The Yoast SEO admin bar menu

The Yoast SEO admin bar offers shortcuts to your notifications and the Yoast SEO settings. If you open the menu while you’re previewing a page on the front-end, you will notice that the menu contains a lot more options. For example, you will find links to tools and resources. Let’s go through the options one by one.

The admin bar in the back-end 

Notifications

If Yoast SEO detects issues that affect the SEO of your site, we will notify you on the Dashboard of the general settings of Yoast SEO. The menu item ‘Notifications’ in the Yoast admin bar menu will lead you directly to them.

SEO Settings 

These are the same settings you see if you click ‘Yoast SEO’ in the admin menu on the left. We recommend you take the free Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training to learn more about each setting. 

The admin bar on the front-end

When you are logged in to your WordPress account, and when you preview a page on the front-end, you will see some additional menu items in the Yoast SEO admin bar menu. Let’s explore what’s there.

Front-end SEO inspector (beta)

If you’re using Yoast SEO Premium, the menu gives you access to the front-end SEO inspector. With this tool, you can easily check the SEO data on your pages.

Focus keyphrase

Here, you will find the focus keyphrase you set for this page.

SEO score

The first traffic light shows the overall SEO score for the page.

Readability score

The second traffic light shows the overall readability score for the page.

Analyze this page

• Check links to this URL: Clicking on this link takes you to Google Search Console. More specifically, it takes you to the section in Google Search Console where you can check the number of links that point to your pages. 
• Google Rich Results Test: Structured data is crucial for getting rich results. The Google Rich Results Test lets you check which rich results can be generated by the structured data the page contains.
• Facebook Debugger: Yoast SEO takes care of your page’s appearance on Facebook. Sometimes, Facebook does not pick up the changes correctly. In such cases, it is helpful to go to the Facebook Debugger and check if there are any bugs you can fix. 
• Google Page Speed Test: Google PageSpeed Insights provides valuable insight into the speed of your pages. It also gives you tips on how to optimize your page’s speed.
• Mobile-Friendly Test: Mobile SEO is an aspect of SEO you should not neglect when optimizing your site. The Google Mobile-Friendly Test checks how easily visitors can use your pages on mobile devices. The test will show a screenshot of how your page looks on mobile and problems will be listed.

SEO Tools

• Semrush: The Semrush platform offers a wide range of tools for SEO and keyword research.
• Wincher: You can easily track your rankings with the Wincher tool.
• Google Trends: Explore and compare search terms with Google Trends.

How to

• Learn more SEO: Our online learning platform Yoast SEO Academy covers all SEO topics, from beginner to advanced. We have free courses as well!
• Improve your blog post: In this post, you will find 10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post.
• Write better content: In this post, we’ll give you 5 tips for writing readable posts.

Help

• Yoast.com help section: Browse through our help articles.
• Yoast Premium support: Find out how to contact our support team.
• WordPress.org support forums: All our free plugins have their own support forums at WordPress.org.
• Learn more SEO: Check out our online courses about SEO. We have free and paid plans.

SEO Settings

These are the same settings you see if you click ‘Yoast SEO’ in the admin menu on the left. We recommend you take the free Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training to learn more about each setting.