Another Rank math review….Yes! But stick with me, and I promise to make it worth it.
According to web experts, Rank Math plugin is the new kid on the block when it comes to SEO. SEO is an important factor, that you just can’t afford to ignore. You could be writing some killer content, but without SEO, it’s worthless. I know. It sucks.
Although I have done a few reviews on SEO products, I’m far from being a guru.
Needless to say, I’ve really been slacking on the SEO aspect of my blog. According to my visitor’s stats, I get about 2 or 3 visits per day. Yeah I know, it’s really bad.
Therefore, in this rank math SEO review, I’m challenging myself to improve my blog’s SEO with the Rank Math plugin. I’m going to document my journey with Rank math, and together we’ll determine its credibility. You are free to join me on this challenge. I’m sure it would come in handy.
Why Rank Math? | Rank Math Review
Well, I did some research and found a couple of reviews on Rank math. Every blog post that I found recommended Rank Math as the best SEO plugin out there. You can never go wrong with reviews. And I just became curious. That’s why I decided to take a leap of faith and try it on my blog.
Getting started | Rank math review
To get started, I visited Rank Math’s official website and created an account. Once you are on the website, I recommend creating an account first.
Then proceed to register your account. After completion of registration, you’ll have access to Rank math’s dashboard. Here, you will see an option to download Rank math plugin.
After successful download, navigate to your WordPress dashboard and upload the plugin. Once you activate the plugin, you should see Rank math’s setup that prompts you to connect your account. You can connect, or just click on “Skip now“.
After the prompt, you should have a setup as shown below:
Choose “advanced” as we want to utilize the plugin at an advanced level and make custom edits. After doing this click on “start wizard“.
If you had Yoast SEO on your website, you’ll get an import settings page that generally imports the settings you had put on your “Yoast SEO“.
I really love this about Rank math and you can tell they’re really trying to be accommodative as much as possible.
The next page is the website setup page.
On this setup page, you’re required to choose the type of blog/website represents. I went with “Personal blog“.
On the “logo for Google“, you’ll need to upload the logo that you intend to appear on Google. You’ll also share your preferred image on social media. Whenever you share content on social media, this is the image that will represent your blog/website. I went for my logo, as I think it’s the best image for my website.
Kindly note, if your website falls under “small business website” or “Webshop“, you might be prompted with other entries such as “Business type” & “Company name”.
Then click on “Save and continue“.
The next page, is the Google services page. If you have already set up your blog’s Google analytics, you can let Rank math access your data. Otherwise, you can skip this, and work on it later.
In my case, I already have Google analytics and Google search console for my blog prompttrends.com. Therefore, I’ll click on “Connect your Rank math account”. You can also do this, if you have already connected your website with Google search console and Analytics.
Give access to Rank math by checking the options on “Google Analytics“, “search Console” and “Manage list of sites“.
For success, you should be able to connect Rank math with Google Analytics & Search Console, as shown below:
Connecting your account with Analytics & Search Console, will finish the setup process faster.
However, if you skipped this, the next page will be the sitemap settings.
The default settings should work fine. Click on “save and continue“.
The next setup is the SEO setup.
Rank math has already done a good job, in selecting the best options for SEO. The “No index empty category” option should be checked to ensure that empty pages are not indexed, as it would interfere with the ranking.
The “open external links in new tab” option, is quite essential, as it ensures that stored content is not changed. I mean you want to open external links on a new tab, to also improve the user experience.
Click on “save and continue“.
You should now be done with the basic settings. Click on the “Setup Advanced options“.
Turn on the “role manager“, on the next setup.
Here, you’re free to assign roles to different users, such as Admin, author, and subscriber. This is especially important for content creators, with different user roles on their website. Choose your preferred settings. Once done, click on “ Save and continue“.
On the next setup page, you’ll find the 404 setup. Turn on the 404 monitor, as it ensures that you’ll see if your visitors get 404 pages (broken pages without content). Also turn on redirections, so as to redirect users to other pages, when they bump into error 404. Once done, click on “save and continue“.
The next setup page is the schema setup page. This setup puts rank math at an advanced stage as this is a very important feature when it comes to ranking pages. Ever noticed featured snippets on Google; usually the first results on Google? This is usually a result of optimizing schema settings.
Ensure that “schema type” is on. This option will ensure that Google processes your data and determine how best to display your data. On the following settings, enable settings as shown below:
The above settings tell Google to optimize for a rich snippet when you’ve created a new article or blog post.
For the landing page, elements kit, templates, and widgets, you do not need a schema type. If you have a product reviews blog/website the “schema type for products” will come in handy. This option will optimize your product review post for a default rich snippet. Proceed by clicking on “Save and continue“.
You will then be redirected to the WordPress dashboard, under Rank Math.
From the dashboard, you can see that Rank math has so many SEO settings for different website setups. Turn on the “Image SEO” setup.
The next step is to set up the “General settings“. Simply click on this option under Rank math.
The first tab will be the links option. As we had already set up, these links options on the setup, we can leave the settings as default.
Under breadcrumbs, I would recommend not turning it on. Different websites and blogs come with different themes, and turning breadcrumbs on would likely break your site.
I actually enabled breadcrumbs by mistake, and immediately received this email, sent by Google search console.
Therefore, breadcrumbs not only affect your theme structure but also affects your SEO.
The next step is the “images” tab. Here you’ll see the “add missing alt attributes“. What are image alt attributes? Alt attribute names display when an image fails to appear. However, they play quite a key role in SEO, and could highly rank your website from the images section on Google.
You want your “Alt attribute” names to have the same keyword as your blog post, as this will have significant results with SEO. So where do you edit your “Alt attributes“?
When uploading your image on WordPress, you’ll have an option to edit the Alt text and the Title, as shown above. Choosing an ideal keyword as your alt text will be quite effective on SEO.
Therefore, should you let Rank Math automatically add Alt missing attributes and missing title attributes to your images? I would not recommend it.
Why? Because Rank math assigns alternative text based on “site title“, “site description“, and “filename“, among other settings. Consequently, it would be hard for Rank math to assign alt attributes based on your desired keyword.
I highly recommend doing this manually from your media library as shown above. However, if you are not much invested in your blog, or do not have much time to optimize for SEO, enabling these options would come in handy.
Under webmaster tools, you’ll need to verify your site to Google search console. As I’ve already verified my site, I’ll show you how to set this up, with one of my sites that’s yet to be verified.
Navigate to Google search console and create an account. After creating your account, click on “add property” as shown below:
Click on the dropdown, and you’ll see an option to “add property“.
Once you’ve clicked on “add property“, you should have a tab like this appear:
Input your website URL, and click on “continue“.
You should have a verification tab appear:
We are going to use the “Html tag” verification option. Click on the dropdown as shown above.
Now click on “copy” beside the code.
This code is what you’re going to copy to the “Google search console” entry under webmaster tools.
Then click on save changes.
Now head back to Google search console to verify property.
You should now have your website property verified.
Under robots.txt, leave the default settings as they are. Robots.txt settings determine the pages that Google crawlers should visit or not.
On the “others” section, you’ll find RSS settings for Rss sites such as New York times and Google news. You want your site to be easily picked by Rss websites, therefore you have to optimize your website for this.
Essentially, you’ll need to enter settings according to how you’d love your blog/website to be displayed on RSS websites. Enter the settings as shown below:
Additionally, you should also leave the “Woocommerce” settings as they are.
Leave all the other remaining settings as they are.
Titles and meta | Rank math review
On the titles and meta category, ensure that “robots meta” is checked so that your website is indexed. Choose your preferred separator. Under “open graph thumbnail“, your logo should work fine as the fallback thumbnail, if a featured image is not set. Leave the other settings as default. Go ahead to save the changes.
Under “Local SEO“, Rank math is keen to let you provide your Local SEO, info as it plays a major role in ranking your business. Ever noticed those rich snippets that appear on Google when looking for services in a particular location?
Therefore, if you have a business with a physical location, these settings are quite necessary for you.
Provide as much information as you can under Local SEO to boost your SEO rankings.
If you categorized your entity as a small business, you’ll have additional options under this category such as email, address, address format, business type, and opening hours.
Under social meta, provide your detailed social information.
In the “authors” section; if you have many authors on your blog, enable the “Author archives“. However, if you are the only author on your blog, you can disable it. It is usually possible for posts and author archives to create duplicate content and Google could penalize you.
In misc pages, you can change settings according to how you’d like your 404 errors and search results to appear. However, the default settings should work well.
The post settings section is very vital to determine how your post titles will appear in the search engine. This is especially important if you have a reviews blog. Most people want up-to-date information, and optimizing these post settings will increase your page views.
A good example is this website that I found on Google when I typed “best drones“.
However, when I visited the website, the title barely looked like what appears on the Search engine.
This is sort of like a hook to get the visitor to click on the link. And it works. Therefore, how your website appears on search engines is very essential. And this is what these big websites do to get as many visitors as possible.
So how do we emulate this?
On the post settings, under “single post title“, choose your preferred title displayed setup. If you have a blog, a setup like this would be effective:
The above setting will custom display your title on search engines, and include the current year, even if your main blog title does not include it.
To add more options such as month, just click on the dropdown, and you’ll see more customized options.
The excerpt under “single post description” works well, as it derives relevant information and displays it on the search engine. Leave other settings to default and save changes.
Under pages, it is recommended that you optimize settings manually for the best results. We will explore this towards the end of the article.
Leave “attachment” and “WPTB tables” settings as default.
In the categories section, you don’t want your categories/archive pages to be indexed as this could lead to duplicate content problems with Google. Therefore, under “categories archives robots meta”; enable it, and make sure to check the “no index” option.
This way, even if your website produces duplicate content, you’ll be on the safe side, because it won’t be indexed.
Adopt the same settings under tags and click on save changes.
Sitemap settings | Rank Math Review
What’s a sitemap? In short, it’s a road map that helps Google understand your blog/website helping it access important pages in order to index them. Consequently, you want to add your sitemap to your Google search console.
As shown above, copy the sitemap index, then navigate to Google search console.
Make sure to select your desired website on the dropdown menu, then navigate to sitemaps, as shown above.
Now paste the link as shown below, then click submit.
Setting up Analytics | Rank math Review
To set up Google Analytics, navigate to “Analytics“, and click on “Connect Google services“.
However, you can’t do this if you haven’t created your Google Analytics account. To create your Google Analytics account, follow the simple steps in the video below.
After creating your account, now click on “Connect Google services”. Since I had already linked my Google Analytics account, I have my Google analytics data displayed on Rank Math’s “Analytics ” tab.
As you can see, my website could really use some serious SEO boost.
Optimizing Pages with Rank Math | Rank Math Review
In order to fully explore Rank math’s potential, optimizing your posts and pages will prove to be quite effective. For example, my website’s appearance on Google is “Home -Prompttrends.com” however, I’d like it to appear as “Prompttrends – Digital Marketing Made Easy”.
To do this, I’ll have to edit my homepage with rank math.
On your WordPress dashboard, navigate to pages, and under the homepage, click on “edit”.
On the top right of the page, you should see a Rank math editing tab, with a preview of your page on Google. Click on “edit snippet“.
Now, edit your homepage title, and make it something relatable to your niche.
You can also edit your excerpt information as shown below:
Now, this excerpt info will appear below your homepage title. Here, you can give a brief info about your site, and what a user can expect when they visit your site.
Optimizing posts with Rank Math | Rank Math Review
For a detailed tutorial on how to optimize your posts, I will show the exact steps I took to edit this “Rank math review” post. Sounds good? Let’s get started.
As you can see I’m actually using Rank math to optimize my post.
1. Adding focus keyword to SEO title
Adding your focus keyword to the SEO title plays a big role in ranking your article. With my main keyword as “Rank math review“, it does appear on the title.
2. Adding focus keyword to SEO meta description
You want to add your focus keyword to your meta description, as it appears on Google as an excerpt, and users can easily visit your link if you provide relevant info.
3. Adding focus keyword to URL
For your article to rank for your focus keywords, you have to include the keyword in your URL.
4. Adding focus keyword to content & appearing on the first 10% of content
I have made sure to include the focus keyword on the content, and the keyword is also featured in the first paragraph.
5. Writing more than 2500 words
Writing a long-form article boosts your SEO score, and you’re likely to outrank your competitors, using the same keyword. In this “rank math review“, post I’ve made sure to write more than 2500 words.
6. Including focus keyword in the subheading and high keyword density
If you were keen enough, you’d notice that I included my focus keyword on a couple of heading 3s and also ensured that I have a keyword density of 1.44 as required by Rank math.
7. Using Content A.I. for more optimization settings
The Content A.I offered by Rank Math helps you determine how to improve your ranking score, by reviewing your content. It’s keen to suggest the required word count, link count, heading count, and media count in order to boost SEO score.
8. Optimizing title readability
In my title, I have included the focus keyword “Rank math review” and added a power keyword, “honest” which also plays as a positive sentiment. However, I couldn’t add a number to my title as it wasn’t relevant. An example of a title with a number would go like, “25 steps to Ranking your article with Rank math”.
9. Optimizing Content readability
You cannot undermine the readability of an article. You want your visitors to have an easy time going through your article. In this blog post, I was keen to include a table of contents, used short paragraphs, and included images and videos.
10. Including internal and external links
Internal and external links in your article are an old SEO strategy that still works wonders if you want your article to rank.
I managed to score 99/100 on this blog post. Not so shabby, ha!
NB: It is not enough to just install Rank Math. You have to customize your settings in order to explore the plugin to the core and for the ultimate SEO experience.
What I like about Rank Math
- They have a very friendly setup for beginners. I find the rank math sidebar that guides you to be quite effective.
- You get so many features on the free plan, that would cost an arm and a leg by other service providers. It makes you wonder about the kind of service you’d get on a Pro plan. Definitely worth it.
- Detailed Reporting- I really love Rank math’s comprehensive reporting. For example: Under analytics, I got to know the page where each article appeared on Google.
- Active customer care team- Ever since I downloaded the plugin, I have received a couple of informative emails from Bhanu Ahluwalia, Rank Math’s co-founder. You can tell that the company really cares for its clients. I actually had a small chat with him, so these are not just automated emails.
What’s the plan with this Rank Math Review
Over the next few weeks and months, I plan to optimize all my other articles with Rank Math. I will then take note of any significant SEO improvement, over the next months.
Eventually, I will purchase the Pro plan to 10x this SEO journey. I plan to go with the yearly plan that costs $59. I will document all the milestones achieved and what you can expect when you work Rank Math. Stay tuned.
Conclusion
Indeed Rank Math SEO plugin has broken odds in the SEO industry. You can tell that these guys mean business as they have gone above and beyond to deliver an in-depth SEO tool.
Although I just got started with Rank math, I can already feel that this plugin will boost my SEO to the moon. Join me on my SEO journey with Rank Math today. And Let’s get you ranked.
What’s your experience with Rank Math?