A free alternative to Yoast SEO Premium.

Is Yoast SEO Premium worth paying for?

Yoast SEO Premium is a good product. The question most site owners ask isn’t whether it works, but whether the features it adds are worth $118.80 a year for each site, every year. For a single business site, many people decide yes. For someone running five blogs, or an agency with thirty clients, the yearly total starts to look different.

Rilea SEO exists for that second group, and for anyone who’d rather not pay for features that are free elsewhere. It’s a full SEO plugin that includes the tools Yoast reserves for Premium, with no paid tier. This page goes through each Premium feature, explains what it does, and shows how Rilea SEO handles the same job.

What Yoast SEO Premium adds

Yoast SEO Premium builds on the free plugin with a set of extra tools. Since Yoast simplified its products, Premium also includes what used to be separate Local SEO, Video SEO and News SEO add-ons. The main additions are:

• A redirect manager
• Up to five keyphrases per post, with synonyms and word-form matching
• Internal linking suggestions and help finding orphaned content
• Local SEO for business details and locations
• Video SEO and a video sitemap
• News SEO and a Google News sitemap
• AI features for generating and improving titles and descriptions
• Support from the Yoast team and access to its training

All but the last two are covered by Rilea SEO for free. The sections below take them one at a time.

Redirect manager

Yoast SEO Premium’s redirect manager creates redirects when you change or delete content, so visitors and search engines don’t hit dead ends. Without Premium, Yoast SEO users usually add a separate redirect plugin.

Rilea SEO includes a full redirect manager. It supports exact, contains, starts-with, ends-with and regex matching with capture groups, and 301, 302, 307, 308, 410 and 451 responses. It creates a 301 automatically when you change a published URL, counts hits for each rule, and imports and exports redirects as CSV. A 404 monitor shows which missing URLs visitors are requesting, with a one-click option to redirect them.

Multiple keyphrases and synonyms

The free Yoast SEO plugin checks one focus keyphrase per post. Premium adds related keyphrases, synonyms and word-form matching, so you can optimise a page for the several phrases people actually use to find it.

Rilea SEO includes a focus keyphrase, up to four related keyphrases and synonyms, all matched across word forms. Its checks cover the SEO title, meta description, URL, introduction, density, subheadings, image alt text and spread, and it warns you when you’ve already used a keyphrase on another page.

Internal linking suggestions

Yoast SEO Premium suggests related posts to link to while you write, and helps you find content that nothing links to. Rilea SEO does both. Link suggestions appear in the editor, with cornerstone content ranked higher. The Link Insights screen shows internal, external and incoming link counts for every post, and the orphaned content report lists published pages with no internal links pointing to them.

Local SEO

Local SEO in Yoast SEO Premium lets you add business details and locations and output the right structured data. Rilea SEO supports a main business and unlimited extra locations, each with its own address, phone number, opening hours, service area and LocalBusiness schema. Shortcodes display addresses, hours, maps and location lists anywhere on the site, and Rilea SEO can give each location its own public page and adds a KML file and a locations sitemap.

Video and news SEO

For sites that publish video, Yoast SEO Premium includes Video SEO and a video sitemap. For news publishers, it includes News SEO and a Google News sitemap. Rilea SEO includes both sitemaps for free. The video sitemap detects YouTube, Vimeo and self-hosted video in your content, and the news sitemap lists your recent articles with your publication name, for the post types you choose. Rilea SEO also offers NewsArticle and Video schema types for individual posts.

What Rilea SEO doesn’t replace

Two parts of Yoast SEO Premium don’t have an equivalent in Rilea SEO.

AI features. Yoast SEO Premium can generate and improve SEO titles and meta descriptions with AI. Rilea SEO has no AI tools. If you rely on them, you’ll need to write titles and descriptions yourself or use a separate AI tool.

Yoast’s support and training. Premium includes support from Yoast and access to its training courses. Rilea SEO is supported by email and through its documentation, which is free but smaller.

If neither matters to you, Rilea SEO covers everything else Premium offers.

What you’d save

Yoast SEO Premium costs $118.80 a year per site, before tax. Over a few sites and a few years, that adds up:

• 1 site for 3 years: $356.40
• 5 sites for 1 year: $594
• 5 sites for 3 years: $1,782
• 10 sites for 1 year: $1,188
• 10 sites for 3 years: $3,564

With Rilea SEO, each of those is $0. If you run WooCommerce, Yoast’s WooCommerce SEO plan is $178.80 a year per store, and Rilea SEO’s WooCommerce product schema is also free. Prices are from Yoast’s public pricing, checked in November 2026, and don’t include any discounts Yoast may offer for multiple sites or promotions.

How to move from Yoast SEO Premium

Moving takes a few minutes and doesn’t change your Yoast data:

1. Install and activate Rilea SEO alongside Yoast SEO.
2. Go to Rilea SEO, then Tools, and click Import from Yoast SEO. Titles, descriptions, keyphrases, synonyms, robots settings, canonicals, social data, cornerstone flags, primary categories, term settings, redirects and main settings come across.
3. Deactivate Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast SEO, then save your permalinks once.
4. Open Rilea SEO, then Redirects, and check your redirects are listed. Turn on the 404 monitor and automatic 301s.
5. If you used Yoast’s local, news or video features, turn on the matching options in Rilea SEO’s settings and add your business details or publication name.

Your sitemap stays at /sitemap_index.xml, so you don’t need to change it in Search Console. The full import guide covers what to check afterwards.

When to keep Premium

Rilea SEO isn’t the right answer for everyone. Keep Yoast SEO Premium if you use its AI features every day, if your team depends on Yoast’s support and training, or if you publish mainly in a language other than English, where Yoast’s readability analysis is more developed. For everyone else, the features you’re paying for each year are available for free. If you can’t decide, try Rilea SEO on one site while your Premium subscription is still active, and compare the two before your renewal date comes round.

What else comes with Rilea SEO

Replacing Premium is only part of the picture. Rilea SEO also includes tools that Yoast sells separately or doesn’t offer in the same form:

• WooCommerce product schema with brand, GTIN, MPN, an offer per variant, reviews, shipping and returns, which Yoast sells as a separate WooCommerce SEO plan.
• IndexNow, which notifies Bing, Yandex and other participating search engines when you publish, update or delete content.
• A bulk editor for changing SEO titles and descriptions across hundreds of posts on one screen.
• An SEO Analyzer that audits any URL, including a competitor’s page.
• A role manager to decide who can change settings, manage redirects or use the bulk tools.
• Image SEO that fills in missing alt text and titles from templates.
• A free Shopify app, where Yoast charges $19 a month for its Shopify version.

Questions people ask before switching

Will my redirects keep working?

Yes. The importer copies the redirects Yoast SEO Premium created into Rilea SEO’s redirect manager. Test a few old URLs after switching to confirm, and keep automatic 301s turned on so new URL changes are covered too.

Will I lose my related keyphrases?

No. Related keyphrases and synonyms from Yoast SEO Premium come across with the import and appear in the Rilea SEO panel for each post.

What happens to my Premium subscription?

Nothing changes on Yoast’s side when you install Rilea SEO. If you decide to stay with Rilea SEO, cancel or let your Premium subscription lapse in your Yoast account. Keep Yoast SEO installed but deactivated until you’re sure, so you can switch back.

Is a free plugin safe to rely on?

Rilea SEO is released under the GPL, the same licence as WordPress, and its code is open for anyone to read. It doesn’t send your site’s data anywhere, and it stores everything in your own database. Being free doesn’t mean features are missing: the only things it lacks compared with Premium are the AI tools and Yoast’s paid support.

Using it on Shopify too

If you also run a Shopify store, Yoast’s Shopify app is a separate $19 monthly subscription. Rilea SEO for Shopify is free, with an SEO editor, analysis, templates, bulk editing and product schema. It’s an early release and self-hosted, so a developer installs it on your store, but once it’s running there’s nothing to pay.

Who saves the most

Agencies and freelancers. Every client site on Yoast SEO Premium is another $118.80 a year, and someone has to decide whether the client or the agency pays. With Rilea SEO, every client site gets the full feature set and there’s nothing to bill or renew.

Bloggers with several sites. If you run a portfolio of content sites, Premium on each one quickly costs more than your hosting. Rilea SEO gives each site redirects, multiple keyphrases and internal linking for free.

Local businesses with branches. Multi-location SEO used to be a separate Yoast add-on and is now part of Premium. Rilea SEO supports unlimited locations at no cost.

WooCommerce stores. Yoast’s WooCommerce SEO plan costs more than Premium. Rilea SEO’s product schema, with GTIN, MPN and variant offers, is free.

News and video publishers. The news and video sitemaps that need Premium in Yoast SEO are part of the free Rilea SEO plugin.