Stop Chasing Green Lights: Why SEO Plugin Scores Don’t Matter for SEO

One of the most common concerns potential clients speak to me about is that their SEO plugin—be it Yoast, RankMath, or a Squarespace “plugin”—don’t show all green lights.

These SEO plugins were largely designed many years ago when SEO was just a checklist, not a strategy. You could tick off some boxes and likely perform okay. In the Post-Keyword Era, these green light/red light indicators are largely noise. In fact, many will even send you down the road to problems, such as keyword stuff, improperly described imagery, and unnecessary changes that erode your brand.

When you use an SEO plugin, you are using it to assist in optimizing your website. You are NOT optimizing for the plugin.

Unfortunately, many folks end up doing exactly that: optimizing for the plugin. And I understand, because those signals look important. A red flag seems like an emergency.

The reality, however, is more complex. Here are some reasons you may get “red” signals in your SEO plugin:

• The plugin is simply software: It can’t read your strategy. We often make strategic choices to optimize a page less, or bring in “fan out” keywords, but the plugin has no way of knowing that, due to it being simply a page of code.

• Some of the suggestions from the plugin are inappropriate. For example, keyword stuffed image alt-text is a massive ADA issue, one we have a responsibility to take seriously. Or, it will suggest more keyword density that runs the risk of your content being flagged as “commodity content.”

• Your SEO plugin may be misconfigured. This happens quite often, in fact! Many times, clients of mine will DIY their Alignthority® SEO Roadmap and forget to reconfigure their SEO plugin. This is no big deal—remember, the plugin does not communicate with the internet. It’s just there for you.

• Not every page has to be or should be optimized. I have chosen to not optimize everything on my site. For example, this article is intended as a resource for clients and colleagues, and it doesn’t matter to me if it ranks. Yoast, RankMath, and others will flag that as a problem. Furthermore, there are mission critical pages such as privacy policies that should not be indexed by Google, so we would not optimize them. But SEO plugins will scold you and give you a sad face in response to that reality.

Furthermore, the SEO plugin software is typically written to create pitfalls such as:

• Forced Internal/External Links: Plugins love telling users, “Add 2 external links to high-authority sites!” This often leads people to drop irrelevant links into pristine brand copy just to clear the error.

• Awkward Exact-Match Keyword Headings: Software often insists that the exact focus keyword appear in an H2 or H3, forcing awkward phrasing that sounds robotic to human readers (and modern natural language processing models).

• Arbitrary Content Length Signals: A red light for “content too short” on a clean, conversion-focused landing page causes people to add fluff just to meet a character count.

The score in your SEO plugin has little or no correlation to your site’s SEO performance.

I have seen websites that have green lights up and down every page, and yet they’re invisible to Google and AI crawlers. This is typically because they are missing a visibility strategy, and just sought approval from their SEO software.

In the Post-Keyword Era, we see that search is quite different, and pages that used to do well in the old school dictionary style SEO world no longer are surfacing in search or being cited by AI software. This is because human behavior has changed too.

Modern search tools, such as Google and ChatGPT emphasize two key elements that are missed by every single SEO plugin:

• EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): Green light indicators can't measure whether the writer actually has real-world experience or unique original insights.

• Information Gain: AI crawlers and modern search algorithms prioritize content that brings new information to the table, not content that merely regurgitates existing search results to hit a keyword density threshold.

High performing pages don’t just tick boxes in an SEO plugin—they answer searchers’ questions while providing unique insights not found elsewhere.

Yoast, RankMath, and other SEO plugins can’t score if you’ve answered searcher’s questions in a way that is distinctive from your competitors. They can’t tell if Google, Bing, or Claude will view your site as more credible than others. And they most certainly can’t develop a strategy that connects audience research, natural language, and a visibility strategy together.

Am I telling you to ignore your SEO plugin?

Noooo… but also kind of yes.

If you’re a Squarespacer user, for example, there is zero functional reason to add an SEO plugin to your website mix. It’s just additional cost and bloat. The system makes it very easy to implement metas and alt-text, and the rest of your strategy should focus on content.

If you’re a WordPress user, I encourage you to think of your SEO plugin as a shortcut to implementing your metas (titles, descriptions, etc) and maybe don’t even look at those lights. Personally, I recommend SEOPress to WordPress users, as it’s much simpler and lighter weight and tends to not stress people out like Yoast and my mortal enemy RankMath.

I like to separate SEO plugin utility into two buckets:

• The Helpful Mechanics (Keep these!): XML sitemaps, open-graph/social preview tags, canonical tags, schema markup generators, and meta description fields. This is helpful and adds quality to your website.

• The Arbitrary Scoring Engine (Ignore these!): On-page focus keyphrase counters, readability scores, and traffic-light indicators. These are distracting and lead to poor decisions.

High-performing SEO in the Post-Keyword Era isn’t built on a green light checklist—it’s built on authority, search intent, and distinct value.

The next time Yoast or RankMath scolds you for not repeating your focus keyword six more times, remember this: software doesn't buy your services, humans do. Use the plugin for your metadata, ignore the scoring engine, and write for the people you actually want to reach.