Rank Math: Feature Overview & User Guide
Constantly changing algorithms and standards can make content optimization challenging for businesses that depend on their website’s performance. While no tool can replace expert writers and SEO specialists, solutions are available to help companies and solo entrepreneurs climb those all-important search engine result pages (SERPS).
The Rank Math SEO plugin is one option for helping website owners reach their optimization goals.
What Is Rank Math?
Rank Math for WordPress is an SEO plugin with a user-friendly interface built especially for the popular blogging and website platform. It requires absolutely no technical or SEO (search engine optimization) knowledge to use.
The power of Rank Math starts with optimizing your content directly within the WordPress editor, whether you're working with page content or a blog post.
Within the editor, Rank Math makes suggestions based on the most widely used SEO practices. In your dashboard, you can also customize your SEO settings and control other elements that impact SEO, like how you want structured data to appear and which pages you want to be indexable.
Rank Math Feature Overview
Rank Math works because it doesn't take a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO. Although you can use it right out of the box, it’s fully customizable with a modular design that allows you to choose the features most important to you. Turn off the features you don't want to avoid unnecessary clutter, complications, and confusion.
Check out some of the key Rank Math features:
-
Over 15 Modules: Choose what you want, and activate some or all of them based on your priorities and goals.
-
Keyword Rankings: Keep track of where you stand in the SERPs with the keyword ranking charts, which highlight search phrases as they climb or drop.
-
Analysis: Detailed analysis checks over 30 common factors to help you identify pressing SEO issues that could impact your rankings.
-
One-Click Migrations: Seamlessly migrate data from other SEO plugins with a one-click import option. This allows you to keep all your historical data and other important settings in place.
-
Rich Snippets: Trying to get ranked with rich snippets? Rank Math offers support for over 20 schema types, including "FAQ" and "How To" snippets.
These features are only the beginning. Rank Math's features include an intuitive setup wizard that does all the work for you. Plus, it integrates with Google Analytics and imports schema markup from other sites and more. It all adds up to an excellent, thoughtful plugin you'll use again and again.
Pricing & Plans
Note: New pricing provided as a screenshot from Rank Math.
Simple pricing plans make setting up Rank Math a breeze. A free plan is available, but if you want to use all of Rank Math's significant features, you’ll want a paid plan. Luckily, they offer multiple tiers and payment options.
Free Version
The free version allows you to fetch Google data once every 7 days, and you can preserve that data for up to 90 days. You can still run a full site analysis, track keyword rankings, optimize content (individually or in bulk), and enjoy the other basic features.
Are you thinking about Rank Math vs. Yoast? Can’t you just get all these features with free online SEO tools? The answer is not really. Yoast checks individual pieces of content, but it won’t integrate with your entire site like Rank Math can.
Pro Plan
For $7.99/month ($6.99 for the first month), you can get the Pro plan and track up to 1000 keywords, plus you get a free trial of the Rank Math AI content generation tool. Unlike the free version, the Pro version lets you track the following:
-
Winning/losing keywords
-
Winning/losing posts and their corresponding keywords
-
Custom-build and validate schemes
-
Watermark social media images
-
And much more
Business Plan
For $24.99/month ($20.99 for the first month), the Business plan provides all the Pro features plus access to more keywords and the ability to run the Rank Math SEO tools on up to 200 websites. The Business plan is aimed at freelancers and business owners who support clients in need of SEO services.
Agency Plan
For $59.99/month ($49.99 for the first month), the Agency plan allows you to support 500 client websites, get 30K credits for AI-generated content, track 50,000 keywords, and more. If you work for an agency, check their website for more information.
All prices are exclusive of tax and include 24/7 priority support. Rank Math also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Why Do People Use Rank Math?
Plenty of free SEO tools are on the market, so the fact that most of Rank Math's features are limited to paid plans may disappoint some website owners. However, users repeatedly agree that Rank Math is worth the expense. Here’s why.
Rank Math represents many plugins in one. It simplifies your workload with a seamless UX that also improves optimization since you're keeping all your data in one place. Looking at comparable plugins available for Rank Math's top features, users say their Pro and Business versions add up to over $1,675.00. That's tough to dispute once you go down the list.
What Users Say
Reviewers on WordPress (and other review sites) consistently rave about Rank Math. In fact, within the WordPress Repository, the plugin has an average rating of 4.9 stars, with over 2,086 Rank Math review scores.
One recent review states, "I tried several SEO plugins and my conclusion was that RankMath is the most complete tool to set up SEO configuration. It is easy to use, provides a lot of useful information on how to set up SEO correctly, it works with Elementor, and I was able to set up SEO in pages, posts, products, etc."
This echoes the same positive sentiments of most reviews, with another saying, "We got bored with the unnecessary complexity of another well-known SEO plugin. After being recommended to me by a fellow developer, we made the transition and never looked back."
There are some complaints about the plugin’s pricing and plan changes. Certain features originally included in the free plan became Pro, and the update caused concern for website owners who had been relying on the free features.
The Pros and Cons of Rank Math
If you're interested in trying out a new SEO plugin for your website, consider Rank Math a top contender. Of course, every solution has its pros and cons. Here's a closer look at what Rank Math offers and where it may fall short for your purposes.
Pro: Pay the Difference to Upgrade
If you're hoping to try out the Pro or Business features but don't want to buy into the Business plan, you can get the Pro plan and upgrade later by paying the difference between the two ($140 plus tax). Unfortunately, there's no way to test out the Pro plan on your own site without signing up, although they do have a demo website.
Pro: Lenient Refund Policy
If you buy the Pro or Business plan and decide it's not for you, Rank Math will give you a full refund. The only limitation is that you must request a refund within 30 days of purchase. They will then void your plugin license and you won't be able to use the Pro or Business features unless you upgrade again.
Con: No White-Label Option
If you happen to be a marketer, agency, or business that offers SEO services to clients, you might be disappointed to learn that Rank Math does not have a white-label option. This means you cannot remove or hide Rank Math's branding from the client's website, which may complicate your billing processes.
Con: Rank Math Prohibits Group Buying
If you like to save money on plugins by sharing the cost and license with other website owners with a "group buy,” Rank Math doesn't allow it.
Con: Downgrading Can Complicate Things
If you sign up for the Business or Pro plan and later downgrade (either from Business to Pro or Pro to Free), you won't technically lose any data. Rank Math says they'll keep all content connected to the features associated with the more expensive plan intact. However, they say it's stored in your WordPress database and only reactivated when you upgrade and start paying for those features again.
This is something to consider, as you can't buy Rank Math outright. It’s an ongoing subscription, so downgrading in the future could impact your SEO if you downgrade to a plan that doesn't have the features you previously optimized your content with.
Rank Math Tutorial
In this quick Rank Math guide, we’ll take you through the initial Rank Math setup and critical Rank Math configuration points. Follow these steps for a simple Rank Math walkthrough:
1. Use the Rank Math setup wizard to get started.
2. Choose your Rank Math settings: Easy, Advanced, or Custom.
3. If you’ve used Rank Math before, you can choose settings from a previous Rank Math installation.
4. Rank Math will check your site to ensure it’s compatible with the plugin — a good reason to get the free trial before committing to a paid version.
5. The system will let you know if any current plugins are incompatible, e.g., other SEO tools.
6. It then lets you import settings from other SEO plugins.
The Rank Math interface will now take data from you for site optimization.
Rank Math Best Practices
Don’t skip the SEO Tweaks page. Here you can automate tasks, like ensuring consistency across your external links. Consider turning off the automated “nofollow” toggle, as you won’t want to apply this to all links.
In addition, make sure the 404 Monitor is switched on, as this automatically notifies you of pages offering the 404 error to visitors or search engines.
Check out forums and online communities for more Rank Math tips.
Scripted and Rank Math
All in all, SEO optimization with Rank Math is fairly intuitive. With a simple setup and user interface, you'll never feel overwhelmed. Rank Math keeps the user experience straightforward while packing in hundreds of dollars worth of premium SEO tools.
Of course, there's no point trying to optimize your website if it isn't built on great content. Businesses can feel lost when searching for the best ways to source that content. With 61% of B2B organizations saying they don’t have guidelines to help them use new AI tools for content generation, finding expert assistance for your content marketing strategy has never been more important.
Scripted provides support throughout the content marketing process, from ideation and strategy planning to publishing, understanding, and optimizing the performance of your content.
The content creation process at Scripted can mean AI alone or only human subject matter experts (SMEs). You can also choose a combination of both. Our talent pool includes some of the most experienced copywriters and editors with a wealth of knowledge and expertise from over 50 industries.
Plus, all our writers are up-to-speed with the latest SEO techniques, so your content has the best chance of performing well as soon as you publish it. Look for specialist badges on our writers’ portfolios that display their particular skills or expertise.
Get started with a 30-day trial of Scripted today to streamline your content marketing and SEO strategy.
