Yoast SEO Premium: How to Upgrade from Free Version to Pro
Considering buying the Yoast Premium? This page gives you excellent reasons to upgrade. Authored by Harsh Agrawal (shoutmeloud.com). ShoutMeLoud is an award winning blog that talks about living a boss free life with blogging. They cover about WordPress, SEO, Make money blogging, Affiliate marketing. Feature image courtesy of Rawpixel.com via Bigstockphoto.
Yoast SEO is the best free SEO WordPress plugin out there.
But they also have a paid version which has added features like:
- Redirect manager
- Multiple focus keywords
- Social preview
- Internal linking
For redirects, I used a free redirection plugin.
I usually don’t use the focus keyword option.
I don’t typically need to see the full social preview.
And for internal linking, I used the SEO Smart Links plugin, but I thought the plugin was getting old and needed to be replaced with something better.
The Yoast internal linking feature available on the premium version shows posts that can be interlinked directly in the post editor section. This was enough reason for me to start using the pro version of Yoast.
It’s not necessary for you to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium. However, since I blog for a living and it’s always a good idea to lower down the number of plugins, I finally decided to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to upgrade from the Yoast free version to Yoast Premium.
How To Upgrade From Yoast SEO To Yoast Premium
Once you have purchased the Yoast Premium license, you will get an email with the plugin’s download link and activation key.
Download by clicking on Download Yoast SEO Premium.
Now, follow these steps:
Note: Make sure you are using the latest free version of Yoast SEO.
- Upload the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, but do not activate it.
- Disable the free version of Yoast SEO.
- Now, activate Yoast SEO Premium.
All the data from the free version will be automatically used by the premium version.
- Click on SEO > Go premium > Licenses to add your license key.
Once your Yoast SEO Premium license key is activated, you can start using their premium version features.
The whole upgrade process doesn’t take more than 5 minutes.
Using the Internal Linking Feature on Yoast SEO Premium:
To start using the internal linking suggestion feature, you need to first analyze your content. Depending upon your blog size, it could take a few minutes to a few hours.
To analyze, you need to go to Yoast’s SEO settings:
Dashboard > General > Internal linking
Once the analysis is complete, you will be able to see the internal linking suggestion from WordPress post editor section.
After using this feature for a while, I believe this one thing alone is worth upgrading the plugin.
Here is how this feature shows suggestions on the WordPress post editor:
The best part is, you can simply drag and drop any suggestion to quickly add it to the writing section.
Note: On other blogs, I had no issue using this feature. However, on ShoutMeLoud, the content analysis failed to crawl everything. I believe it’s because we have a huge site here with more than 2500+ posts.
Redirection Module:
Click on SEO > Redirects to start using the redirects feature. If you are using any other redirection plugin, you can migrate the data to Yoast SEO Redirects and deactivate that other plugin.
From the settings option, you can configure what kind of redirection you want to use:
- PHP or Web server
Yoast SEO Premium can generate redirect files that can be included in your website’s web server configuration. If you choose this option, PHP redirects will be disabled. Only check this option if you know what you are doing!
Social Preview:
The social preview feature shows you how your post will be shown on Facebook and Twitter. This feature is also available on the free version, but there you can’t see the full preview.
For a single person managing a blog, this feature is not so important. However, for blogs with multiple writers, this feature will help improve the content publishing flow.
Multiple Focus Keywords:
This feature is useful for those who take on-page SEO seriously.
One major difference between Yoast free and Yoast Premium is the number of focus keywords you can target in an article. In the free version, you can target only one focus keyword, whereas in the premium version, you can target multiple focus keywords.
Conclusion: Is Yoast SEO Premium Worth the Upgrade?
Yoast is a reputed company in the WordPress community and so are their products.
The SEO premium version costs $69 for one site and offers the above additional features. Some of these features you can definitely get by with using free plugins, however, for those who are blogging to earn money or using WordPress for their full-time business, Yoast SEO Premium is definitely worth it.
If you are starting out with a limited budget, you can upgrade to the premium version later in the future.
I believe these additional features save a lot of headaches and make life much easier. I would also love to see more new features added in the pro version of Yoast SEO in the near future.
