[00:00:42] Now, I don't make a recommendation one way or the other since only you know the status of your business budget. Instead, we discuss pros and cons so that you can either add or remove this tool from your wishlist. Since we've been diving into the features of Yoast all month, I thought it would only be appropriate to look into Yoast Premium for this episode.
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[00:01:28] First, Yoast maintains your site map, and a site map is something we can discuss in a future episode, but basically it's just a current list of all the indexable content on your website. Google uses this as part of the crawling and indexing process. The next thing that Yoast does for free is add relevant SEO code to your blog content.
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[00:02:14] So that Google can find it and so that you don't have to go digging through the HTML of your blog posts. And then the third thing that's helpful about Yoast is that it activates rich pins for Pinterest and you don't really have to do anything special for it. It just has to exist. Because the current way that Pinterest verifies your website for rich pins is different than it was in the past,
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[00:03:02] So those are just some of the reasons why it's so helpful to have an SEO plugin installed on your website. The other perks are the obvious ones of just having that support when you're working on your on-page SEO. The free plugin gives you space to add your meta description, adjust your slug and title, and all of those other important SEO tasks.
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[00:03:50] But what do you get for your $10 a month? Let's dive into some of the features of Yoast Premium. At the top of the list these days, I feel like it's this way with all tools right now, but they have AI features at the top, and that personally is not a selling point for me. But Yoast says that there is AI support for title and meta description generation,
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[00:04:47] And then if internal linking is a struggle for you, Yoast Premium gives you internal linking suggestions and also has an orphaned content finder so you can make sure all of your posts are linked sufficiently for SEO purposes. And if you're not sure what an orphaned post is, you can find more details about that in episode 44.
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[00:05:30] Like there's not a section in your H TM L that says Focus keyword this. Instead what that field does is it tells you and it tells Yoast like, what's the big picture here? And then the tool helps you make sure that you're optimizing the post for that keyword. And so basically the premium version allows you to add more keywords to do that process with.
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[00:06:27] Do you need the premium version of Yoast in order to take care of these specific blogging tasks? So kind of going back through that list, I would say first you don't need Yoast Premium in order to access support from AI. If that's something that you use in your blogging workflow, you can easily copy and paste into chat GPT
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[00:07:12] And as we've talked about in the past, cornerstone content and internal linking are both things that you can track with your own content spreadsheet or a database if you have one. You can sort your list of existing blog posts by category, and then you can look for a related content to include in the blog post you're working on, and then make sure you're linking to your cornerstone content.
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[00:07:56] and over time, you are just going to naturally accumulate rankings for additional keywords. So to sum it up, you don't have to use Yoast Premium in order to access these features. There are steps that you can add to your workflow to take care of these tasks for free. But I do think in the case of paying for Yoast Premium, you have to decide if the time you save by having all of those features available in one tool
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[00:08:43] But then for other people who are just getting started with their business and their website, they would much rather spend that $10 on a tool for a different part of their workflow and go ahead and manually take care of those other tasks. Ultimately, the choice is up to you because only you know your business budget and needs.
