Beat the Limitations of Yoast SEO Free with These Tips

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What is Yoast SEO?

Every WordPress user is more than familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin. It is a useful, freemium, and innovative plugin that makes your site more SEO friendly. But free Yoast SEO has certain limitations, and you have to purchase Yoast SEO Premium to overcome these limitations. If you are on a tight budget, exploring solutions that does not involve any costs are always ideal. In this article, you can find out all about the free alternatives to complement your Yoast SEO with our 6 Yoast SEO Free Tips. So, scroll down and start your learning trail!

The world wide web is huge, and yet you had stumbled on my site looking for something. I hope you find it as we had taken huge efforts to create them. Best of all, its FREE! Hence, some of our content may include affiliate links (i.e. whenever you click on the links and purchase, I earn a small commission at no extra costs to you!). No worries! Some of these links may look like phishing, but I assure you they are not! Lastly, the affiliation does not affect my reviews towards them. Enjoy!

1. No Suggestions for Internal Links and Auto Internal Linking

Complement AnswerThePublic with Yoast Free SEO
Image Source: AnswerThePublic

Yoast SEO encourages adding internal and external links in your articles or blogs. Adding Internals links can improve visibility, eradicate bounce rate, and provide you with a better understanding to improve quality. But Yoast SEO doesn’t provide suggestions on what links to possibly add to your page. Although Yoast SEO premium suggests internal links from your website, to add to your page, this can be quite a hindrance if you are using the free Yoast SEO.

But, don’t worry, we introduce you to Inter Links Manager, a free WordPress plugin that automatically helps you with internal linking of keywords to your own URL. All you need to do is go to the Plugin Manager, add all the keywords then enter the URL link you wish all these keywords to link to. Set! You can also optionally set how often the link appears on a page and search engine follow. It is recommended not to set search engine to follow to reduce visitor dropout and to set the link appearance number to not more than 3 to prevent overloading.

Alternatively, you may also consider Internal Link Juicer which is also free and equally rated as Inter Links Manager but with double the active installations from WordPress users. This Plugin also comes with slightly more features.

However again, both Plugins does not offer internal links suggestions so before setting the auto-linking, you will have to manually find keywords yourselves. We suggest this tool, AnswerThePublic, which allows for unlimited keywords finding using their artificial intelligence (AI).

2. Not Redirecting Old Links to New Ones

In Yoast SEO, if any page or website that you linked on your page, gets deleted, the reader might have to be redirected to a ‘Page Not Found’ message. This can be quite annoying at times and might make you lose visitors. Although Yoast SEO Premium redirects all the deleted links with new links automatically, this feature is absent from Yoast SEO Free.

There are various Redirection plugins available on WordPress that redirects 404 error links to new links.

  • Redirection: This free WordPress plugin tool automatically creates redirects when the user clicks on a link that is broken, deleted, or changed. You just have to configure the plugin once to do this. Download Redirection today to avoid having dead links!

3. No Top Performing Keywords Suggestion:

Finding top performing keywords are important as it plays a vital role in improving the ranking of your site. Kindly note that this limitation is different from the first we mentioned as this keyword need to be tied to search engine’s ranking of it. Hence, AnswerThePublic, is not suitable.

Here we suggest the following free tools, not Plugins, TAKE NOTE:

  • SpyFu: This SaaS is one of the top SEO providers in the world. Their particular function, Keyword Research, is free and has no limits on the number of keywords entered. On top of, it also shows other extremely useful analytics such as similar keywords, top associated questions, difficulty to rank this on search engine, the estimated costs for paid clicks etc. This software is extremely useful and famous in ‘Spying’.
  • Ahrefs: We like this tool because it generates a huge number of keywords per search and provides the estimated average number of searches a month for all keywords, although if you are only using the free version, only the top ten keywords by volume will show the keyword difficulty (KD). Remember that the lower the KD, the easier it is to rank on that particular search engine. We also like this tool for its ability for free users to generate keywords based on four search engines and the countries that the keywords are most popular of.

4. No Social Media Previews

Yoast Social Media Previews
Image Source: WP Social Preview

Although the Yoast SEO Free allows users to preview how a page is going to be displayed in Google, it doesn’t provide the option of previewing pages on Facebook and Twitter. This is important only for users who are also managing their Facebook and Twitter accounts with their WordPress site. Although not totally essential, it does saves time and perhaps some embarrassment to publish without preview.

  • WP Social Preview: This plugin is lightweight but carries a lot of potential especially in the age of social media. This open source software is able to support previews on Google, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

5. No SEO Keyword Export

The premium version of Yoast SEO allow users to export their SEO scores to a CSV report for external analysis or future use. This explains just why this feature is a must have and must use feature! But don’t worry! Here is a WordPress plugin that exports your SEO meta data to a CSV report and more for a one-time small fee.

  • Smart SEO Data CSV Import/Export Suite for WordPress: This WordPress software allows users to import and export SEO meta data with the possibility to filter by post types, tags or taxonomies. Most importantly, it also is able to integrate with Yoast SEO to extract out data from this plugin. Besides, the ability to import SEO meta data means the possibility to update in bulk easily and quickly. The fee is only US$39 for one site license. We suggest to grab it!

6. No Outdated Content Notification

Yoast SEO Premium has an amazing feature of notifying you when the content on your blog gets outdated and old. This can have an impact of search engine’s ranking as search engine have a preference for updated content. In this case, we mean up to one-year max. If the content published date are too far and a hassle to update constantly, then make schedule to update multiple content at one go.

This small limitation is not hard to tackle. All you need is to set your own notifications with some phone apps, email apps, calendar or work tools. Basically, any tool that you use on a daily basis could potentially be used to notify a call to update. Then from there, all you need is go to the WordPress Post interface and do a full review and publish again, or schedule for publishing on a later date.

Final Comments

We had discussed some ways, external tools and plugins that could be useful for your SEO efforts as a free user in Yoast SEO. The plugins we suggested are lightweight and not meant to be used as a SEO tool itself as using multiple SEO plugins in one WordPress site is not recommended and may potentially cause a crash. We certainly hope you enjoy our 6 Yoast SEO Free Tips.

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If you have any recommendations of your own, feel free to COMMENT below for everyone to learn.

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