WordPress SEO: Why Yoast Plugin Isn't Enough?

Read Time: 4 Minutes
WordPress SEO: Why Yoast Plugin Isn't Enough?

There are many ways to make your website more popular. For instance, a custom-built website might attract more people due to its uniqueness. You can click here to see how that goes.

Aside from that, one of the most well-known ways to improve your website's visibility is to use SEO

Since there are many SEO tools for this, people believe it's easy. They rely on tools like Yoast SEO. As one of the most popular WordPress plugins, it's currently used on over 5 million websites. Even some of the best legal outsourcing companies use it to optimize their website.

But, is that enough, and can these tools replace SEO experts? Well, read on to see our take on this.

How does Google work?

Google works in three stages:

  1. Crawling

  2. Indexing

  3. Serving search results

Let's go over each of these stages and see what they're about.

Crawling

  • Since a registry of all web pages isn't really a thing, Google periodically checks if there are any new or updated pages on the internet.
  • Google can find new pages in many ways. For instance, it will follow links from the pages it already knows, such as a hub page, to see if there's anything new. Sitemaps can also help Google with this, so you can upload one to make the process easier and faster.
  • Once it discovers the page, Googlebot crawls the page to see what it's about. Now, this may take some time since Googlebot tries to avoid overloading it.
  • Keep in mind that Googlebot doesn't crawl all pages on the internet. For instance, you, as a site owner, can forbid Google to crawl a certain page. Some pages are inaccessible without logging in, and other pages might be duplicates of previously crawled pages. 

Indexing

  • Once it discovers a new page, Google tries to understand what the content of the page is about. This is called indexing. It does so by processing and analyzing the content and key content tags and attributes, such as alt attributes, images, videos, and more.
  • It also gathers some signals such as the language of the page, the country the content is local to, and the usability of the page. That way, Google can assess the quality of the content as well as its target audience.

Serving search results

  • At last, when a user searches for something, Google will try to deliver the content of the highest quality and relevancy. There are numerous ways Google can determine if the content is relevant and good, as well as its relevancy. For instance, it considers the user's location, language, and type of device they're using in terms of relevancy. 

What does SEO have to do with that?

  • Now, search engine optimization, as the process of making your website better for search engines, helps Google do its job more efficiently. With SEO Services, you can get your website crawled efficiently and indexed more accurately.
  • For this purpose, companies hire SEO experts. Their job is to make sure the website is ranked as high as possible on the search engine results page (SERP).

So, why is Yoast SEO not enough?

  • As you can see, a lot goes on behind the scenes. Since Google pushes new updates quite frequently, SEO experts have a lot of things to do.
  • As we've mentioned, many experts use tools like Yoast SEO, but they don't fully rely on it. Let's see why that is.

It doesn't understand the intent.

  • Understanding and satisfying search intent is the most important thing to Google. If people couldn't find what they were searching for, they'd give up on it.
  • For that reason, Google has created multiple algorithms that go into depth and try to assess what the content is about and if it delivers quality. To help with that task, SEO experts include keywords throughout the content.
  • But, there's a catch. You can't just use them anywhere you like, randomly. Keywords need to be naturally incorporated to work. Also, being repetitive is boring and unnatural, so SEO experts often use the similar-but-not-identical terms.
  • Yoast SEO often doesn't understand that. It fails to recognize that you've used a term similar to the keyword. That results in wrong keyword density measuring. If you only listen to Yoast SEO, this will affect your real-life results.

It adds too much unnecessary code.

  • Each time you install a plugin on your WordPress website, a little more code is added to the existing one. This can reflect on your load time, which is not only a ranking factor for Google but also a deal-breaker for many users. People hate to wait, so they abandon the website that's taking too long to load.
  • Now, Yoast SEO is a good plugin, don't get me wrong. But it adds a lot more code than some other plugins. This can reflect on your load-time, depending on how the rest of the website is doing. 
  • So, make sure to check your code from time to time and remove unnecessary parts, as well as other plugins you're not using.

It doesn't break the rules.

  • Yoast SEO has strict rules as to what's considered good and bad. It relies on keyword density when calculating the content topic and relevancy to search terms because that's how Google used to do it. But that's changed, and the Yoast SEO algorithm still hasn't.
  • Yoast SEO, for instance, doesn't consider plurals, slightly tweaked grammar, or rearranged words as keywords. It only takes into account your focus keyword.
  • So, from time to time, it will suggest that you make some changes to the content just to cram in some more keywords. More often than not, your blog post will then end up looking completely unnatural. This will ultimately hurt your SEO more than help because Google knows when the content doesn't feel natural to the human ear.
  • So, have some common sense and listen to your gut. The quality of the content should always come first.

Remember that Yoast SEO is just not human.

  • SEO tools are of great help to those in charge of search engine optimization – many experts use them to double-check their work. But they can't entirely replace humans. 

 

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