TL;DR: Let’s get this out of the way straight away: no SEO plugins on their own will improve your rankings. That’s not opinion, it’s fact.
If your content isn’t structured properly, lacks user intent, or simply doesn’t answer what people are searching for, no plugin can fix that.
Table of Contents
1.SEO Plugins Comparison: Yoast vs RankMath vs AIOSEO – What Really Matters
2. What SEO Plugins Actually Do
3. The Big Three: Yoast, RankMath & AIOSEO
4. Beware of SEO ‘Experts’ promoting plugins
SEO Plugins Comparison: Yoast vs RankMath vs AIOSEO – What Really Matters
To quote SEO legend Nikki Pilkington:
“They’re a good guide. They’re a nice basic checklist. They’re a help, especially when you’re starting out.”
That’s exactly what SEO plugins are – helpful guides, not magic bullets.
What SEO Plugins Actually Do
SEO plugins give you a framework to optimise your posts and pages. They check things like meta descriptions, title tags, readability, and keyword placement. They can even generate sitemaps and help with schema.
What they can’t do is make bad content rank. Google’s algorithms focus on quality, intent, and helpfulness. A plugin might give you a green light, but Google doesn’t care about that light – it cares whether users find your content useful.
The Big Three: Yoast, RankMath & AIOSEO
Recently, I compared the three main players: Yoast, RankMath, and All in One SEO (AIOSEO).
After years of using Yoast Pro, I’d become a little disillusioned. Yoast is still solid, especially when it comes to understanding semantic keywords, but it hasn’t evolved much recently.
RankMath, on the other hand, integrates neatly with Elementor and reads heading tags properly, something AIOSEO often struggles with. It’s got a clean interface and plenty of features, but there’s a problem – some of its scoring metrics are, frankly, nonsense.
To achieve a top score, RankMath insists you:
a) Include a number in your URL
b) Use their AI tool (a paid feature)
Neither of these are ranking factors.
Having a number in your URL might have mattered 15 years ago, but it doesn’t now.
This is where plugins can be misleading – they create the illusion of SEO success when, in reality, they’re just checking boxes that Google doesn’t even look at.
Beware of SEO ‘Experts’ promoting plugins
Speaking of misleading, this post on Threads caught my attention:
A self-proclaimed SEO “gurooo” (© Nikki Pilkington) was praising RankMath, calling it the best plugin around. Nothing wrong with that – until you realise it was a paid post, not marked as such (which breaches ASA rules).
The irony? That same “gurooo” doesn’t even use RankMath on their own site.
This is a perfect example of why you shouldn’t take SEO plugin reviews at face value. Always check whether someone’s promoting a tool because it works for them, or because they’re being paid to say it does.
So, Which SEO Plugin Should You Use?
Truthfully, none of them are perfect. It depends entirely on what you need.
- Yoast: Great for semantic keyword understanding, trusted by many, but starting to feel dated.
- RankMath: Integrates well with page builders like Elementor, but its scoring system is questionable.
- AIOSEO: Simple and effective, but can struggle with reading some page elements.
The best approach? Pick the one that feels most intuitive to you, learn what it’s telling you, and don’t follow its advice blindly.
Final Thoughts: Focus on Content First
SEO plugins should help you, not dictate your content. Follow the basic principles outlined in our post How to rank a blog post on Google.
Solve real problems for your users. Use sites like Also Asked or Answer Socrates for content ideas. Whether you use AI tools or not, focus on publishing content worth reading – not AI-generated filler or plugin-pleasing fluff.
At the end of the day, good SEO comes from clarity, structure, and usefulness, not from ticking boxes in a plugin.
