In 2020, I provided marketing guidance to over 100 small business owners. A common question: Is Yoast SEO worth it? My answer every time: Absolutely.
Why Is Yoast SEO Worth It
Yoast SEO is the #1 tool for on-page SEO. It’s a powerhouse, and their free version works just fine for many small businesses. (At $89/year, the premium version is an affordable way to turn a great tool into an amazing one.)
First and foremost, build your website in WordPress. Second, use this template to create a high-converting home page. Third, load the free Yoast plug-in and start using it. If you’re tight on time, you can do these three things and stop reading here.
Perhaps, however, you’re the sort of person who wants to know exactly what you should use Yoast for. You’re an inquisitive sort. I like that. So let me explain.
Why Use Yoast
SEO Analysis: Yoast helps you optimize your text for search engines by making sure your focus keyword appears everywhere it’s supposed to. And it tells you where you can improve.
Internal Links: As your site grows, it’s important to set up a good contextual internal linking structure. Internal links are links from one page on your site to another page on your site. Yoast makes sure you’re using internal links on each page. It’s a fast way improve your SEO while also making sure your most important pages have lots of internal links pointing at them.
Keyphrase Use: First and foremost, Yoast helps you avoid keyword cannibalization by checking that you haven’t used a keyphrase before. Yoast also checks that your keyphrase has been used the proper number of times (optimal keyphrase density 0.5-3.5%). In addition, it checks that you’ve used your keyphrase in the page introduction, subheadings, and image alt attributes.
Text Length: Yoast gives you a word count for each page. Word count is important. A regular site page or blog post should contain more than 300 words. A cornerstone content page (the pages or posts you want to rank highest in the search engines) should contain more than 900 words.
Back End Details: Yoast makes sure search engines understand what your content is about. It checks for use of your keyword in your SEO title and meta description, and it checks the SEO title length and meta description length.
Redirect Manager: Yoast lets you set up page redirects with ease. If you change one or more URLs, you don’t want visitors to land on 404 “not found” pages. Also, Google hates those pages.
Build your site in WordPress, use this free high-converting home page template, and download the free Yoast plug-in. Win-win-win.
Fast Wins + Zero Fluff = Game Changer
I have a lot more to say on this and many other important subjects. I’m pulling back the marketing veil to empower small businesses to survive and thrive — no marketing agencies required.
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