Do you need Yoast Premium?
Yoast is an asset to any WordPress site that wants to do well in Google - but should you upgrade to Yoast Premium?
There are very few WordPress plugins that I actually recommend - most WordPress sites have far too many are suffer from severe bloat and technical debt because they’re so reliant on so much junk. But in that short list I recommend for pretty much every WordPress we build at my agency, Yoast is right up there.
WordPress has great SEO potential - mainly because you can get (or, your developer can) to the source code and do anything you need to. However out of the box you don’t get a lot of free reign over things like title tags and meta descriptions. Yoast changes all that and let’s you actually optimise your pages properly, which is great. So if you’re building a WordPress site and you want it to stand a chance in Google, then absolutely install the free version of Yoast.
Now, it would stand to reason that if Yoast is so good, the Premium version should be great. But I’m afraid I’m just not convinced it is. You see, once you can optimise your pages, everything else you can do yourself or manage with free tools.
Things you can do with Yoast SEO Premium
Premium walks you through a couple of “Workouts” - one for helping you identify your key content, and then telling you you need to build links to it. And one for helping you think about which pages of your site are still relevant and which you need to link to (internally) a little more. It doesn’t do anything for you - it can’t really, that’d be too risky - it just makes you work through a list of your pages and consider which ones you should improve on based on reading some SEO tutorials they link to. So the work’s on you still. If you do have orphan pages (pages which aren’t linked to from any other pages) I think it’ll show you which they are but I haven’t actually seen that work.
Yoast AI Title Generator
This is a nice little feature where you can click a button to have a window bring up suggestions for different title tags for your page… but all the times I’ve tried this the suggestions have been very “salesy” and over the top… for my client’s “Brands” page it suggested things like “Brands that redefine quality and innovation”. That won’t help with SEO because the words “quality and innovation” are so generic and suit any sector. I’d say if you want to use AI to help with title generation you might as well use ChatGPT for free, or Headline Studio by CoSchedule.
Keyword suggestions
Keyword suggestions could be really useful, but Yoast just hooks up with SEMRush, which you can use for free (if you dig around or click here), or be upsold to more of their features. Or there are plenty of free keyword research tools you can use, which I’ll write about another day, so make sure you’re subscribed to get that email when it lands.
Yoast Academy review
Now, my issue with the Yoast SEO Premium features are largely that they don’t really (understandably) do anything for you - you still need to take action yourself. But to be fair, your £99 Premium subscription does include access to Yoast Academy, where they’ll tell you how to do stuff. And from going through their courses, I like their info, and it’s clearly explained with videos or written notes, depending on which you prefer. From what I’ve seen it doesn’t go into quite as much detail as my SEO Fundamentals Course, but it would certainly give you some things to action. As I’m all about trying to save small businesses money though, if you’ve read this far, I’ll give you a discount code for my SEO course so that you do it for less than the price of Yoast Premium.
Conclusion: Is Yoast SEO Premium worth £99?
With the Academy in mind, yes it probably is - but the actual plugin on it’s own I don’t think is that useful. Absolutely 100% get the free Yoast SEO plugin, and then upgrade if you’ve got time to do the Academy - or, better still, use my 50% coupon code to get one of my SEO courses (lite or full). Lite is an easy to dip in and out of £15 PDF (so you’d get it for £7.50) and full is SUPER detailed and £150 (so £75 with the voucher). Drop me a message if you want more details and a code… (this is my agency’s contact page but I get the messages).
I think the problem Yoast have got is that they’ve given a great set of tools in the free version, and without becoming another SEM Rush or AHREFS (which as plugin developers, they probably see as quite a different kind of offering), they can’t really offer much of value apart from the training. But unless you actually use it every year, it’s not really a recurring cost you need.