Why We Use SmartCrawl over Yoast and Rank Math

If you’ve ever logged into your WordPress dashboard and wondered why you don’t see Yoast’s traffic light or Rank Math’s score out of 100, this post is for you.

The short answer: every website we host comes with SmartCrawl Pro, included in your hosting. Yoast, Rank Math and SmartCrawl all sell capable paid versions, and on features alone they’re closer than most comparison posts admit. The real difference is who pays for it and who looks after it.

SmartCrawl Pro is included with our hosting

Yoast Premium and Rank Math Pro are paid annual licences that you buy and renew yourself. SmartCrawl Pro is included at no extra cost for every client who hosts with Vigilante.

Because our hosting, backups, updates and SEO tools all run through WPMU DEV’s Hub, we manage SmartCrawl alongside everything else on your site. It’s configured the same way on every site we host, so when we jump into your dashboard we know exactly where everything lives. Less clicking around means more time on the work that actually moves rankings.

Automation that does the boring work

Good SEO is mostly maintenance. Broken links, missing meta descriptions and orphaned pages creep in every time content changes. SmartCrawl Pro handles a lot of that on autopilot:

• Scheduled site crawls. It scans for broken URLs, 404s and redirect chains, then flags or fixes them before Google notices.
• SEO health audits and reports. We get regular checkups on every site, which feed straight into the reporting we send you.
• Automatic linking. We set target keywords once and SmartCrawl turns them into internal links across your content.
• Instant indexing. It uses the IndexNow protocol to tell search engines the moment a page is published or updated.

Rank Math Pro offers similar automation, and Yoast Premium covers part of it. The difference is that with us, it’s set up, scheduled and watched for you.

Redirects and schema, built in

Two things we use constantly on client sites are redirects and schema markup.

All three Pro versions include a redirect manager. SmartCrawl Pro adds advanced rules like regex and location-based redirects. When we rebuild a site or retire old pages, that keeps your hard-earned rankings from falling through a 404.

SmartCrawl also supports more than 150 schema types. Schema is the structured data that helps search engines, and increasingly AI search tools, understand who you are, where you’re located and what you offer.

The three Pro versions side by side

Here’s how the paid versions of each plugin compare for a typical business website.

Based on each plugin’s published features and regular, non-promotional pricing as of October 2026, in USD. Rank Math bills in euros (€107.88 a year), converted at the October 2026 exchange rate.

Feature for feature, the Pro versions are close. What makes SmartCrawl the clear choice for our clients is the first two rows: it costs you nothing extra, and you never have to touch it.

To be fair to Yoast and Rank Math

Both are excellent plugins. Rank Math Pro even has features SmartCrawl doesn’t, like built-in keyword rank tracking. Yoast has been the household name in WordPress SEO for years. If you run your own site elsewhere, either one is a solid choice.

The plugin is only a tool. The results come from the strategy and the people using it.

If you’re moving to us from Yoast, there’s nothing to lose. SmartCrawl can import your existing Yoast settings, titles and descriptions.