Should I optimise my blog posts with Yoast?

Every now and then, we’ll receive a question like this from our clients:

“I noticed our blog articles haven’t been optimised with Yoast. Is it worth doing?”

If you’re not familiar with Yoast, it’s an SEO plugin for WordPress websites. In this example, our clients are referring to Yoast’s SEO and Readability scores.

If you have Yoast installed, it’s easy to check your scores:

1. Click on “Posts” in the menu on the left
2. Once the page loads, you’ll find all the posts on your website in a table format
3. On the far right of the table, each row will have two columns with a coloured dot
4. The colours will be either green, orange, red or grey. The first column, with a traffic light icon for a header, is your Yoast SEO Score. The second, with a feather icon for a header, is your Yoast Readability Score.

The colours are a simple traffic light system:

• Green is “good”
• Orange is “okay”
• Red is “not good”
• Grey is no score (you need to enter a keyword to receive a score)

As a website owner with little SEO experience, seeing a post you’ve spent hours writing receive a red dot can be concerning. That’s usually when they email us.

It’s worth noting these aren’t official SEO scores from Google or Bing. No such thing is available publicly.

Yoast rates posts using their own system. The system is based on their subjective understanding and experience of SEO. It’s by no means perfect.

But… it’s pretty good.

The SEO Score provides tailored recommendations to help writers meet SEO best practices. And the Readability Score highlights any issues that impact how easy your writing is to read.

Both can be really useful. Especially if you don’t want to learn SEO and copywriting in detail, but want to cover the basics.

So, is it worth optimising blog articles using Yoast?

Yes, definitely give it a go. Ultimately, Yoast is encouraging you to follow some of the most established principles of SEO and readability.

Just don’t worry about it too much. As a business owner, you have far more important tasks than hitting all green on the traffic light system.