Across 326 Persian WordPress pages that rank in Google, Rank Math was on 155 and Yoast on 126. Globally the ratio runs the other way: Yoast has more than ten million active installs and Rank Math four million. The Persian-language market has moved in the opposite direction from the world.
Forty-three of those pages ran no SEO plugin at all, and they rank anyway.
How the detection worked
From the plugin's own signature in the page source, never from the prose. Rank Math prints a Search Engine Optimization by Rank Math comment and loads assets from /plugins/seo-by-rank-math; Yoast prints its own comment and a yoast-schema-graph class. Matching on the words in the text would have counted every article about Rank Math as a Rank Math site, and the number would have meant nothing.
What actually comes out the other end
Popularity is the least interesting thing here. The question worth answering is whether one plugin does something the other does not, so we compared the output of the same pages.
| Plugin | Pages | Has a description | Median length | Over 160 | JSON-LD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rank Math | 155 | 99% | 151 | 14% | 100% |
| Yoast | 126 | 88% | 135 | 7% | 100% |
| Neither | 43 | 91% | 151 | 21% | 74% |
Both plugins emit a canonical tag and JSON-LD on effectively every page. Pages with no plugin still carry a canonical 93 percent of the time and JSON-LD 74 percent, because modern themes now do part of that job themselves. The technical gap between the two tools is small.
The difference we did find sits elsewhere. Yoast trains you to write shorter: a median of 135 characters against 151, and only 7 percent past the 160-character display limit against 14 percent. Which means the red and green bar, however irritating, changes behaviour.
One number we did not expect
In the same sample we checked how often Google actually displayed the description that was written. Rank Math pages: 26 percent. Yoast pages: 17 percent. Pages with no SEO plugin at all: 38 percent.
Thirty-nine pages is a small sample and that last figure should not be leaned on. But the direction matches what we see in client work. A description a person wrote for one specific page beats a description assembled by a plugin template out of the title and the category. An SEO plugin does not make Google like your writing.
So which one
Our position is unhelpful to anyone selling SEO consulting: this choice barely matters. Both do the base job. The real criterion is which one you will actually fill in.
If you are new to this and want to be walked through it, Yoast's coloured bars will nag you into completing the field. If you run many content types and want schema, redirects and Search Console integration without paying, Rank Math gives more away in its free tier. We kept Yoast on this site, because the SEO work we do does not need elaborate meta templating and we would rather the tool stayed simple.
What neither of them does
No SEO plugin writes content, builds links, fixes speed, or decides whether a page should exist. The green score in Rank Math or Yoast is not a Google number either. It is the plugin's own number, produced by rules the plugin's authors wrote.
In this sample those 43 plugin-free pages are sitting on page one of Persian results. If the score decided anything, they would not be there. The longer version of that argument is in our piece on what SEO actually is.
The mistake four sites in the sample were making
Four pages out of 326 printed the signatures of two SEO plugins at once. That means both are active and both are writing their own tags: two canonical tags, two schema blocks, and sometimes two meta descriptions where one overwrites the other.
If you have switched SEO plugin, the old one has to be deactivated and deleted. Deactivating alone is fine, but a plugin left active and forgotten produces exactly this. Open your home page source once and search for the word canonical. If it appears twice, that is the problem.
Limits of this count
We only looked at pages ranking for Persian queries about web, SEO and hosting. That sample over-weights this industry and is not a picture of Persian WordPress as a whole. The paid tier of either plugin is also invisible from outside, so free and premium are not separated in this data.
Common questions
Is Rank Math better than Yoast?
On the technical output of the pages we sampled, there was no meaningful difference. Rank Math gives more away for free; Yoast trains shorter descriptions. Choosing between them has no measurable ranking effect.
Can I migrate from one to the other?
Yes, both ship an importer for the other. The part people miss is deleting the old plugin afterwards and checking a few page sources for duplicated tags.
Does a green score mean the page is optimised?
No. The plugin awards that score against its own internal rules, such as keyword repetition and sentence length. Google never sees it and has never published anything like it.
Can I work without an SEO plugin?
You can, but then the title tag, description, canonical and sitemap are your theme's job. That is reasonable on a bespoke theme and a waste of time otherwise. If you want help without installing anything, our free tools cover part of the same ground.
And if you want to know which of your pages have no tags at all, send the address from our contact page and we will look.
Measured 19 August 2026 across 326 ranking Persian WordPress pages. Install counts from the official WordPress plugin repository on the same date.
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