Yoast SEO + Schema Pro – Use Structured Data for Better SEO

If you’re like most WordPress webmasters, there’s a good chance that you’re using Yoast SEO to handle your site’s on-page SEO.

And that’s a great idea! Yoast SEO is popular for a reason – it makes it easy to perform most on-page SEO optimizations on your site.

But one area that Yoast SEO doesn’t fully cover is schema markup.

See, while Yoast SEO does add basic organization schema markup to your site, it doesn’t add the same type of helpful schema markup that Schema Pro adds.

For that reason, if you want to add comprehensive JSON-LD schema markup to all the content on your site and get those eye-catching stars and other rich results, you need to use Schema Pro alongside Yoast SEO.

In this article, we’ll explain the difference between what Yoast SEO and Schema Pro do and why the two plugins are better when used together!

What’s The Difference Between Yoast SEO And Schema Pro?

Yoast SEO is, at its core, an all-in-one tool to help you optimize the basic on-page SEO elements for your site like:

• Meta information
• Keyword density
• XML sitemaps
• Content quality
• Internal linking structure
• Basic schema markup for limited uses

Schema Pro, on the other hand, is entirely focused on doing one aspect of SEO, schema markup, really well.

How Schema Pro Takes Schema Markup Further Than Yoast SEO

One reason that some webmasters ask questions is because Yoast SEO does collect very basic structured data information during its setup wizard.

If you remember setting up Yoast SEO, it looks something like this:

In total, Yoast SEO helps you add these four types of schema markup:

• Basic organization data
• Breadcrumbs
• Social profiles
• Homepage for search

But here’s what Yoast SEO doesn’t do:

It doesn’t add schema markup to the actual content of your posts, pages, or custom post types.

That difference is very important.

See, while the schema markup that Yoast SEO adds is helpful, and we certainly don’t want to denigrate Yoast SEO’s performance, it’s also incomplete and won’t get you the full benefits of schema markup.

Let’s make that a bit more concrete with an example.

Say you run a cooking website that posts lots of delicious recipes.

Yoast SEO will help you handle the post’s meta information and analyze its content for your focus keyword. But if you want to add the proper schema markup to get those eye-catching recipe details in the Google organic search results, you need Schema Pro:

And it’s the same for all the other content types where schema markup helps you get rich results.

Yoast SEO and Schema Pro: Better Together

This isn’t an either/or situation. Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin for a reason. But it doesn’t do everything.

If you want to add proper schema markup to the actual content of your WordPress site, rather than just basic information on your organization, you need a separate solution.

That’s where Schema Pro comes in. Schema Pro builds on the great on-page foundation that Yoast SEO provides by making it easy to automatically add proper JSON-LD schema markup to all the different content on your WordPress site so you can get the full benefits of schema markup.

Better yet, Schema Pro is built to work together with Yoast SEO.

If Schema Pro detects Yoast SEO on your website, Schema Pro will automatically disable its sitewide schema features to avoid interfering with the basic schema markup that Yoast SEO adds:

And that’s why we say that Yoast SEO and Schema Pro are better together.

Rather than clashing, Schema Pro gracefully disables the few features that overlap, while still giving you access to all of Schema Pro’s other features that help you add proper JSON-LD schema markup to your site’s content.