Yoast Premium – What does the premium version of the popular SEO plugin offer?

A good web presence has many indicators. One of them is optimizing the website for the user and for search engines. Helpful in this are plugins which allow users to make adjustments, like SEO modifications, without needing programming knowledge.

In this article, we take a closer look at the paid Premium version of the Yoast plugin.

Yoast – the most well-known SEO plugin for Wordpress

Yoast is familiar to everyone who has worked with Wordpress and SEO. It is one of the best SEO plugins that Wordpress currently offers. Many important features, such as editing post titles and meta descriptions or setting a focus keyword, are included in the free version of Yoast.

Yoast now offers users a Premium version. We briefly present which additional features are included in the paid version here.

What YOAST Premium offers

Yoast Premium is currently available for 69 euros. The price includes one year of updates and support. If you want to install the plugin on multiple sites, there are discounts for 5-200 additional websites. More info can be found here.

Setting up redirects

Yoast Premium has an integrated redirect manager. This makes it easier for you to redirect URLs that need to be set up in your WordPress installation. This feature is especially significant because it allows direct integration with the Google Search Console (formerly: Google Webmaster Tools). Redirects can be entered directly into Yoast or a file can be generated. This is then placed on the Apache or NGINX server and subsequently interpreted by the web server. Thus, there is no need to work directly on the .htaccess file on the web server. Thanks to this feature, even non-administrators can easily and quickly set up redirects.

Figure 1: Redirects can be entered directly into Yoast

Optimize texts for multiple focus keywords

Another tool that Yoast Premium provides is the ability to optimize pages or posts in real-time. The focus keyword can be a word, a phrase, or a part of a sentence. For optimizing your content for this focus keyword, Yoast Premium is a great help. It checks in real-time and evaluates the number and distribution of the defined keyword in the text. Overall, up to five keywords can be defined.

As part of the Yoast Premium content analysis, the readability and SEO-friendliness of your text are checked. In addition, the Insights tool shows you the five words or word combinations that appear most frequently in your text. With this function, you can check if the topics you discuss in your text match what you want to convey.

Preview images on Facebook and Twitter

If you like to publish your posts on Facebook, Yoast Premium helps you in optimizing the presentation. Preview images, or so-called snippets, play a crucial role in click behavior and search rankings. With the additional tool at Yoast Premium, your workflow in creating social media posts is improved.

If you publish a post and have not selected a specific Facebook image in the Yoast Premium plugin, you do not know which image Facebook will automatically use. This is where Yoast SEO steps in and shows Facebook through metadata which images are available.

Figure 2: Preview article shows the feature image and the meta description

This allows you to see in advance how your post, which you want to publish on Facebook, will look.

For Twitter, a similar preview exists. You can edit the metadata under the images and adapt it according to your own preferences.

All social networks require similar data. If no specific values (images and metadata) have been provided, OpenGraph metadata are used. This is also the case with Pinterest and Google+.

For this reason, OpenGraph is also an essential component of this tool.

Optimize internal linking

For your site to rank well, among other things, the structure of your website must be flawless. A good internal linking is crucial. Handpicked, relevant links provide the best prerequisites for this.

However, now there is a better, faster way to add relevant links to posts: Yoast SEO Premium has a new tool that works via drag & drop.

While you are writing a text, the most prominent words in your article are identified in real-time. The Yoast SEO linking tool uses this data and searches for suitable posts on your website. On the right side of the editor, you will find a box with a whole range of links. The list is prioritized: the link at the top fits your new post best.

Figure 3: Links: prominent words in a post - Right: the link suggestions

As soon as your article is analyzed and the relevant links are presented in the box, you can select and then copy the link to the appropriate place in your new article. If your browser supports it, you can also drag & drop the link to the corresponding word or text passage.

Conclusion on Yoast Premium

Working with Yoast and the search engine optimization with the traffic light system is a good motivation to take the first steps with this tool.

Ultimately, the Yoast Premium version brings many advantages. However, it is very dependent on the content of the site. It should be decided individually whether Yoast Premium is really necessary.

Especially text-heavy websites or blogs that work a lot with Twitter and Facebook find the tool very valuable to optimize the website.

For all users who do not have a WordPress site, there is still good news: Yoast has recently announced that it will also soon be available for TYPO3 and Magento 2.

How can we help you further

Do you need help optimizing your website with Yoast or would you like to discuss in person whether Yoast Premium is ideal for your website, just send us a message.