Why the Yoast SEO Green Light Doesn’t Tell the Full Story

WordPress remains the most popular CMS out there, with a whopping 62.5% market share. One of the reasons for its enduring success is the level of customisation on offer, with thousands of plugins available to choose from – and one of the most widely used is Yoast SEO.

Thousands of site owners swear by it. It can analyse your content as you write it, telling you which SEO best practices you’ve implemented and which ones you’ve missed out on. For those new to the complexities of SEO, it’s a great way to get started, providing pointers to help you better optimise your content for search engines.

But it’s not the be-all and end-all that some think it is. Yoast (and other plugins like it) don’t tell you all you need to know in order to rank highly on the SERPs, and we’re going to explain why in this blog.

Is Yoast a good SEO tool?

Absolutely. We’re not saying Yoast and its competitors are bad tools by any means – they’re extremely useful. We particularly like how easy it is to edit metadata with Yoast; the handy metabox located at the bottom of each page allows you to tweak your title, description and even the page link in a matter of seconds.

The content analysis section is handy, too. Simply input a focus keyword and the tool will analyse your content in an instant, scoring it not only on its level of optimisation but also on its readability.

All of this is in a free plugin. Sure, there’s a premium version that comes with a few additional features, but even the free version offers most of what you need to get started with eCommerce SEO. So what’s the problem with it? 

Here’s why it doesn’t tell the full story

Although Yoast gives you satisfying green lights when you get things right, it’s easy for this green light system to lead inexperienced users astray. If you focus too much on making Yoast happy, you can easily end up making your content worse, not better. Here’s why.

It can encourage keyword stuffing

The main problem with Yoast is that its algorithm is far more simplistic than Google’s (or that of any search engine). For a piece of content to rank highly in the SERPs, it needs to do a whole lot more than just have the right keywords in the right places. 

Yoast will give you a green light if your content has a certain keyword density – but sometimes, achieving this keyword density figure isn’t possible without stuffing your content full of keywords. If you try too hard to implement the same keyword over and over again, your writing will end up feeling forced, awkward and robotic.

You’ll have made a classic mistake: writing for an algorithm instead of for a human. In the past (we’re talking years ago), including all the right keywords in your content was often enough to rank. But not any more. The complexity of today’s search engine algorithms means they can detect overly optimised content from a mile off – and they don’t want to see it. They want to promote content that’s enjoyable to read – content that other humans are going to enjoy. 

Yoast doesn’t always pick up all of the content on the page either, depending on the way the website is built. That can lead to inaccuracy in terms of keyword density, further leading you astray.

It doesn’t pick up on keyword variations

To compound the issue, the free version of Yoast only allows you to track one ‘focus keyword’ at a time. It’s rare that a piece of content is only optimised for one keyword, and even if it is, keyword variations should be used to make the content more appealing to read. 

Search engines can pick up on synonyms and variations of the same phrase, so including keyword variations is actually a good thing for SEO, not a bad thing. But Yoast can’t detect keyword variations like search engines can – so you might not always get the green light you were expecting. 

It doesn’t know who you’re writing for (or their intent)

Although Yoast can track keyword density, it doesn’t understand the intent of that keyword – a crucial element of SEO. Understanding keyword intent is so important because a piece of content that’s intended to be informative should be written very differently from a piece of content that’s intended to generate conversions. 

Again, this is something that search engines understand but Yoast doesn’t. Even if you include all the right keywords in all the right places, if your content isn’t written with the intent of that keyword in mind, it will fall flat from a ranking perspective. 

There’s more to content than just keywords

SEO is about so much more than just keywords nowadays. As we mentioned earlier, old-school practices like keyword stuffing used to actually work. It’s why they became so widespread. Now, there are no cheat codes or shortcuts you can take to generate page one rankings: you just have to write really good content!

That means not only using keywords that users are searching for but also recognising the intent of those keywords. It means optimising the layout of your page so it’s engaging and enjoyable to read. It means including all of the right CTAs and choosing the right tone of voice. It’s so much more complex than it used to be, and no green light system – no matter how slick and satisfying it is to use – will ever be able to tell you all you need to know about SEO. 

Need a helping hand?

With 25 years of experience in SEO and content marketing, we’re here to help you grow your eCommerce brand the right way. If long-term, sustainable growth is your goal, the team at Brave is here to help you make it happen. Explore our case studies today to see how we’ve helped businesses like yours become market leaders.