If you know anything about search engine optimisation – and, to be honest, even if you don’t – you’ve probably heard of Yoast. Yoast promises to help you improve your website’s SEO, with the ultimate goal of maximising visibility by getting you up there in the Google ranks. Sounds promising, doesn’t it?
Now, as someone whose job it is to facilitate business growth through digital marketing, you might think I’m here to tell you to focus your energy on getting the highest Yoast score possible.
But I’m not.
I’ve built my business, Gromfrog, on openness and transparency, and I often get calls from people who are worried that the little red lights mean that their website will never gain traffic. But, I tell them exactly what I’m going to tell you; don’t stress about your Yoast score – it’s not a good indicator of quality content.
Understanding Yoast scores
Yoast assesses content based on a number of different readability and SEO factors. It then gives a final score on a scale from 0 (abysmal) to 100 (perfect). Yoast uses a traffic light system, so you can easily see if your content is pretty poor (a red light), generally okay (an orange light), or really good (a green light). In most cases, you’re going to be looking at a score of around 60-70 to reach green light status.
On the surface, this is a good way of doing things, as it gives a decent overview of overall content quality. The problem is that it’s not measuring the right things. Many people end up spending hours upon hours making ‘improvements’ that increase their Yoast score but are actually lowering the quality of their content.
What’s the problem with Yoast?
About 10-15 years ago, search engines weren’t as smart as they are now, and SEO was mostly just about keywords. Yoast was launched in 2010 and was built around these SEO practices. They worked very well back then, but this isn’t really how SEO works now. Sadly though, keywords still form the basis of Yoast’s SEO analysis. You enter a focus keyphrase – the keyword you want to rank for – then the tool looks at things like how often you use that phrase, and how that phrase is distributed throughout your content. This is how it determines the SEO part of the overall score it provides.
But as you may already know, keywords are just one small part of SEO today. Right now, there are believed to be something like 200 ranking factors that Google uses to determine how high up in the SERPs each page should be for individual search queries. And with the creation of more sophisticated language models, user intent is emerging as one of the most important of these ranking factors, leading ‘semantic SEO’ into the spotlight.
What is semantic SEO?
Semantic SEO focuses on context, meaning, and delivery of the type of information people want to see, regardless of what they’ve actually searched for. It prioritises user intent, rather than exactly matching keywords, taking into account related terms and synonyms.
For example, imagine someone searches for ‘London palace’. Today’s search engines better understand the meaning behind the query and should (hopefully!) return results about Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace, St James’s Palace, and so on. Maybe even Crystal Palace FC! Semantic SEO aims to understand whether the searcher is looking to visit a tourist attraction, buy a massive house, get directions through a suburb, or buy football tickets, and serve them all the information they need for their intended search.
Following semantic SEO practices means picking topics that people want to read about, making sure you answer their questions quickly (getting straight to the point), thoroughly (giving them all the information they need), and concisely (no fluff). This is a very different way of looking at things compared to the older method, which was about attempting to guess what exact keyword combinations people were going to type into Google.
Is Yoast SEO still relevant in 2025?
No, it’s not. Yoast focuses on readability and keywords, largely overlooking other important ranking factors, including semantics. The result? People tweak their content to try and get that sought-after green light. But in making the text good from a technical perspective, it often loses other qualities and characteristics that make it valuable and useful to the reader.
If you try to follow every single one of Yoast’s suggestions, you’ll often make your article less readable for your site visitors, especially with its suggestions to add specific keyphrases. These may not fit nicely into the text and can instead make the content appear a bit clunky and forced.
I personally know of website pages that score under 10 on Yoast (which by their standards is pretty horrendous!) but rank number one for their target keyword. How? Because the content meets many of the ranking criteria that Google is known to use, even if it doesn’t necessarily meet Yoast’s definition of optimised content.
One of those criteria is that readers stay on the page long enough to read the content, and even revisit it again later as a reference. If Google sees that real people like what you’ve written, they’re much more likely to show it to more of them. The important thing is to find that happy middle ground between writing for people and writing for SEO.
How to write for people & SEO
Writing for people, while keeping on the right side of search engines is actually a lot of common sense.
My top tips are:
1. Plan your content
Think about which topics you’re going to cover and make sure you know what people are asking about them. Link topics together into comprehensive guides, and don’t make it any longer than it needs to be just to hit arbitrary word counts.
2. Work on your headings
You’ll want to think about your headings and make sure they’re clear, directly letting the reader know what they can expect to learn within each section. Structuring content in this way works for search engines, too. They can also gain an understanding of what your article is about, helping them to deliver content that fits the user’s needs, rather than simply matching their search query.
3. Create informative metadata
Make sure the metadata is filled in. That’s something I still use Yoast for. Metadata works for both people and SEO because it quickly and clearly states what the content is about. This can help users make smart decisions about what they click on in the SERPs (and perhaps more importantly, what they don’t). Metadata works to support search engines to deliver the most relevant content as fast as possible.
Don’t worry about Yoast scores
Your Yoast score can give a broad overview of how you’re doing in terms of keywords and overall readability, but it shouldn’t be your main concern when creating content. What matters is creating content that’s valuable, engaging, and relevant, so readers can quickly find what they need.
So, rather than obsessing over that little green light, focus on crafting content that serves the needs of your audience and aligns with what Google truly values. If you’re struggling to find that balance, book a free 20-minute strategy call with me, and we’ll look at it together.
