Today, we’re making Yoast SEO 20.3 available to the world. This release comes with a long list of enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements designed to help you improve your SEO experience.
Improved highlighting in analyses
One of the most significant updates in this release is an improved highlighting feature. Yoast SEO helps you quickly locate where you need to make your edits to improve the readability of your content by highlighting the pieces in your text.
In this release, we’ve made the highlighter better. We can now highlight content in captions of audio, embed, gallery, image, table, and video blocks in WordPress. You can also use it to highlight content in Yoast SEO FAQ and How-to blocks.
The highlighter helps you locate the places where you’ve used your keyword, like in this caption
Portuguese language enhancements
We’ve made important improvements to our Portuguese assessments in the release, like the passive voice and transition words assessments.
Yoast SEO’s passive voice assessment helps you create clearer and more concise content. Passive voice can weaken sentences. It can make them harder to understand, so this assessment checks your text for instances of passive voice. By reducing the use of passive voice in your writing, you can improve your content’s overall quality and readability. The assessment is available in multiple languages.
The transition words assessment in Yoast SEO helps improve the coherence and readability of your writing. Transition words are essential to connect ideas and help readers understand the flow of your content. By analyzing your text for the use of transition words, the assessment can suggest improvements to your writing. We’ll highlight instances where transition words could be added or replaced.
In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved these two assessments for the Portuguese language. The passive voice assessment now has better detection of participles. Plus, we’ve added new transition words to the transition words assessment, thanks to the contributions of Mathias Ribeiro.
Bug fixes and enhancements
Regarding bug fixes, we’ve addressed several issues in this release. For example, shortcodes in the Block editor will no longer be treated as words in the content analysis. Additionally, editing text in the Classic editor while the highlighting feature is enabled will no longer make the text unfocused, and self-closing break tags </br> will now be removed when analyzing content.
Other improvements in this release include avoiding PHP warnings due to a wrong variable type. Also, we removed the beta badge for the inclusive language assessment.
Yoast SEO Premium redirect manager
Yoast SEO Premium also gets a round of enhancements this time. For one, we’ve made the links in the redirect manager clickable. It’s now easier to check if these are functioning properly. The redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium is a valuable tool for ensuring that your website visitors always find what they need. It helps prevent 404 errors and maintain a well-structured website, improving search engine rankings and user experience.
Update to Yoast SEO 20.3
At Yoast, we’re always working hard to improve our line of SEO plugins. Each release brings improvements and enhancements that make it easier to manage your site or improve its SEO. Yoast SEO 20.3 has a long list of fixes and improvements, from highlighting content to enhanced support for the Portuguese language.
In Yoast SEO 20.2, we’ve improved our innovative indexables technology. We’ve developed a faster and more reliable way of indexing your site’s data. In turn, we make better use of this data to improve your site’s SEO. Plus, this technology helps us do our best to make the web greener and lays the groundwork for exciting future possibilities.
An improved indexing system
You might be wondering, “What exactly are indexables?” Well, think of them as a way to help search engines find and understand the content on your website. An indexable is any resource a search engine can index via a URL.
When a search engine “indexes” your website, it creates a map of all the pages it knows about. The indexables framework allows Yoast SEO to make a similar map of your site, interact with it and manage important SEO-related information.
But what makes indexables so special? Essentially, they allow Yoast SEO to better handle different types of content on your website beyond just traditional pages. This includes things like categories, archives, media files and far beyond that. This can greatly help larger sites with many different content types. Plus, it helps us build features on top of it!
And the best part? The indexables technology means better performance and more efficient use of resources. It’s a step towards making the web a little bit greener, as it reduces the amount of processing power needed to manage SEO metadata.
So, how does this work?
When you create a website, you like stuff to be easily accessible online. Indexables help Yoast SEO understand your website, so it can help search engines like Google understand your website better. Yoast SEO stores information about your website in a unique database table that we use to uncover and use your data — and speed up your database.
To put indexables to work, you need to optimize your website’s SEO data. You can do this when you set up Yoast SEO or at a later date. When you optimize your SEO data, Yoast SEO will store information about your website’s pages in a unique table. This can take some time, especially for large websites, but you only need to do it once. After the initial optimization, Yoast SEO will automatically update the indexables table whenever you change something on your website.
Today, we’re launching improvements to this system for Yoast SEO and WooCommerce SEO.
You can run the indexables SEO optimization from the first-time configuration screen or in the tools section of Yoast SEO
Going green with Yoast SEO
Our enhanced database system is one of the many improvements we’ve made to make a difference on the web. Thanks to this technology, we’ve improved the loading times of millions of websites. Features like our crawl optimization options help you determine what search engines should and shouldn’t crawl — keeping them in check and making them waste fewer resources.
When your website loads faster, it reduces the time and energy required to load and display each page. Less resources, such as electricity and data, are needed to load your website. This increased efficiency can positively impact the environment by reducing the energy required to power and cool the servers that host your website.
Additionally, optimizing your SEO data and improving the crawlability of your website makes it more efficient and easier for search engines and visitors to navigate.
Update to Yoast SEO 20.2
Yoast SEO 20.2 comes with an update to our indexable database system. With this release, we’re laying the groundwork for some interesting new developments. Plus, we’ve improved the system’s performance, helping to achieve a better web — and a greener planet! — for all.
After successfully introducing a new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0, we have more exciting news! We have built an integration with Mastodon, the decentralized and open-source social network. Yoast SEO Premium users can now verify the link in their Mastodon profile with this integration. We’re also adding your profile to the structured data we generate for your site. Plus, we’re improving our inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO 20.1.
Mastodon is picking up steam
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many people have moved to the popular open-source alternative, Mastodon.
Mastodon is part of the fediverse (a combination of the words federated and universe). Unlike Twitter, it’s a decentralized network of communities and platforms, powered by open-source communication software. This provides an alternative to centralized social media, giving users more control over their privacy and data. It also provides more options for people to join communities based on common interests and values.
Introducing a Mastodon integration to Yoast SEO 20.1
The Mastodon integration in Yoast SEO Premium does two things:
It helps you verify the link to your site in your Mastodon profile
It adds your Mastodon profile to the sameAs structured data we output for your site
The integration allows users to verify the links on their Mastodon profile quickly and easily. Simply switch on the Mastodon integration, add the URL of your profile in Yoast SEO, and add a link to your site on Mastodon itself. After that, refresh your Mastodon page, which should show a green verified link in your profile.
Enter the link to your Mastodon profile on the Site representation section of Yoast SEO
The Schema structured data for Mastodon works automatically. After adding your Mastodon profile in the Yoast SEO settings, we add that link to the structured data graph we generate for your site. We use the same sameAs links for other platforms. This makes it easy for search engines to identify all the other platforms you are active on.
This integration is part of our ongoing commitment to making content creation and distribution as seamless as possible for our users. Our values align with Mastodon’s focus on the open web, user privacy, free speech, and community building. So we’re excited to offer this integration to our users. Try it now!
Also, an Easy Digital Downloads integration
In addition to the Mastodon integration, we’ve added an integration for the popular Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) WordPress plugin. We improved Easy Digital Download’s Schema output for this integration and tied it into the Yoast SEO schema graph. This makes the combination much more robust. You can activate it in the Integrations section of Yoast SEO.
More add-ons integrating with the Yoast SEO Schema API
Improvements to the inclusive language analysis
Over the past months, we’ve worked hard on making our inclusive language analysis as helpful as possible. In Yoast SEO 20.1, we are releasing an improved version of our inclusive language analysis. This latest addition to our collection of SEO tools emphasizes the importance of using language that is inclusive, respectful, and free of bias.
Language is one of the most powerful tools for creating a more inclusive world. With the inclusive language analysis, we want to empower our users to make a positive impact through their writing.
Creating content that resonates with all audiences is essential in today’s rapidly changing and diverse digital landscape. The inclusive language analysis provides real-time feedback on the language used in your content and offers suggestions to help you create more inclusive content.
If you haven’t started using the new and improved inclusive language analysis, try it out now! Help create a more inclusive and respectful digital community for all.
Upgrade now to Yoast SEO 20.1
Two weeks ago, we successfully launched the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0. Reactions have been really positive! Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal said, “I’ve been practicing SEO for almost 25 years, and this version of Yoast is the easiest-to-use SEO plugin I’ve used to date.â€
After releasing that first piece of the puzzle, we are excited to present you with more shortly. But for now, we’re introducing Yoast SEO 20.1 with a new Mastodon integration and improvements to the inclusive language analyses.
We are thrilled to announce the release of Yoast SEO 20.0. This release features a brand-new, state-of-the-art settings interface that takes your SEO work to the next level. We took great care to design an interface that’s logical and easy while simultaneously fully featured. This user interface brings Yoast SEO ahead of the curve and prepares us for a bright future!
Meet your new SEO best friend
With Yoast SEO, we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming.
It’s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off!
The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0
A better interface for you and us
We’ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use.
Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: “We felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us. Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPress’s interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasn’t progressed for years.â€
“I’m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release,†says Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast. “Our team wanted to do this, and they delivered. It is a technically outstanding change and proves we are constantly improving and optimizing. Our new user interface shows we’ll keep delivering the best possible experience to our users. A very exciting first step in 2023!â€
A logical structure for settings in Yoast SEO 20.0
The first thing you’ll notice about the new interface is its sleek, modern look and streamlined navigation. The new sidebar lets you quickly and easily access all essential settings and features without navigating multiple pages or menus. We’ve even added a search feature to find everything you need in a jiffy.
We reshuffled the contents of the old settings and divided them into four main sections:
General:
Site features: here, you can easily switch specific features on and off, from the different analyses to IndexNow and the XML sitemaps.
Site basics: in this section, you can find the basic information about your site, like the name and tagline of the website, plus force rewrite options and the like.
Site representation: this section contains information about your site that helps search engines understand it better through Schema structured data, like if the site represents a person or an organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.
Site connections: here, you can connect the different search engine tools to your site, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Content types:
Here, you’ll find your site’s settings for each content type. You can determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data describe this content best.
Categories and tags:
Same as the content types, except this is for your taxonomies.
Advanced:
Here, you’ll find features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium. Plus breadcrumbs options, plus settings for various archives and special pages.
Individual feature settings pages
One of the most significant changes in Yoast SEO 20.0 is the new, intuitive layout of all the individual settings pages. Each setting now has a clear and concise explanation, making it easy to understand what it does and how to use it. The new interface also includes insightful links to give you more context on optimizing your website for search engines. This makes it much more user-friendly for those who are new to SEO.
Like a breath of fresh air
Yoast SEO 20.0 is a game changer
Overall, Yoast SEO 20.0 is a major step forward in developing the plugin, and we are confident that it will help you achieve your SEO goals more easily. The new interface is cleaner, more intuitive, and user-friendly. It’s now easier than ever for you to optimize your website for search engines. We are excited for you to start using the new interface and see it for yourself.
Thank you for choosing Yoast SEO. We look forward to helping you improve your website’s rankings with our new, super-modern settings interface. And remember, this is only the beginning!
Earlier this year, we added a new feature to our Premium plugin, the inclusive language analysis. Now we’re excited to say that we’re bringing it to Yoast SEO Free as well. Why? Because we believe that using inclusive language is essential in making the web a better place.
Taking a stance
We believe that inclusive language is so important that we wanted to make sure that everyone (who wants to) can use this feature. Not only does it make you less likely to exclude people and alienate them with your content, but it’s also becoming more important in SEO every day. If you want to take advantage of this new feature, head to your features settings in Yoast SEO to turn it on. This will also be available in Yoast SEO for Shopify later this week.
Does inclusive language matter for SEO?
You might be wondering why we added a check for inclusive language in Yoast SEO, a product focused on improving your SEO. Using inclusive language helps you reach a wider audience and avoid alienating potential customers. It aims to create content that’s accessible and understandable to as many people as possible. This leads to more people returning to your website, sharing your content, and even buying what you’re selling.
It simply helps you to write content that doesn’t exclude people. Content that doesn’t alienate or even offend a portion of your audience. Which, especially as a business owner (or website owner), you don’t want to do. And that can happen easily without you even realizing it. Google also points out the importance of using inclusive language in your content. You can learn more about this in our post about inclusive language and SEO.
The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO
This new feature works pretty similarly to our other analyses by giving you real-time feedback on your text with the use of traffic lights. Here is an example of what it looks like when in use:
The inclusive language analysis in Yoast SEO
It’s up to you whether you activate the analysis
It’s good to know that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it won’t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content. You can activate it by going to Yoast SEO > General > Features and toggling the inclusive language analysis switch. If you choose not to use this feature, the SEO and readability analyses won’t change.
Activate this feature ve language analysis in Yoast SEO > General > Features
We strongly suggest using it as it can benefit your SEO and helps you make your content relatable for a bigger audience. The goal of inclusive language is to avoid excluding or alienating people. So, this new analysis helps you create content that everyone can enjoy and that’s less likely to offend anyone!
Other improvements and fixes
Of course, we’ve also worked on improvements for our SEO plugins. For instance, we’ve improved the subheading distribution assessment to make it easier to find those overlong paragraphs. Now, hit the eye icon to highlight the subheading where the piece of text appears. Very helpful when working on long articles! The same assessment also keeps an eye on your intro and warns you if you start your article with an overly long introduction.
Quickly find overly long pieces of text
We’ve improved our Integrations page, making it clearer which WordPress plugins hook into our Schema API. This means that the structured data output by these plugins will be neatly tied into the graph Yoast SEO generates for the site. Together, this forms a very comprehensive Schema solution. We urge other plugin developers to come on board — check out our Schema documentation!
Improved admin bar menu
Today, we’re cleaning up the admin bar menu and expanding the range of options. If you are a Yoast SEO Premium user, you can open up the front-end SEO inspector instantly to check the SEO settings of the page you are currently on. You’ll also find the focus keyphrase you set for this page and the overall readability and SEO scores in the famous colored dots. Plus, you can find quick links that let you send the page to be analyzed by external tools, like Google’s Rich Results Test or PageSpeed Insights. Of course, you also access the Yoast SEO settings from there.
Updated admin bar menu in Yoast SEO 19.12
Of course, there’s more. We’ve added a new Website name text field in the Site representation step of the First-time configuration. You can also set this in the Search Appearance section of the settings.
We’ve also worked on improving compatibility with PHP 8.2. In addition, we now ask users to update to a recent version of PHP, as we are dropping support for PHP < 7.2 starting March 1st, 2023.
Enjoy these Yoast SEO updates
In this release, we’ve added support for our inclusive language analyses to our free Yoast SEO version. Try it out and see if you can write more inclusive content that will help you reach a broader audience.
It’s Cyber Monday, and the Yoast Black Friday deals are still going strong. Have you claimed your 30% discount yet? If not, hurry! Time is running out. Get the advanced features of our Premium plugins and outrank your competitors in Google. Are you looking to save time and access easy tools and practical tips on boosting your rankings? Yes?! Then you should get Yoast SEO Premium!Â
Our 2022 Cyber Monday sale has now ended. But you can still sign up for our newsletter: you’ll get all the latest Yoast SEO news and blog posts delivered straight to your inbox. Register now so you don’t miss our next sale!
Not convinced yet? In this post, we’ll tell you all about the benefits of Yoast SEO Premium and why your site can’t do without it — interested in one of our other plugins? Check out this post!
Write content that ranks in the search engines
To stand out in search engines, you must write high-quality, SEO-friendly content. SEO is still king (or queen!). Why? People don’t want SEO-friendly content per se; they like what SEO-friendly content can do for them. You need to optimize your text for the right keywords without over-optimizing. Your text should be easy to read. You definitely should add keywords in a text; you should optimize your text. However, optimizing for search engines should never compromise the readability of your text. That could hurt your rankings.
Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced analysis that recognizes different word forms and synonyms. It can recognize plurals, past tense, and other word orders. You can add related keywords too. With Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll be able to optimize your text for SEO without compromising the readability of the text.
An example from a text optimized with Yoast SEO Premium for [puppy training] with the synonym [obedience classes]
Help Google to understand your site
Google is brilliant, but it needs help understanding the structure of your site. Always bear in mind that Google’s bots follow your internal links. That’s the way Google crawls through your site. That means you can’t have any dead ends or 404s on your site. Otherwise, Google will get lost. Yoast SEO Premium will help you to take care of all 404s with the redirect manager.
Posts with many will appear more important to Google than posts with little or no internal links. This means that you’ll need to optimize your internal links so that Google knows what the most important content is. Yoast SEO Premium offers practical SEO workouts to help you quickly improve and optimize your internal linking structure. Also, you’ll get internal linking suggestions within every post to further enhance your internal linking structure.
The cornerstone content workout in Yoast SEO Premium helps you to link to the most important articles
Manage the SEO of a growing website
If you keep adding content to your website, Google will have more trouble crawling through a big site. And what to do with outdated content? You shouldn’t have old stale content on your site. How do you keep track of it all?
Yoast SEO Premium will help you with your SEO maintenance. We will remind you to update those stale articles and tell you if you don’t update your most essential pages regularly. Our SEO workouts will help you keep track of your SEO and solve all kinds of problems you’ll encounter if your site gets large. With SEO workouts, we help you get the work done. We’ve made it incredibly easy to stay on top of your SEO, saving you precious time and effort. If you follow the steps in our workouts, we’ll make sure to keep your website crawlable.
Yoast SEO Premium also gets you access to a recent feature built to optimize crawling on your site. The crawl cleanup settings give you more control over which unnecessary and unimportant URLs, scripts, and metadata in WordPress you want to keep Google from crawling. WordPress automatically adds these to your site, only adding unneeded overhead. Blocking these URLs makes your site easier to crawl — making your site a lot more sustainable!
In the Crawl optimization section of Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll find a load of options to finetune crawling
Learn EVERYTHING about SEO with Yoast SEO academy
Buying Yoast SEO Premium will give you access to all of the online courses of Yoast SEO academy. And you want that! We’ll help you get started with keyword research and how to set up an internal linking strategy, but we’ll also teach you everything about structured data. Everything you ever want to learn about SEO is covered in one of our courses.
Each course consists of multiple short videos, reading materials, and quizzes. We’ll share a lot of practical tips that you can put into practice right away.
A small sampling of what’s available in Yoast SEO academy
Only a couple of hours left to go green on Cyber Monday!
What are you waiting for? Make sure to go green today and buy Yoast SEO Premium with a 30% discount. And start outranking your competitors! But be quick, as this sale won’t last forever…
Go Premium and unlock this feature!
Unlock our internal linking features and get free access to all of our SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium:
Exact keyword matching used to be an important SEO tactic, but those days are long gone. Now search engines can understand when similar phrases and related terms mean the same thing. Adding too many exact match keywords might make Google think your post is just another piece of spam. We’ll explain how to write naturally while still using your keywords. You’ll be seeing green bullets in no time!
As we mentioned in the introduction, focusing on just exact keyword matching isn’t really necessary anymore. It can actually be harmful to your SEO by making your writing seem spammy. In fact, in Google’s helpful content update, they said they wanted to see: “helpful content written by people, for people”. This means that the quality of your content could have an even bigger impact on your rankings. So you should focus on creating content that’s written in a natural way, using a variety of related keywords and phrases. Automatically-generated content or content that’s spam-full with keywords simply won’t work anymore.
What does writing naturally mean?
Using a natural writing style means that if someone reads your text aloud, it sounds like normal human speech. Think of the way it sounds when a friend, family member, or teacher explains something to you — that’s ‘natural’. In contrast, a legal document or a technical handbook is written in an ‘unnatural writing style’; very few (if any) people speak in that way.
A natural writing style has lots of benefits! It’s usually more comfortable for users to read, and can be a lot more engaging. Many people find writing in a natural way easier, too. Think about it — reading a magazine article feels a lot more enjoyable than reading a set of terms and conditions. It feels like the author is talking to you, and you can get to know the person writing.
Natural writing and SEO
Let’s say you’re preparing for the holiday season. You want to optimize your site so people can find it, which is great! But thinking too much about keywords and calls to action can be a distraction. The result? Clunky, hard-to-read text with too many keywords or keyphrases squeezed in where they don’t belong. Unfortunately, those keyphrases aren’t likely to help your rankings much, and any user who does find your page in the search results probably won’t read your content.
Does that make it harder to optimize your text for search engines? Not at all! Especially if you use the Yoast Premium SEO analysis because this feature recognizes related keywords, synonyms and variations of your keyphrase as well. It allows you to write high-quality content for your visitors and much more natural-sounding texts! Because when we speak naturally, we say the same thing in lots of different ways too.
“Yoast SEO only recognizes my exact focus keyphrase”
So, what’s the difference between the Premium SEO analysis and the free version? Is it really worth getting the premium version to prepare your site for Black Friday (and other holidays)? While the free version of Yoast SEO is great for getting a general idea of how many times you mention your focus keyword, our premium plugin helps you write more naturally. You’ll get high-quality content and the best SEO results. Not convinced? Let’s look at an example.
Imagine this: You’re trying to optimize your post for the term [guinea pig]. In your text, you’ll probably use guinea pig (singular) and guinea pigs (plural). However, if your focus keyword is the singular [guinea pig], the keyword density check in the free version does not recognize your plurals and will give you a red traffic light.
In this text snippet, the term guinea pigs is used three times and guinea pig only once. That means we get a red traffic light…
The free version of Yoast SEO is great for getting a general idea of how many times you mention your focus keyword. But if you want to write naturally and get the best SEO results, our premium plugin can help.
How our premium analysis can help you
So how does the analysis in Yoast SEO Premium help you to write more naturally? Firstly, in the premium analysis, plurals and past tense are recognized as occurrences of your focus keyword, so they’ll count towards your SEO assessment and will help you get those bullets green!
Let’s look at the example again. With our premium plugin, both guinea pig and guinea pigs are highlighted:
The premium analysis recognizes both the singular and plural versions of my keyword. Which means: no red traffic light!
Why is the analysis a premium feature?
Recognizing plurals and past tense isn’t easy. And it’s different for all languages. Simply put, it’s a lot of work. That’s why we have an entire team of linguists working on it, making sure we’re adding more and more languages.
You can ignore the keyword density check in the free version of our plugin. But if you do, it’s still important to check for yourself that you’re using your keyphrase(s) in a varied and natural way. This will cost you time and effort, however. And with Black Friday and the holiday season coming up, you might want to save yourself the hassle of manually checking your keyphrases by using the Yoast SEO Premium analysis!
Besides allowing variants of your keyword, the premium analysis also lets you add related keywords and synonyms. For instance, instead of always using the keyphrase guinea pig, you can switch it up and refer to cavia or cavy instead, which is another name for the guinea pig. When you add cavy as a related keyphrase, you’ll get another SEO check for that phrase too.
Let’s look at another example: if your focus keyphrase is [playing with your cats], it will recognize that keyphrase in the sentence ‘You canuse toy mice to play with your cat‘. Or, if you want to optimize for [games for cats] it will recognize the sentence, ‘Another game your cat will love …’as well. The analysis is able to recognize these variations on your keyphrase and add them up to your total usage of the focus keyphrase.
Yoast SEO Premium makes it easier than ever to write SEO-optimized texts in a natural way. And it gets even better — by using synonyms and related keyphrases, you increase your chances of ranking for different related queries in the search results too! Read more about this in our post about how to use synonyms and related keywords.
Focus on writing naturally
You want your visitors to find and love your content. And you want Google to love it too! In order to achieve both, you should focus more on writing naturally, which is the whole idea behind our premium analysis. No more awkwardly rewriting your sentences, so the SEO analysis picks up on your keyword. No more wondering if you really didn’t use your keyword often enough, or if the plugin simply doesn’t recognize every instance. Our plugin will give you little nudges to optimize your text a bit more, without tempting you to chase the green traffic lights with exact keyword matching. You’ll write quality content that users will enjoy reading!
Today, we’re releasing updates for four plugins and add-ons: Yoast SEO 19.10, Yoast SEO Premium 19.5, Local SEO 14.7, and WooCommerce SEO 15.3. The updates mainly consist of enhancements and fixes, plus support for material structured data in WooCommerce SEO. Find out what else is new!
Yoast SEO 19.10 and Premium 19.5
The overarching theme of these releases is to get ready for the upcoming High Performance Order Storage feature in WooCommerce 7.1+. This feature is more commonly known as custom order tables. This long-awaited improvement promises significant performance gains for ecommerce sites. With today’s update, all of our WordPress plugins support this.
Besides that, we improved some small things in Yoast SEO, like giving you better feedback in the Flesch Reading Ease insights when we see that text is fairly difficult. Plus, we’ve fixed two bugs related to our integration with Elementor.
WooCommerce SEO: material structured data
When working on your ecommerce store, you need help from the WooCommerce SEO add-on for Yoast SEO. This helps you finetune your online store and improves the product structured data that Google needs to present your products in the search results.
Besides updating it for the above-mentioned new feature in WooCommerce, we’ve added two enhancements that make WooCommerce SEO even better. Recently, Google added support for material in the product structured data, which lets you specify what material your product is made of. This gives Google more details about your product; we all know the more information you provide, the better.
Go to the dashboard and click on Yoast SEO > WooCommerce SEO
Set the Material option to Product Material
Go to Products > Attributes
Add a new attribute and name it Material
Add a product material, like Wood
Go to Products -> Add new
Set a name and a price for the product, choose Material from the custom attributes, and select Wood
Go to the product page, inspect the source code and scroll down to the Product schema structured data
Tadaa! You’ll notice the material property in the Product schema. This should be set to the product material wood
Here’s what that looks like in the Schema Validator:
The material is now available in your product structured data thanks to WooCommerce SEO
Local SEO for Yoast SEO
Local SEO is the add-on you need if you focus on getting your business noticed locally. The Local SEO plugin helps you get all your business details in order — like opening hours and maps — and translates those details into structured data that Google can use to highlight in the search results. In this release, we’ve fixed several minor issues to keep Local SEO in top shape.
Update now to Yoast SEO 19.10 and the others
Today, we’re releasing updates to most of our plugins. These updates come with loads of fixes and enhancements to help you make the most of your work! Update now to get the latest and greatest.
