Yoast SEO offers both a free core plugin and paid Premium tiers. The free version handles essential on-page optimization—title tags, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, readability checks, and basic schema markup. It's actively maintained and genuinely useful for most WordPress sites, not a crippled demo. Premium starts at $99 USD annually for one site, scaling to $299/year for up to 25 sites. Premium adds internal linking suggestions, redirect manager, content insights showing most-linked and least-performing pages, and advanced schema controls including FAQ and HowTo blocks. The redirect manager alone saves hours when restructuring site architecture or fixing 404s after migrations. For local service businesses or bloggers, the free version typically covers what you need. You can manually set your title tags and meta descriptions, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, and get readability feedback without paying. Where Premium becomes worth it is e-commerce sites with changing product URLs, agencies managing multiple client sites under one license, or businesses publishing enough content that the internal linking suggestions measurably speed up workflow. The redirect manager also matters during domain migrations or when consolidating old pages—tracking and implementing 301 redirects through Yoast beats editing .htaccess files for most users. At Ottawa SEO, we typically start clients on the free version unless they're running WooCommerce with frequent SKU changes or have a content team that publishes daily. Premium's workflow features pay for themselves when you're managing scale, but they don't magically improve rankings—search performance still comes down to content quality, technical health, and backlinks. One watch-out: Yoast Premium is per-site annually, so budget accordingly if you're running multiple properties. The license model means a three-site agency setup costs $199/year, which is reasonable compared to hiring a developer to build equivalent redirect and schema tooling. Just remember the plugin handles on-page signals; it won't fix thin content or build your authority.