ReachKit vs Yoast SEO

What Yoast does better

It is in the room while you write. That is the whole advantage and it is a large one: the analysis sits beside the post, updates as you type, and turns the abstract question "is this page optimised" into a checklist you clear before hitting publish. An external checker like ReachKit can only tell you afterwards. For anyone publishing regularly on WordPress, the shorter loop wins on its own.

It also handles the technical plumbing in the background rather than reporting on it — the kind of work that is tedious to do by hand and invisible when done right. Yoast has been maintaining that for WordPress since long before most of the tools on this page existed, and its free plugin is a genuine free plugin, not a trial.

Premium is €118.80 per year excluding VAT, with one seat included and additional team seats at $5 per month each excluding VAT.

Where it leaves a solo founder stranded

It requires WordPress. That is not a criticism — it is a WordPress plugin and it is excellent at being one — but it means that if your product is a Next.js app, a Rails app, a Framer site or a custom stack, none of this is available to you at any price. A large share of the founders reading this page are in exactly that position.

And within WordPress, the analysis is still an analysis of the page. Yoast checks whether the page is well-formed for a keyword you typed into a box. It has no measurement of whether anyone searches that keyword, how many queries the site already ranks for, or which rival holds the ones you want — so the green light means "this page follows best practice", not "this page will be found". Those are different claims, and only one of them is what you were actually after.

What ReachKit does instead

ReachKit reads the HTML you actually serve, so it works on any stack with nothing to install. It measures 8 on-page signals — page title, meta description, heading structure, content depth, structured data, canonical URL, social share tags, and images & alt text — and the free checker at reachkit.app/tools/on-page-check takes no account and no email, at 30 checks per hour.

The honest limitation is the mirror image of Yoast's advantage: ReachKit is never in your editor. It will not stop you publishing a page with no meta description; it will tell you afterwards that the page has none, and what that is costing you.

The costing is the point. The 8 signals are combined by geometric mean with your raw search footprint — how many real queries you already rank for — into one 0–100 Discoverability Score, so the number answers "can people find this" rather than "did I tick the boxes". It is deterministic: same URL, same score, and no language model touches it.

The paid plan turns that into a ranked weekly action plan — one task surfaced per day, each citing its evidence — and the next weekly scan re-measures, so a score gain is attributed to the on-page fix you shipped. €29.50/month, the 50% launch price, locked for life, normally €59.

Who should pick which

Pick Yoast if you publish on WordPress. Nothing ReachKit does replaces having the checklist beside the editor, and for a content-led WordPress site that loop is worth more than an external score.

Pick ReachKit if your site is not WordPress, or if you already clear every green light in Yoast and still cannot work out why nobody is finding you — that gap is exactly what the search-footprint half of the score is measuring.