Getting your on-site SEO right is hard. There are so many different factors you need to consider that it can be difficult to keep on top of it all. Thankfully, WordPress users have an entire arsenal of tools at their disposal to make it easier.

Two of the most popular SEO plugins are All-in-One SEO and Yoast SEO, but if you’re yet to use either, you may be wondering which one is best to help with your optimization.

What Do All-in-One SEO and Yoast Do?

Both WordPress plugins give you a set of tools for refining the SEO of each page and post that you publish on your site. The basic features are mostly the same across both, providing you with stats to show how well refined your content is and how focused your keywords are.

They’ll also help you to add in schema markup without having to edit any code manually, making this process quick and easy.

At the site level, both plugins can generate XML sitemaps, add breadcrumb navigation, manage redirects, and edit robots.txt and .htaccess files.

For the most part, all of this can be done without either of these plugins, but both All-in-One and Yoast make it a breeze.

Advantages of All-in-One SEO

While both do a similar job and contain similar features, All-in-One has some advantages over Yoast.

It contains a scoring system called TruSEO. While you’re editing pages and posts, it gives you a numerical indicator of how effective the content is. While you’re creating a page or post, you just have to enter a focus keyphrase and it will give you an actionable list of things to improve such as including the keyphrase in the title, URL, and introduction.

It also contains a feature known as Dynamic Tags that can change your title or meta description based on the current day, month, or year. This means that your article can always appear up to date.

For example, an article titled “The Best Dry Cleaners in the Bay Area 2021”, will automatically update to 2022 after the New Year.

When generating XML sitemaps, All-in-One gives you more control of what’s included and what isn’t, including the types of posts and taxonomies. You can even include custom landing pages that aren’t built within WordPress.

Advantages of Yoast SEO

That’s not to say Yoast doesn’t have plenty to offer; it also contains features that make it stand out from All-in-One.

It offers an easy way for you to verify your site with most major webmaster tools, including Google Search Console, Baidu, Yandex, and Bing Webmaster Tools. You just need to paste your verification code into the corresponding box and Yoast will take care of the rest.

Yoast can also import data directly from Google Search Console to save you some time.

If you subscribe to Yoast’s premium package, then you can also create sitemaps for video and Google News to help you appear in those particular search results.

Yoast also contains a readability score for posts and pages, which some users find useful in making their writing accessible to a wider audience. Though it’s worth noting that it’s a blunt instrument that will constrain your creative flair if you follow all of its suggestions.

If you use the WooCommerce plugin to create an ecommerce store on your WordPress site, then you’ll want to install the separate Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin. This gives you more control over the schema for product pages and adds product categories to your sitemap.

Cost – All-in-One vs Yoast

Both plugins are available to install for free from the official WordPress plugins directory. The bulk of their features can be used for free, so you can get started with your SEO without having to spend a single penny.

However, if you’re serious about taking your SEO to the next level, then you’ll likely want to stretch for the premium versions.

For a single site, Yoast SEO Premium will set you back $89 a year. This can unlock features like:

• Intelligent word forms recognition – A system for helping you produce more naturally-sounding content
• SEO “workouts” – A tool that gives you a to-do list of SEO tasks
• Improved internal linking tools
• Automatic error redirection

All-in-One SEO has a tiered pricing structure ranging from $49.50 a year for one site to $299.50 a year for 100. The list of additional features is pretty long but is similar to Yoast.

Which is Better – All-in-One or Yoast?

It is difficult to say one is better than the other. They both do great jobs and that’s reflected by the huge numbers of positive reviews that each one has. If none of the unique features stand out to you, then you might want to try them both out to see which one suits you best.

If the thought of using these tools is daunting, don’t fret! Get in touch with the Sympler team today to see how our SEO experts can help to improve your rankings.