Rank Math SEO Plugin: Full Tutorial, Pro-Tips & Secrets

Key Takeaways

so you've got a website or you're planning one for your business but how can you easily optimize it for searches in just a few minutes and do it for free well you're in luck today because there's a new ish SEO plug-in on the scene called rank math that's gonna do the job and it's super easy to set up and I'm gonna show you how so let's go I made a video a while back going over my then favorite SEO plugin for WordPress called Yoast which was the industry standard for quite a few years and honestly it still isn't bad but that's about all I can say about it now that I've been using ranked math and I like it better for a few reasons first because it's super user friendly and really easy to figure out it has way more features that you'll actually use and it's 100% free unlike Yoast which basically operates on a freemium model to prot freemium product meaning some of its free and a lot of it actually isn't and the stuff that you have to pay for on Yoast is actually included with rank math and honestly it works better on rank and math than on Yoast where you pay for it so in this video I'll show you exactly how to set it up on your WordPress site and how to use it so your website and all of your content is gonna be properly optimized for search and you'll be in prime pouncing position to start out ranking your competition in no time absolutely for free and yes I do this on every client website that I create for them and I also make these same recommendations to the students in my paid program because it works and I do want to let you know we are covering a lot of ground here today so I wanted to make it really easy on you by offering a free checklist that you can just download and follow along with as you're setting things up so you can just watch now without having to take notes so just go to West McDowell comm slash ranked math to get that checklist and I'm also going to link to that in the description below so let's get right into it okay so here we are in the backend of WordPress and the dashboard so the first thing we're gonna do we need to install rank maths you're gonna go over to plugins and then add new and then just go up here and search for rank math and we've got it right here and we're in luck today because it was actually updated 17 hours ago I was just checking it out and this is a brand new version that's gonna make it even easier on you so I'm really glad I did this today rather than yesterday so I'm just going to click on install now and then activate okay so now it's going to ask you to connect a free account or you can skip it I'm gonna really recommend that you activated though because if you if you do this it's gonna give you a lot more insights and a lot more actionable tips for you to take away so I'm gonna click on activate rank math and then from here you just sign up either with Google or Facebook it's gonna click on continue with Google I'm gonna choose my email here and then just click on OK alright pretty painless start right so so here's what I'm talking about when we've got that with the new version so this is brand new where it basically asked you if you want to go for easy advanced or custom mode here's the thing we're gonna go easy and here's why because for advanced there's so many things you can do on this that are going to probably take you triple the time and maybe get you one or two percentage points higher in in your effort so I think easy is the way to go here for 99 percent of you so let's just go click on easy and then start wizard and I just don't want to be overwhelming I know a lot of you are coming from kind of a beginner background so if I showed you the advanced way your head might just spin around so alright the first thing we're gonna do is just fill in some basic information it's asking you what kind of site you are and they're gonna make recommendations for you based on all this stuff so in this case this is just a fictitious business so either you know if you're a personal blog you would choose that if you're a new site personal portfolio like if you're a designer I would say most of you were gonna fall into small business site unless your ecommerce image or a webshop and honestly I'm not really sure what other personal or other business would mean so I'm just gonna click on small business site and then it's gonna ask you you know what kind of business you are so this is really going what if you're already on Google my business you're gonna want to get as close as possible to that category that you put in on there so I'm doing a fake marketing company so I'm just going to type in marketing and nothing is being found for that so since nothing's being found I'm just going to leave it an organization and I think we can get a little bit more granular on this a little later in the process so a company name just gonna talk marketing and of course this should match exactly what you have in Google my business and now it's gonna ask you to upload a logo so I'm going go ahead and do that it's gonna drag it over here on the stage and then use this file and what they want is um you say a square image is preferred by the search engines but just make sure you're falling in within the minimum size and the maximum size and now but you know how when sometimes maybe you've had in the past people would share a page on your site in a really wonky image would show up like something you didn't intend to show up there so what this is gonna do is that you you can upload a default image so if someone shares one of your pages that no other image was specified to be included in that share now you can control which image it is so I'm just gonna upload something kind of general this just meant to show the vibe of the company and I always like to have kind of a happy customer image so I'm just gonna use that all right now click on save and continue okay now here's where things can get a little technical so Google search console is a really great tool that lets you see exactly where do you fall in line in terms of your keywords and where your ranking for them and it is a good idea to connect this to that but I don't want to bog people down in this training with this because it does get a little techie but if you get if you download that free checklist the the quick start checklist description below this video that's gonna walk you through this step so but again search console is not really going to um it's not really gonna help you rank any higher it's just gonna give you insights of how you're already ranking so we're gonna skip this one for now so just click on skip step alright so the site is now ready one thing to do here I would encourage you to enable auto update so that way you're always on the latest version of it and then we're done with this first step so to click on return to dashboard okay so now we're on the basic dashboard area for rank math and the first thing it brings you to is local SEO and I think that's a really good start because if you're a local business this is one of the main benefits of using rank math and this is one of the things that Yoast charges you extra for so let's just go ahead and fill in some basic info and I'm assuming when we're doing this you've already claimed your listing on Google my business that is a very important first step so most of you are going to be an organization but if you're more of a you know a business coach a one-man operation and you're kind of more of a personalised business maybe it goes by your name then you would click on person but I think organizations going to be right for most of you so we've got the name of the business already there we've already got the logo set up and so this is where you would just put the homepage of your website and you would put in your email address here and here is where you want to put in your address here's the thing again make sure that you're putting it in exactly as you have it and Google my business because one of the things that can really help you rank locally is consistency let's say for instance on your Google my business your list is 1 2 3 Main Street with an ST period well you wouldn't want to do here then is you know spell it out it has to be super consistent don't ask me why Google is smart but they're not smart enough yet to to be able to differentiate this so make sure you're you're very clear and very consistent and that includes you know if you if you're using number 12 make sure it says that versus you know sweet 12 just keep it consistent and then locality that would be your city region would be your state and assuming you're in the US here and then USA and then address format we're not going to need to mess with that unless you're in a foreign country where these things are kind of written out differently but here it's address city state zip code so we're fine there okay we're already an organic business type let's see if we can put in anything more anything more specific here yeah no I guess we can't so we're just gonna leave our organization now ok so opening hours this is another one of those things you want to be consistent from Google my business to rank math so you'll notice you know it for my my us people here we don't go by the 24-hour clock obviously we go by the 12-hour clock but I think rank math is based somewhere in Europe so they have the default set to the 24-hour clock so we're going to go ahead and switch it over to 12-hour but that still doesn't change this over so what we need to do is make sure it's kind of written out in the 24-hour clock I think and I think when you use this it'll kind of carry over the translation but if you don't know 9 so the 17 is 5 p.m. so do the math from there and you know if you're closed on Saturday and Sunday you just remove those and then keep going down you're gonna add your phone number and specify if it's customer service tech support just choose the the best option here price range this is optional but if you're a really expensive high-end service you might want to add in the you know the four dollar signs just to kind of weed people out and then from here what you're gonna do is you're gonna select your about page so this this website is kind of a dummy site with a no content on it yet but you could basically just type in about and if your about page is already there it'll pop up here and you'll just click on it so just click sample page and contact us same thing so nothing found for that so but if it's here you would just click on it then Google Maps API key so it's a good idea to have Google Maps integrated in your site there are other ways of doing it and this is actually a paid option not by rank math but just to have a Google Maps API it's a little technical it's a little more for developers so I think we can skip this and the geo coordinates not super necessary because they already have your address if you want to include that for some extra points I'm not I'm not really sure if it actually gives you any extra points if you do it but if you want to do it just do a search online for geo coordinates you'll pop in your address and it'll give it to you then click on Save Changes now what do we do after this you know most of these things over here on the Left panel have already been pre-configured in the way that's going to do the most good for the most people so you can go through these one by one if you want to and get things exactly how you want to so I'll just you I'm just kind of walk you through this first one right here at global Mehta so it gives you options you obviously want your site to be indexed that means the search engines can find it you probably don't want links to be nofollowed a lot of this gets kind of technical and they've already like I say they've already put in the the default options that are going to be the best and like you know if you want to have a different separator character you can do that so by that I mean when people search for you online or find a post or anything the way it's set up now is to have the post title than a - then the name of your business if you'd rather I kind of like this one personally I think it looks cleaner but it's really just up to you and then capitalized titles I think that's actually a pretty good idea you probably should be doing that anyway when you input it but if in case you miss anything it'll just make everything look nice and consistent and we've already got this image that we've uploaded for social media so I'm just going to click on Save Changes here everything else is pretty good to go um one thing you definitely want to make sure is you have sitemap settings the way you want them so I'm just going to click on that down here so again all these options are pretty much configured to be the way they should be so I'm not going to make any changes here but the one thing I do want to show you now is what do you do how do you use rank math as you input new pages and new blog posts to make sure that you have the best chance of ranking so I'm gonna go over to my website right now and well I don't really have a blog I do have a podcast so this is just the view of anytime you input a blog post or even if you this works for posts as well as for pages so these can be articles or these can be just think of the standard pages on your site the home page the about Us page any page that you're trying to rank for a specific keyword you want to go through this exercise so you'll find the page or the post and then see how we've got this score up here right now it's not doing so well it's 18 out of 100 so you're just gonna want to click on that and then to open up all the goodies here you get from ranked math that show you how you're doing and exactly what you can do to do better and by the way I should say this is a podcast so it's like show notes this is not meant to be a really all-encompassing article but I still think it's worth looking at to give you a sense of it so the first thing you want to do is enter in your focus keyword so SEO doesn't do a whole lot of good if you don't know what keyword you actually want to rank for so in this case it would be Instagram hashtag strategy so I'm going to pop that in here okay so now just knowing what it is I've already improved quite a bit in my score I went from 18 to 69 here so let's go ahead and let's take a look down here at basic SEO so this is kind of a little checklist that shows you what you're doing right and where you can use improvement so it says you're using focus keyword in the SEO title because I've got that in the title that helps with SEO focus keyword not found in your SEO meta description which is this guy right here so what that refers to is think about when you do a Google search let's say we typed in Instagram hashtag strategy this is the SEO title and this is the SEO description and most times it's just kind of pulled from an excerpt from your article but you actually want to be a little more intentional and write something that's designed to entice the click so what we want to do is make sure the title has the keyword and the the description so let's go ahead and edit that snippet so the title is already good to go alright so I just changed it to discover the Instagram hashtag strategy you know I got the keywords in there they're sure to win you more yeah the rest of its not that important for this video but I've got it in there so I'm just gonna close out of here alright so now we've gone up to 71 and now we've got a green check mark there the the focus keyword is in the description next it says focus keyword is not found in the URL so that's something that matters too and obviously you can't really do that on the home page unless you you've bought a domain name like you know Instagram hashtag strategy com but let's see what we can do about that let's go back to edit snippet and permalink is what we want to do there so alright so I changed it to Instagram hashtag strategy in permalink and now we've got another check mark so now we're up to 76 so focus keyword was found in the content I'm sure it's somewhere in here yep Instagram hashtag strategy right there and ideally speaking you probably want to use it a couple times within in the body don't overdo it don't overstep but if you can use it a couple times you're gonna be really good to go and the one remaining X that I'm getting here is basically saying the content is really short and it is again this is like this is just show notes for a podcast but if this were a blog post I would definitely want this to be at least 600 words if not longer if you're really trying to rank for something and it's competitive I definitely recommend going around 2,000 words that's just gonna give you the best chance of ranking now we can go down even further into additional so let's see we said it says focus keyword not found in subheadings like h2 h3 h4 so what that refers to is so this the title of the post that's what they call the h1 that's the big heading that's the the daddy of the headings then we got h2s which is one slot underneath that then age threes and so on so what we might want to do is add in an h2 tag that actually so in other words a subheading that includes the keyword phrase so let's go ahead and click on the plus to add a block and we'll do heading and it says set for h2 so I'm gonna say okay I'm just gonna say the Instagram hashtag strategy that I recommend and let's just kind of move it up here you know obviously we're not actually writing a post here but it's not in the right place but you get the idea so now we have now we've got another check mark here and next the next check mark it or started the next X is they want us to add an image with the focus keyword as alt text so I'm going to show you how to do that real quick just go up and adblock and I'm gonna choose an image and I'll just find one from the media library that's already here I'll just choose that one I'm gonna kind of size that down because it's a little obnoxious right now and so now so the image is there but it is not it just still doesn't have the proper alt text on it so with that chosen I'm gonna go to show block settings and with that selected it's going to show me the image settings an alt text right here that's basically all alt text is is it's meant to be a text description of the image so it's also a really good way to get some SEO points so I've put in Instagram hashtag strategy there and now we're all the way up to 82 in the score so click back on there to get back to it and click back on additional let's see how we're doing here so it's saying we couldn't find any internal links in your content that's kind of a minor thing but if you wanted to go for that you would just find you know sign up for my free video masterclass training so all I would really do here is I would just I would highlight this text and I would just link it up to the proper page and then you'd have an internal link so once again if you want that free checklist of all the steps that we just covered and a few more actually that we didn't have time for just click right up here and you can download the guide and just follow right along with it super easy so click right up here to get that checklist and start out ranking your competition in just days see you soon