Debunking Page Score: The impact of SEO plugins on page rank.

Don’t get me wrong; I love SEO plugins. I have been using Yoast for years and, more recently RankMath , because I find RankMath to be a little more comprehensive. A good SEO plugin can save a lot of time, highlight missed opportunities, and make adding the proper metadata easier. In many cases, SEO plugins can help rookie SEOs easily add rank factors to a web page. At GreenBanana SEO, we have been developing and refining our Search Engine Optimization process for over 15 years. Our SEO Agency process includes a thorough site health scan, a competitive analysis, content planning and mapping, content recipes, on-page coding, and distribution. The process is not only time-consuming but also requires variable skill sets from multiple team members, but it works, and it works well.

As a lifelong SEO geek, I am always on the lookout for new tools, and as a business owner, I love finding ways to increase efficiency. It would be amazing if the GB team could install a plugin, shoot for the highest score, and press publish. So I tried it. I tried to rank a phrase on our site ( greenbananaseo.com) using only the SEO Plugin tool. I started four months ago by selecting a term I wanted to rank by only focusing on the score. I compared the plugin tool phrase to 2 other phrases, all intended to rank around the same time. I’m not disclosing the phrases for competitive reasons, but I can tell you that all three keyword phrases had similar keyword difficulty (KD) scores, an indicator of how hard it is to rank a keyword phrase, and all three phrases got the same link-building attention.

The Result: The two keyword phrases whose target pages landed moderate plugin scores of 79 out of 100 and 82 out of 100 ended up ranking in the top spot; page 1 , position 1! The phrase where I focused all my attention on achieving the highest on-page plugin score is still stuck way, way, way-way down in position 77.

An interesting Find. The two phrases and associated pages that rank both show low keyword density ( the number of times you repeat the target phrase on a page) and no outbound links ( adding links to your page to other websites ). See the first two images below for reference. Compare this to the third image, where the focus keyword is 2.27, within the recommended tolerance of keyword density. Do you think I over-optimized 😉 ????