If you want your site to rank highly in Google, you need an SEO plugin to make all of the on-page SEO tweaks that WordPress doesn’t allow by default. While there are a number of SEO plugins that you can choose from, most of the time your decision is going to come down to Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO.
So – which of these two SEO titans should you choose? Well, let’s find out…
To get your site’s SEO started on the right path, I’ll compare Yoast SEO with All in One SEO so that you can figure out which plugin is right for you.
The Introductions: Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO
Before I go into more detail, let’s take a quick look at both of these plugins.
A Quick Overview of Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. It has over 3 million active installs according to WordPress.org and has racked up an impressive 5-star rating on over 13,000 reviews.
Nowadays, Yoast goes beyond SEO, also offering content analysis, social settings, and more.
A Quick Overview of All In One SEO
While Yoast SEO hogs most of the spotlight, All in One SEO is no slouch with its similar 3 million plus active installs. It also boasts a stellar 4.5-star rating, but only 500+ reviews.
All in One SEO doesn’t handle readability or keyword analysis like Yoast, but it does offer social settings and plenty of other helpful features.
Which Has More Flexible General Settings?
Let’s start off by comparing the general SEO settings offered by each plugin. By that, I mean sitewide settings that don’t apply to specific posts or pages (I’ll cover those later).
Overall, I’d say both offer plenty of functionality for the average user – I’m not sure there’s a clear winner here. At least for me, both plugins let me customize all the aspects of SEO that I need to change.
Yoast SEO General Site Settings
Yoast SEO locks pretty much all of its helpful site-wide settings behind its Advanced settings pages option. Without enabling that in the Features tab of your Yoast dashboard, you’ll never see most of what the plugin has to offer.
Assuming you enable that, you’ll be able to do a few helpful things. First up, you can set up the sitewide title and meta structure for your various content pieces using dynamic variables:
While this feature is hard for beginners to comprehend, it gives you a ton of automation control over your SEO, especially if you’re using custom post types.
Skipping over to social, you can also add a default image for your open graph tags as a fallback for if a post without its own image gets shared on social media:
Other site-wide features that Yoast SEO offers include:
- XML sitemap generator
- Breadcrumb tool – very helpful if your theme doesn’t already support breadcrumbs
- Basic schema markup for your site
All in One SEO General Site Settings
All in One SEO offers similar functionality when it comes to site-wide settings, though the interface isn’t quite as user friendly.
In the General Settings tab, you can set up your site-wide titles and meta descriptions. Just like with Yoast, you can use custom variables to insert dynamic content:
You can also use dynamic titles for custom post types in a separate section.
One neat feature in the General Settings tab is the Google Settings box. Here, you can set your preferred site name as well as add markup for the Google Sitelinks Search Box:
To get more functionality, you can also use the Feature Manager to activate tools that allow you to manage:
- Sitemaps
- Social Meta
- Robots.txt
Which Has Better Post-Specific SEO Settings?
While the site-wide settings were fairly similar, the plugins start to diverge when it comes to the post-specific settings.
All in One SEO tends to focus exclusively on SEO and social settings, without any analysis. On the other hand, Yoast SEO does both analysis and settings.
For total beginners, Yoast SEO offers an easier approach because it includes guidance. But if you’re already familiar with SEO (and don’t need Yoast SEO’s fairly shallow analysis), All in One SEO offers a more streamlined interface.
Additionally, there is one more key difference in that you need the pro version of All in One SEO to perform SEO for individual categories, tags, and custom taxonomies, whereas Yoast SEO lets you do that for free.
Yoast SEO Post-Specific Settings
Here’s what the basic Yoast SEO meta box looks like on an individual post:
At the top, you have tabs for readability and a focus keyword. On the left, you have tabs for social settings and advanced settings. And you can always manually edit the title and meta information by clicking Edit Snippet.
So…is Yoast SEO good? Well, like I said, beginners might appreciate the readability and keyword analysis. I personally don’t. The keyword analysis can be helpful, but I think readability is close to worthless.
Still – I use WordPress a ton. If you’re a beginner, these analyses do absolutely give you a helping hand.
All in One SEO Post-Specific Settings
For comparison, here’s what All in One SEO’s meta box looks like for an individual post:
As you can see, there’s a lot less there. Is that bad? Not really. Like I said in the intro – if you’re already familiar with SEO, All in One SEO still lets you do everything that you need with regards to titles and meta information. It just cuts out all of the analysis.
For example, Yoast SEO lets you add a focus keyword to your post. All in One SEO doesn’t. That’s not “worse.” It’s just different, and maybe a little less beginner friendly.
Which Has Better Social Media Support?
Both plugins let you configure social options for your content. In fact – I’m not sure there’s any major difference here.
Both plugins let you configure for Facebook and Twitter with a similar set of options, so I’m calling this a draw.
Yoast SEO Social Media Settings
Here’s what Yoast SEO’s social media settings box looks like:
You can set the title, description, and image for Facebook. And if you click over to the Twitter tab, you can do the same for Twitter.
All in One SEO Social Media Settings
All in One SEO’s social interface isn’t quite as streamlined, but it offers all of the same functionality:
One small advantage of All in One SEO is the ability to set a custom video as well as your Facebook object type.
However, I doubt most regular users will take advantage of this feature, so I don’t think it’s enough to swing things in All in One SEO’s favor.
Which Has Better Sitemap Support?
Both plugins allow you to create XML sitemaps. And just like social settings, I don’t see anything significant to differentiate the two. So again, I’m calling this section a draw.
Yoast SEO Sitemap Settings
Yoast SEO lets you create a sitemap, as well as exclude certain post types and/or individual posts:
All in One SEO Sitemap Settings
Similarly, All in One SEO lets you create a sitemap, as well as set up custom priorities for the content:
One nice feature is that you can also manually add URLs for pages that are hosted outside your WordPress site:
As with social settings, this option is definitely nice for some users, but I don’t think the need is universal enough to tip things in All in One SEO’s favor.
What Else Is Worth Considering?
Both plugins approach features differently. With Yoast SEO, pretty much every feature is already enabled when you install the plugin.
On the other hand, All in One SEO ships with the minimal number of features and allows you to enable additional functionality as needed via a Feature Manager tab.
For this reason, All in One SEO feels decidedly less bloated than Yoast SEO, which I think is a point in All in One SEO’s favor.
Additionally – both plugins offer Pro versions.
Yoast SEO’s Pro version adds:
- Multiple focus keywords
- Internal link suggestions
- Redirect manager
All in One SEO’s Pro version tacks on:
- Advanced WooCommerce support
- SEO for individual categories, tags, and custom taxonomies
- Video SEO
Should You Use Yoast or All in One SEO?
I don’t think you’ll go wrong with either plugin. In the end, it comes down to this:
If you want the most beginner friendly SEO plugin, go with Yoast SEO because not only is its interface designed to be user-friendly, it also has a huge support community behind it because it’s so popular.
On the other hand, if you’re a more advanced user, I think All in one SEO offers all the functionality you need, along with some help small features that come in handy occasionally. You’ll lose the analysis features offered by Yoast, but I don’t think that’s a major drawback for advanced users.
Me personally? I use both depending on the site (legacy effect). I have a small preference towards All in One SEO – but both plugins have done well for me.
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