Yoast SEO analysis

Why do I need to use the SEO analysis in Yoast SEO?

If you are an SEO expert, you might know by heart what you need to do to make a page understandable for search engines and potential visitors. But for most people, SEO is something like a black box where stuff magically happens. With Yoast SEO, we try to open that box for all types of users — from beginners to experts!

The SEO analysis in Yoast SEO uses the focus keyphrase you set to check if you use this phrase in places where it should appear. For instance, this might be the title of your post, the URL, or the meta description. In addition, it also checks if you use the keyphrase enough in your main content and warns you if you overdo it. 

There are over fifteen different checks that help you get the insights you need to make the content ready to go. For instance, it checks if you’ve added internal and external links or if you’ve added relevant alt text to your images. Plus, it counts the number of words in your article to prevent you from posting thin content — i.e. content without much value to search engines.

This is just the tip of the iceberg!

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“I think Yoast SEO analysis is an awesome tool that has helped improve my online writing immensely. I can’t imagine doing what I love to do without the help of Yoast’s SEO analysis. Yes, it’s a pain in the behind at times. But at the end of the day, SEO analysis is that omnipresent, yet silent content editor and writing coach we all need. Thank you Yoast for building such an outstanding product.”

Rod Thomas, Lake Forest, USA

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Based on solid research and years of experience

Yoast SEO is a tool built by SEO experts with years of experience in the industry. Our team regularly conducts research to assess if everything we do in Yoast SEO is still relevant and useful. We also listen to feedback from our users and often sit down with representatives from search engines to discuss upcoming changes or developments.

Yoast SEO analyses work in real-time

All of the analyses in Yoast SEO work in real-time. Simply start writing, filling in the metadata, adding images and links and you’ll notice the checks do their work. Haven’t mentioned your keyphrase enough? You’ll get a red or orange light that automatically turns green once you meet a certain threshold. Repeat your keyphrase too many times and you’ll notice it turn orange or red once again.

The SEO analysis uses your keyphrase as input

By entering a focus keyphrase — the term you want this post to rank for —, you’ll activate most of the checks. Some work without it, like the text length and internal links checks. The keyphrase-based checks help you to find out if the text aligns with your keyphrase — have you used it enough in the right spots? Also, we check if you use the terms or their synonyms and related keyphrases — if you have Yoast SEO Premium — throughout the text and not just at the beginning.

Yoast SEO Premium adds even more features

With Yoast SEO Premium you get an extra thorough analysis. Yoast SEO Premium has an advanced analysis that recognizes all the word forms of your focus keyphrase. Word forms are grammatical forms of your keyphrase. For instance, if your focus keyphrase is [cats], the singular form [cat] would also be recognized. This also works for checks in the SEO analysis, like the meta description, the title, slug and subheadings. What’s more, Yoast SEO Premium also works with synonyms and related keyphrases. This means you can have the SEO analysis check your post on how well you diversified you made your content!

These are the checks in the SEO analysis

This page collects all the Yoast SEO assessments. From here, you can navigate to the individual assessments to learn more about what the check does, the specific feedback you receive and how you can improve your work.

The assessments are divided into three categories:

• Keyphrase-based assessments
• Other SEO assessments
• Readability assessments

In addition, we have a glossary that explains the most important terms regarding the content analysis.

Keyphrase-based assessments

• Keyphrase in introduction
  Checks whether words from the keyphrase can be found in the first paragraph of the text.
• Updated: Keyphrase length
  Checks whether the number of (content) words in the keyphrase is within the recommended limit. For languages with function word support only content words are considered. For languages without function word support all words are considered.
• Updated: Keyphrase density
  Checks whether the (content) words from the keyphrase are used in the text and whether they are used often enough (but not too often). For a match to be found, all content words should occur in one sentence. Multiple occurrences of all content words within one sentence are considered multiple matches.
• Keyphrase in meta description
  Checks whether all (content) words from the keyphrase are used in the meta description. A match is counted if all words from the keyphrase appear in a sentence. Multiple matches per sentence are counted multiple times.
• Updated: Keyphrase in subheadings
  Checks whether the subheadings reflect the topic of the copy (based on keyphrase or synonyms). A subheading is considered to reflect the topic if at least one (content) word from the keyphrase is used in it.
• Link focus keyphrase
  Checks if there are links in the text, whose link text contains keyphrase.
• Updated: Keyphrase in image alt attributes
  Checks if there are keyphrase or synonyms in the alt attributes of images.
• Updated: Keyphrase in title
  Checks if the keyphrase is used in the page title.
• Keyphrase in slug
  Checks if the keyphrase is used in the URL.
• Previously used keyphrase
  Checks if the words from the keyphrase were previously used in a keyphrase for a different post.
• Keyphrase distribution (only in Premium)
  Checks how well the words from the keyphrase are distributed throughout the text.

Other SEO assessments

• Text length
  Checks if the text is long enough.
• Updated: Outbound links
  Checks if outbound links are present and followed.
• Internal links
  Checks if internal links are present and followed.
• SEO title width
  Checks if the title has a good length.
• Meta description length
  Checks if the meta description has a good length.
• Updated: Text length for taxonomy pages
  Checks if the taxonomy page has a good length.
• New: Stale cornerstone content (only in Premium)
  Checks if you’ve updated your cornerstone articles recently.

Readability assessments

• Subheading distribution
  Checks whether long texts are divided by subheadings.
• Paragraph length
  Checks whether the paragraphs exceed the recommended maximum length.
• Sentence length
  Checks whether the sentences exceed the recommended maximum length.
• Consecutive sentences
  Checks whether there are more than 3 sentences in a row that start with the same word.
• Passive voice
  Checks whether the number of sentences containing passive voice exceeds the recommended maximum amount.
• Transition words
  Checks whether there are enough sentences containing transition words.
• Flesch Reading Ease
  Checks how easy to read the text is according to the Flesch Reading Ease test.
• Text presence
  Checks whether there is enough text in the copy.
• New: Single H1
  Checks if there’s only one H1 heading in the copy.