You’ve downloaded Yoast SEO, you’ve plugged in your keyword, you’ve checked off all their “boxes” and that little red light has officially turned green — but your blog post has been live for months and you’ve seen little to no results from your hard work.

That’s the issue with Yoast. It’s an amazing tool for bloggers, business owners, or anyone who wants to utilize SEO on their website, but it isn’t the solution for everything. 

Let’s talk about why your blog posts aren’t ranking even when you use Yoast SEO:

What is Yoast SEO?

Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress websites (or websites with a WordPress-hosted blog, like Showit) that helps with SEO. It allows you to specify metadata on your pages and gauge how “optimized” your content is based on the keyword you plug into its dashboard.

It’s extremely easy to set up and use. It’s one of my top recommended free tools for anyone who wants to improve their SEO and start organically connecting with new leads (especially if you’re starting or growing a blog). 

Yoast can do more than check your content and pages for optimization. It can also work with other aspects of your website, like creating a blog (or website) sitemap to submit your content to Google. 

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on The Yoast “Greenlight”

One of the most notable features of Yoast is the light — a small light in their dashboard that gives your content a rating for how well it’s been optimized for SEO in general and for the keyword you choose. 

It’s sorted by:

• Red: Not optimized, very poorly optimized. Needs improvement.
• Yellow: Somewhat optimized, meets some criteria, but not all. It could use some improvement.
• Green: Optimized well enough to Yoast standards. It may need some improvement, but it’s mostly considered “good to go.”

But none of this helps with choosing the right keyword. Your page might be optimized, but is the keyword one you actually have a chance of ranking for? It also doesn’t consider your user experience. You can make everything “green,” but then it’s awkward to read.

Essentially, Yoast gives you a good base to work from — but it’s not the end-all-be-all solution it tends to be presented as.

How Do You Know if Your Page or Post is Optimized for SEO?

Follow best practices to the best of your ability (without compromising on the quality of your content) and track your performance. Tracking your analytics is the only way to truly see if your page or post is optimized for SEO (and going to get you results). 

SEO goes beyond how many times you mention your keyword in your post and whether you’re backlinking to another page on your website. It depends on your website’s health, your competitors, and your industry as a whole; it can even depend on the search intent and interests of your dream clients and readers.

If you want to know if your page or post is optimized for SEO (beyond the Yoast SEO standards), here are some things to look for:

• Are you mentioning your main keyword in your title? Do you use it in your content in a natural, integrated way?
• Are you using variations of your keyword throughout your content?
• Have you specified your URL and optimized it for SEO?
• Did you add your meta description and image alt descriptions?
• Are you matching your audience’s intent and interests in the content? Are you answering their questions?
• Is your content easy to read and navigate? Have you introduced bullet points if needed, shortened your paragraphs, or added graphics to make your content easier to comprehend?
• Are you backlinking to other blog posts and pages on your website and to other reputable, trustworthy sources on the internet?

Just like Yoast, this list does not guarantee a first-page rank on Google, but it will help you find areas to improve and optimize your post and page beyond Yoast standards!

Can You Still Use Yoast? Yes, But…

None of this means you shouldn’t use Yoast; you should! Yoast shouldn’t be the ONLY thing you use to help improve your SEO and reach your dream clients. Looking at SEO like a checklist (which is exactly what Yoast does) serves as a starting point for SEO, but it lacks the nuances of human behavior. That’s exactly who we’re trying to attract. Making the Google robots happy is half the battle, but you can’t and won’t see results from SEO if you’re not writing, designing, and optimizing for real people.

Yoast will give you the green light for having 500 words, backlinking to another page on your website, uploading a featured image, and repeating your keywords a few times. What it won’t do is look at what’s being said in those 500 words, what you’re backlinking to (because, yes, it matters), if the image is even related to your content, or if the keyword makes sense for your strategy — all of which is considered when Google ranks your pages.

When you work with an SEO 1:1, you get a personalized strategy. We find keywords that work for you and look beyond word counts and keyword placement to put you in the best position possible to meet your clients where they’re at in their journey.

If you really want to see improvement (and skip the guesswork), book your SEO Audit and Optimization; just apply here to learn more.