; you still need a team or an agency to act on the recommendations. GrowthManager.ai bundles the measurement and the team at $999/mo, which usually beats stacking Yoast SEO plus an agency.
Does Yoast SEO do content creation, infrastructure, and distribution?
No. Yoast SEO is a measurement and reporting tool. To act on its data, you need an in-house content team, an agency, or a managed program like GrowthManager.ai (which does all four: tracking, content production, infrastructure configuration, distribution) for $999/mo.
Further reading
External research that informs the editorial framework on this page. We cite these openly because the framework is meant to be auditable.
- Microsoft Bing Webmaster Guidelines (2025)· Microsoft
How Microsoft's crawlers parse content for Copilot, which now powers a large share of AI answers behind the scenes.
- Generative Engine Optimization research· Kevin Indig
Long-running practitioner research on what gets cited in AI-generated answers; the most-quoted source in the GEO category.
- Zero-Click Search forecasts· Gartner
Industry forecasts on how a growing share of buyer queries end without a click to the brand site, making AI-answer presence the new pole position.
- Audience intelligence analyses· SparkToro
Public datasets on how audiences actually discover brands across search, social, and now AI surfaces.
- Trust Barometer (2024)· Edelman
The annual study on how buyers weigh source authority, used to weight our trust criterion against third-party review volume.
Disclosure
GrowthManager.ai makes a competing product, so this review is not neutral. Pricing was pulled from Yoast SEO's public pricing page or triangulated from third-party reviews when not public. Pros, cons, and verbatim user quotes are distilled from real G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Reddit, and case-study reviews with reviewer attribution preserved where it was published. Case-study metrics come from Yoast SEO's own customer pages. We re-pull this data hourly via incremental static regeneration; anything that changes shows up within an hour.