Looking for content marketing tools to optimize for the search engines? Meet Yoast.
SEO can be complex for every site owner, but it doesn’t have to be. And, yes, you can derive plenty of value by hiring an SEO expert, but you can do a lot on your own with the help of various SEO tools and content management systems.
Today, we’re talking about one such content marketing tool for SEO that perfectly pairs with WordPress and other leading content management systems – Yoast SEO. Being one of the most popular content marketing tools, Yoast has over 11 million active installs.
In this post, we’ll talk about its features and how it contributes to better content marketing strategies.
Content marketing tool: What is Yoast SEO?
Yoast SEO is a freemium content marketing tool used to enhance your website SEO. It is a WordPress plug-in that works as a virtual SEO assistant, offering suggestions and techniques to help you optimize your website.
The free version gives you access to the necessities, such as one focus keyword and complete SEO analysis. At the same time, the premium version increases the bar with features like suggesting synonyms in text, SEO workouts, internal linking suggestions, and so much more.
Apart from highlighting the improvements you need to make on your content, they also link you to additional information on the website to learn more about the aspect. This helps you also decrease errors while optimizing content.
You can install this plug-in on your WordPress website directly from the store or download the same and upload it to your site.
What is Yoast used for in content marketing?
We measure the effectiveness of content strategies according to the rising graph of traffic and conversions. If the content is not friendly enough for search engines and readers, it will be lost in a black hole of mirage content.
Yoast SEO helps you escape this nightmare by alarming you about such red flags with its suggestions. You can use Yoast to:
1.Create better SEO content
Yoast SEO allows you to optimize content for the search engines. Right from the title, URL, meta title and description, images and the body of it, this is one of the content marketing tools that will ease out creating SEO content.
2. Hide your pages from search engines
Let’s say you’re creating a landing page for your product but don’t want it to appear in search results. You can use the Yoast SEO plug-in to hide it. It will add non-index to the pages you don’t wish to be indexed by limiting search engines.
It also adds canonical link elements to your website which helps search engines to determine the correct links to index.
3. Prevent content scraper
Many people have their scraping websites, which can be threatening to your pages. These scraper websites use RSS feeds of different sites to create content. It’s one of the issues website owners face.
Yoast SEO protects your website by including a link with each RSS feed to your content. This outperforms scrapers in search rankings and informs search engines of content’s original location.
Features of content marketing tool—Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO being the most popular content marketing tools has a lot to offer. Here are some of its significant feature that will help you optimize your content better.
1. SEO workouts
Yoast found an innovative way to help you finish the work you dread or procrastinate. SEO workouts are a premium feature which are SEO exercises focused on one particular task. These tasks can be refreshing your outdated content or improving the linking structure. Such tasks tend to be overwhelming, especially when you have a large website with zillions of pages.
Image Credit-Yoast SEO
It helps you keep your site in good shape while improving rankings. To start a workout, you need to go to the Workouts section in the SEO tab of your menu. From there, you can choose an activity and start working towards better SEO health.
2. Internal linking suggestions
To rank on search engines, your site structure needs to be great. One way to do this is by creating internal links. Search engines crawl websites by following external and internal links. It also gives search engines an idea of your website’s structure and hierarchy.
Yoast SEO—the content marketing tool saves you time by suggesting links while you’re writing, and you can drag that link into your text. And with larger sites, you cannot remember every published content piece. This way, it helps you set up a great structure by connecting content related to each other without overlooking any articles you might forget.
Internal linking uses the Insights tool and collects the most used words in the post you’re writing. It uses this data to find the best-fitting posts for you to link.
Image Credit-Yoast
Apart from internal linking suggestions, it also shows you how many internal links you have in your post and how many you need to add more. You can find this in your overview of pages, posts, or other content.
3. Schema support
The schema describes your content for search engines. Yoast SEO generates structured data for your site, but you can change the settings yourself to add more specificity to your content.
Image Credit-Yoast SEO
It automatically adds the description for you on every page you make and the connections that can help search engines understand it. In addition, it also has features that generate schema, like content blocks and other plug-ins, like WooCommerce SEO and Local SEO.
4. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb is a text path indicating where the user is on the site. If you struggle with the wrong category in your breadcrumbs, then Yoast solves this problem by setting a primary category.
Image Credit-Yoast SEO
Having a primary category helps search engines to know the rightful place for the content and users don’t get lost while surfing. This way, you help both search engines and users navigate your website easily.
5. SEO analysis
Making sure the content we publish adheres to the updated Google algorithm is always a task. But Yoast makes it easier for you by offering all the tools you need to improve the content SEO.
If you’re an SEO expert, you know what you need to do to make a page search engine friendly. But not everyone is an expert; the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO focuses on one keyphrase to check if you’ve used it in places where it should be. It can be your post’s title, URL, or meta description. And it warns you if you overdo it.
Image Credit- Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO has fifteen different checks that help you get the required information to make the content ready.
6. Duplicate keyphrases check
You found your primary keyword with extensive research, but you cannot use it on multiple pages to rank for the exact keyphrase. Doing this will hurt your rankings, and it is called keyword cannibalization— making your pages compete with each other.
Image Credit-Yoast SEO
As your site grows, it is tough to track all the key phrases you’ve ever used. Yoast SEO helps you by warning you when you’re using a duplicate keyphrase, and the link texts are the same too.
7. Readability analysis
Let’s face it, no one wants to read content filled with jargon and fancy words. Using complex language makes it hard for people to understand it. The Yoast SEO readability analysis helps you create easy-to-read content.
Image Credit-Yoast SEO
It has a Flesch Reading Ease Score—which measures your readability on a scale from 0-100. For example, 0-30 for academics and 90-100 for 11-year-olds. It scrutinizes your content on two aspects—how the number of words relates to the number of sentences and the number of syllables relate to the number of words.
To pass this check, you need to keep your sentences short and avoid using complex words.
How does Yoast help you with better content marketing?
Yoast SEO is one of the best content marketing tools for amateur and professional marketers. Here are some ways Yoast helps you in your content marketing journey by making SEO simpler.
1. Optimizing your web content
Creating content and optimizing it for search engines are two different aspects. And keeping a balance between both is a challenge. But Yoast makes it easier for you by telling you where to focus on making your content search-engine and reader-friendly.
You can quickly check the keyword density of your focused keyphrase. It helps you fix your page by alarming you about the errors that impact your on-page SEO.
The red, yellow, and green icons indicate if you’ve met the suggested criteria for well-optimized web pages. However, do not fret if not all categories are in the green. Having proper grammar and conveying the right messaging is more important than satisfying every SEO criteria.
2. Structuring content better
If you wish to rank your content, you’ll have to create a site structure understandable by Google. To accomplish this, you need to do your internal linking well.
Yoast SEO premium has an internal linking tool offering site structure training that helps you develop the skills to create the ideal website structure.
3. Set templates for meta titles
With the Content Types tab, you can create templates for meta titles, and descriptions for all kinds of content, such as:
- Pages
- Posts
- Taxonomies
- Custom post types
- Archive pages
This helps you maintain content uniformity. Yoast provides snippet variables to help you, so you can create your custom content. The Content Types tab also enables you to choose if you want to display the post-publication date in snippet preview—and if people can see how recently you’ve created those posts.
But, showing your publication date on SERP informs the user of how updated your content is. Hence, they might prefer your content over any competitor.
4. Integrates XML sitemaps and search console
Gone are the days when you had to install a separate plug-in to manage the site’s XML sitemaps. Yoast SEO automatically generates and submits XML sitemaps to Google and Bing.
It also discharges you from the regular practice of adding XML sitemaps to the webmaster tools account. The plug-in has the search console, previously known as Webmaster Tools Account, integrated into the dashboard. You can view your website’s performance in SERP from your WordPress dashboard.
Is Yoast SEO the right choice for you?
Content marketing is crucial for creating an authoritative brand in this cut-throat competition. But publishing your content without optimizing for search engines, is not a good idea.
Having a tool assisting you with the nuances of SEO can help you track your rankings and improve them overtime with consistent strategies. Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO tools for you if you have a WordPress website. It has an intuitive interface and is easy to implement.
However, if you’re looking for some expert guidance on content marketing and how you can use SEO to improve your rankings and conversions, then reach out to us at Contensify. We’ll help you in improving your Google SERP image with curated strategies.
Contact us today to get your content marketing toolkit ready.
