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Many of our users have asked us about the reasons we switched from Yoast SEO to All in One SEO for WordPress.
At WPBeginner, we decided to finally move to the All in One SEO for WordPress. It has improved our SEO workflow and given us the tools we needed to manage our website.
In this article, we’ll share our top reasons for switching to All in One SEO for WordPress and why we believe it is the best WordPress SEO toolkit on the market.
Why All in One SEO for WordPress?
If you are making a website, then installing an SEO plugin is one of the first things you should do in order to start getting traffic.
When we first started WPBeginner in 2009, we were using All in One SEO Pack because it was the original WordPress SEO plugin. After a couple of years, we switched to Yoast SEO because it was a newer plugin, and they had added new innovations.
Over the next several years, our website grew a lot. However, we felt that Yoast SEO stopped innovating and no longer had the features we needed. For instance, we needed better control over XML sitemaps, powerful schema.org tools, and more.
In 2020, our parent company Awesome Motive acquired the All in One SEO plugin.
The All in One SEO team did a fantastic job of completely overhauling the plugin, adding all the latest SEO features, and truly made it best in class. After numerous rounds of testing, we decided to make the move from Yoast SEO to AIOSEO in November 2021 because our team was convinced that AIOSEO had simply surpassed Yoast in terms of SEO features.
Since then, we have noticed a significant improvement in our editorial workflow and day-to-day SEO tasks.
That being said, here are the top reasons we switched from Yoast SEO to All in One SEO.
1. Better On-Page SEO Tools
On-page SEO is the term used for optimizing blog posts for SEO. This is one of the biggest day-to-day SEO tasks for most users as they add content to their websites.
All in One SEO offers the best on-page SEO experience with helpful features and tools at your fingertips.
You’ll see two prominent buttons in the top-right corner of your screen while writing content.
First, there is The Headline Analyzer tool, which gives a score for your post title with suggestions to improve it.
You can also try different headlines without changing the post tile and pick the best one. See our article on how to use the headline analyzer to write better SEO titles.
Under the General settings, you can add a focus keyphrase. This will give you an SEO score for your focus keyphrase with tips to improve it.
Plus, you can optimize your content for more than one focus keyphrase.
The snippet editor allows you to easily add SEO title, meta description, and focus keyphrases.
You’ll also see a live preview of how the page would look in search engines.
All in One SEO allows you to use dynamic tags in your SEO title and description. This way, you can automatically change the title and description.
For instance, you can use current month and year tags to always display the current year in the post title without editing them manually each year.
Best of all, the tags are searchable and you can easily add them from the drop-down menus, so you don’t need to know all the tags or look up any documentation.
The Social tab under SEO settings will show a preview of how your article would appear on Facebook and Twitter.
From here, you can set the title, description, and thumbnail that you want to use.
All in One SEO allows you to choose from a bunch of options for your social media thumbnails.
You can also just use the custom image option, and manually upload an image to use as a social media thumbnail for each article.
Need to redirect an article to a different post or page? No worries.
The Redirects feature lets you easily set up redirects for any post or page on your website without harming your site’s SEO.
Other on-page SEO tools include a Schema generator and Link Assistant. We will talk about them individually later in this article.
Overall, we believe that All in One SEO offers a much easier yet incredibly powerful on-page SEO experience than any other tool on the market.
2. Powerful XML Sitemaps
WordPress itself comes with built-in XML sitemaps and almost all other SEO plugins include some kind of XML sitemap functionality.
However, All in One SEO lets you take your XML sitemaps to the next level.
The plugin will automatically generate sitemaps for all your content types, including posts, pages, custom post types, products, and more.
You can easily exclude any post or page that you don’t want to include in your sitemaps.
Plus, you can also exclude any content types or taxonomies from your sitemaps.
Some users want to include their standalone landing pages to their sitemaps.
All in One SEO lets you include any page not generated by WordPress to your sitemaps.
The plugin also generates an RSS sitemap.
This includes the latest updates to your content and helps your newer content get indexed much more quickly.
If you run a news website, then you can generate a news sitemap to appear in the Google News carousel.
Additionally, you can generate a video sitemap. This helps your videos appear in Video search results.
This is the most extensive XML sitemap tool currently available to WordPress users, and it is still incredibly easy to use even for absolute beginners.
3. Most Comprehensive Schema Markup Support
Schema markup is a special type of HTML code that you can add to your WordPress website to tell search engines more about your content.
For instance, you can tell the search engines that a particular page is a blog post, a recipe, a FAQ, a news article, or a product page in your online store. Search engines can then use this data to display rich results.
All in One SEO comes with the most comprehensive support for schema markup for your WordPress website.
Starting with the Knowledge Graph data that helps search engines like Google get additional information about your website or business.
After that, you can set the default schema type to use for each post type.
You can also generate schema markup for individual posts or pages.
For instance, you can differentiate your regular articles from recipes, FAQs, online courses, and more.
If you run a local small business, then All in One SEO lets you easily add local SEO schema markup.
With local SEO markup, your site gets more exposure in local search results and Google Maps.
You can add multiple locations, display business hours, provide contact information, and more.
This extensive Schema.org support allows you to easily optimize your content for rich results in Google.
AIOSEO also lets you generate custom schema markup for recipes, videos, products, FAQ schema, and more. You can use their next-gen Schema templates to get rich snippets.
For power users, you can even write your own custom schema and save it as reusable templates, and it even has built-in schema validation.
4. Beginner-Friendly User Experience
Not all WordPress users are SEO experts, and even those with SEO expertise can benefit from a smooth user experience.
All in One SEO for WordPress makes SEO simpler for both beginner and advanced users.
It comes with a much cleaner and simpler onboarding experience than other SEO plugins, and a simple setup wizard walks you through the basic SEO setup.
It uses a modern user interface that is easy on the eyes and fast.
It saves you from unnecessary page loads when making changes to SEO settings.
The plugin also gets out of your way when you just want to write content or work on your website.
Once properly set up, beginner users can focus on creating content and growing their business instead of reviewing SEO settings.
At the same time, all the advanced features are easily accessible when you need them.
We believe this polished user experience makes a big difference when working on your website and performing day-to-day SEO tasks.
5. The Link Assistant Tool
Links play a crucial role in SEO. They not only help your users and search engines discover new content, but they also help search engine rankings.
However, tools that allow you to analyze your website’s internal and external links are usually very expensive.
All in One SEO brings that same functionality to your WordPress website.
The Link Assistant tool helps you analyze internal and external links added to each article.
The plugin will also make smart link suggestions. You can click on a post to review a suggestion and add the link without editing a post.
This comes in particularly handy for promoting newer articles by adding links to your older articles.
You can also click on the edit button and change the anchor text or surrounding text without editing the entire article.
We feel that the link assistant tool alone is a strong reason for switching to All in One SEO for WordPress.
6. Redirection Manager
Broken links cause 404 errors in WordPress, which may affect your site’s SEO.
All in One SEO comes with a powerful redirects manager tool that allows you to easily set up redirects on your website.
It keeps a log of 404 errors on your WordPress site so that you can easily find posts that may need to be redirected.
Also, if you change a post or page’s permalink, AIOSEO will immediately ask if you want to redirect the old URL to the new one.
Plus, if you ever plan to move your WordPress site to a new domain name, All in One SEO comes with a full site redirect that automatically redirects users to your new domain name.
7. Social Media Integration
Social media platforms play an important role in promoting your website beyond organic search traffic.
All in One SEO provides deep integrations to social media platforms with open graph metadata integration.
You can add links to all your social media profiles associated with your website and help search engines discover them.
Each author on your website can also add links to their individual social media profiles.
This allows search engines to discover social media accounts for authors on your website.
Finally, you can easily set open graph metadata and thumbnails for each article.
This allows you to override default settings and get more control over how each article appears when shared on social media.
8. Enhanced Image SEO for WordPress
Image search is an important source of traffic for many websites. All in One SEO allows you to easily optimize your images to get more search traffic.
Simply go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance and switch to the Image SEO tab.
From here, the plugin can automatically use the filename to generate an image title and alt tags.
You can also tell it to replace dashes and underscores with spaces and change letter casing.
With Image SEO, You can also disable WordPress attachment pages and redirect them to the original post or page where the image is embedded.
Lastly, you can optimize filenames by not stripping dashes, changing letter casing, and stripping common stop words.
9. Sitewide SEO Audit
For many beginners and small businesses, purchasing an expensive SEO tool for a site-wide SEO audit or competitor analysis is not a viable option.
All in One SEO comes with a built-in sitewide SEO audit and competitor analysis tool.
With an SEO audit, you can see an overall SEO health score for your website.
It will also give you a detailed report with practical suggestions to improve your SEO score.
You can also see how your competitors are doing and get an SEO score check for any website.
Bonus SEO Tools included with AIOSEO
Aside from the above reasons, AIOSEO also gives us dozens of other powerful SEO features that we simply didn’t have previously.
For example, they were the first ones to add IndexNow support in WordPress to speed up search indexing for Bing.
Recently, they added a powerful table of content block that not only helps improve user experience, but it also helps you get multiple links in your Google search results.
You can add a table of content block right inside your WordPress editor, and the best part is that AIOSEO automatically generates the markup while letting you fully customize the content (including hiding certain headings).
Also if you’re using headless WordPress site, then they also have a full REST API support to improve your SEO rankings.
How to Switch From Any WordPress SEO Plugin to All in One SEO?
Switching to All in One SEO for WordPress is quite simple.
First, you’ll need to install and activate the All in One SEO for WordPress plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Note: There is also a free version of All in One SEO that you can use. However, it may not have all the features we mentioned above.
Upon activation, you will be asked to run the setup wizard. During the setup, the plugin will automatically detect your other SEO plugin and will offer to import SEO data.
Simply check the box next to the old SEO plugin and click on the Import Data and Continue button.
All in One SEO will automatically import all your SEO data, including post titles, meta descriptions, keywords, and more.
You can also manually run the importer by visiting the All in One SEO » Tools page and switching to the Import/Export tab.
Simply select the SEO plugin you were using before and hit the Import button.
We hope this article helped explain the reasons why we switched from Yoast to All in One SEO for WordPress. You may also want to see our complete WordPress SEO guide for beginners or take a look at our detailed side-by-side comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO.
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