All in One SEO Pack vs Yoast 2016

In 2016, the choice between All in One SEO Pack and Yoast came down to how much time you wanted to spend configuring and how many features you needed out of the box. I was managing around a dozen client sites at the time, and my priority was setup speed and a clean interface. All in One SEO Pack let me set the title template, enable the XML sitemap and add the canonical URL in under three minutes. Yoast took longer because I had to hunt through tabs to disable the readability analysis I did not need and to turn off the default title settings that forced a separator I did not want.

I always recommend checking the [SEO Tools](/seo-tools/) landscape before picking a plugin, but in 2016 the two giants were these. Yoast fans praised the content analysis, and it was genuinely better for a beginner who wanted to know if their paragraph was too long or their subheading distribution was off. But I found that the readability traffic light turned many clients into keyword stuffers. They would cram the exact phrase into the first sentence just to get a green light. All in One SEO Pack never did that. It just asked for a title, description and focus keyphrase – and left the writing to you.

For value, All in One SEO Pack won easily. Its free version included meta tags, sitemaps, schema mark-up and even social meta. Yoast free was solid, but anything beyond basic required Premium or an add-on. I had a client running a WooCommerce store with product variations. Yoast's free plugin could not handle that without the WooCommerce add-on, which cost extra. All in One SEO Pack handled product schema natively in its Pro version, and even the free version gave you control over individual products. I chose All in One SEO Pack for that site and saved roughly £30 a year.

If you ran a content blog and valued the readability feedback, Yoast was the better fit. But for most eCommerce sites, local businesses or portfolios, All in One SEO Pack gave you more control with fewer interruptions. That is why I leaned towards All in One SEO Pack in 2016.

Both plugins shared a dangerous behaviour: they encouraged users to trust plugin suggestions too heavily. I saw countless sites where the meta description matched exactly what the plugin said, complete with the auto-generated snippet that looked nothing like the live result on Google. Plugins cannot see the SERP – they guess. The only way to know if your snippet will work is to check the actual search results with a [SERP Checker](/rank-tracker/) or by searching yourself.

Another common pitfall was sitemap duplication. Both Yoast and All in One SEO Pack could generate an XML sitemap, but so could WordPress core since version 4.4. Many users enabled two sitemaps without realising. I used [Screaming Frog](/screaming-frog/) to crawl a few sites and found that the Yoast sitemap was indexing fine, but the core WordPress sitemap was being blocked in robots.txt. That caused confusion for search engines. The fix was simple: pick one sitemap and disable the other. In 2016, I preferred the plugin sitemap because it gave more control over what to include.

Performance was another shared issue. Both plugins added about the same page load overhead – roughly 100–150 ms on a shared host – but that added up if you had many plugins. I ran a [Website Speed Test](/website-speed-test/) on a site with Yoast, Jetpack and WooCommerce. The TTFB went from 400ms to 650ms. The overhead was not huge, but on slower servers it mattered. All in One SEO Pack was slightly lighter because it did not run the readability analysis on every request, but the difference was marginal.

Finally, both plugins promoted the idea that you must set a focus keyphrase for every page. That is wrong. Many pages rank for dozens of phrases, and forcing one keyphrase leads to awkward optimisation. I saw a product page stuffed with one keyword because the plugin told the author to use it three times. A better approach is to write naturally, use [Bing Webmaster Tools](/bing-webmaster-tools/) to see which queries the page currently matches, and optimise for those.

I used to think Yoast was the only professional choice because its readability analysis was so advanced for 2016. I recommended it to every client, insisting that the green lights meant better content. I was wrong. The readability scores do measure sentence length and passive voice, but they do not measure whether the content answers the search intent. I had a client who rewrote an FAQ page to get a green readability score, making the answers longer and less direct. The page lost traffic because users expected short, scannable answers, not paragraphs. I should have told them to ignore the plugin and watch their [Google Trends](/google-trends/) data for shifts instead.

Another mistake was that I assumed switching plugins was a nightmare. I had chosen All in One SEO Pack for one site in 2014, then wanted to try Yoast for social meta. I procrastinated for months because I thought I would lose all my meta data. When I finally made the switch, it took two hours. Most title tags and descriptions carried over because both plugins store them in the same WordPress post meta fields. The canonical URLs and sitemap settings required reconfiguration, but it was not the disaster I feared. Now I tell people to test the other plugin on a staging site first. You can always revert.

I also overestimated the importance of XML sitemaps. In 2016, I had clients who panicked because their sitemap had a 404 error. I spent hours debugging, only to realise that Google had already indexed their site fine without one. The sitemap is a discovery aid, not a ranking factor. If your site has a solid internal linking structure, you do not need it urgently. I would prioritise canonical URLs and structured data over sitemap configuration. Both plugins handled that, but I wasted time perfecting sitemaps when I should have been auditing duplicate content with [MozBar](/mozbar/).

Finally, I used to recommend Yoast for all news sites because of its News add-on. But All in One SEO Pack's Google News sitemap was free and worked just as well. I spent money on an add-on I did not need. The lesson: always check the free version before buying Premium.