You’ve installed Yoast SEO on your WordPress site. You see the little green, orange, and red lights telling you how your content is doing. But now you need to show your boss, your client, or even just yourself how your site’s SEO is performing. You’re probably asking yourself, can you pull an SEO report from Yoast?

It feels like the logical next step for a plugin that does so much for your site’s optimization. The short answer is, not really. Yoast doesn’t generate the kind of performance reports you’re likely thinking of.

You won’t find a button that spits out a PDF with keyword rankings, traffic graphs, and backlink profiles. This can be confusing because Yoast is the king of WordPress SEO. But its job is very specific. Understanding what it does, and what it doesn’t do, is the first step to getting the data you actually need. So while the answer to can you pull an SEO report from Yoast is no, this guide will show you exactly what you can get from it and where to find the real reports you’re after.

What Yoast SEO Actually Does (and Doesn’t Do)

Think of Yoast as your pre-flight checklist for SEO. It’s a coach that sits next to you while you write your content in WordPress. It makes sure you’ve buckled up and checked all the on-page optimization boxes before you hit that publish button.

Yoast’s famous traffic light system gives you instant feedback on your essential seo. You get a green light for SEO and readability if you’ve done a good job. It checks things like if you’ve used your focus key phrase in the SEO title, meta description, and throughout your text.

This WordPress plugin even looks at sentence length and use of transition words to help you start writing better for your human readers. You interact with these features directly in the meta box below your post editor. It’s an immediate, actionable form of SEO analysis for the content you’re currently working on.

Beyond content analysis, Yoast handles critical technical SEO tasks behind the scenes. It generates XML sitemaps to help Google find and index your pages. It also helps you add schema markup, which gives search engines more context about your content, a key factor in how Yoast SEO Google works together.

The free version is powerful, but Yoast SEO Premium offers even more. It includes an internal linking tool that suggests relevant posts to link to as you write. This is a huge help for building a strong site structure and improving your SEO performance.

But notice a pattern here? All of these functions are about preparing your content for success. They are about setting up your pages and improving your content performance potential, not measuring what happens after they go live in Google search.

Why Doesn’t Yoast Have Traditional SEO Reports?

It might seem like a huge oversight for such a popular SEO plugin. Why wouldn’t the most popular WordPress SEO tool offer SEO reporting? The reason boils down to focus and purpose.

Yoast’s mission is to make on-page and technical SEO accessible to everyone. It focuses entirely on optimizing your website itself. Its core function is to help you create content that meets search engine standards before you publish.

Creating a comprehensive SEO report requires a different kind of technology. A proper reporting tool needs to crawl the web, track website keyword positions in Google, analyze competitor backlink profiles, and pull in huge amounts of website data. This is what platforms like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz Pro do.

These platforms are massive data companies. If Yoast tried to build all of that into its plugin, it would become incredibly bloated and slow down your website. It would also need to be much more expensive to cover the costs of collecting and processing all that external data, making data easy to get is not easy to build.

Instead, Yoast sticks to what it does best: helping you create perfectly optimized content right inside your WordPress dashboard. It’s the starting point for a good SEO strategy, not the final analysis tool.

Can You Pull an SEO Report from Yoast in Any Way? The Closest Things You’ll Get

Okay, so there are no pretty PDF reports. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get any useful Yoast SEO data out of the plugin. There are a couple of features that come close to a report, even if they aren’t meant for performance analysis.

Using the Yoast SEO Export Feature

Yoast has an import and export tool. This tool was not designed for SEO reporting but for site maintenance. Its main purpose is to let you bulk edit your SEO data in a spreadsheet or move it to a different website, which can save time.

But you can use it to get a raw data dump of your on-page settings. To do this, from your WordPress dashboard, find the Yoast SEO menu item. If needed, expand child menu items to see all options and navigate to Yoast SEO > Tools > Import and Export. That child menu holds some powerful features.

From there, you can choose the Export tab and create a CSV file. A CSV file is a simple spreadsheet that you can open with Google Docs or Microsoft Excel. It’s not a performance report, but it’s valuable for content audits.

Here’s what you can export from the free version:

• Your SEO title for every post and page.
• The meta description you’ve written.
• The focus key phrase you set for each piece of content.
• Whether a post is set to noindex or nofollow.

While it won’t show you traffic or rankings, this SEO data export can be very helpful for a content audit. You can quickly see which pages are missing a meta description or which ones are targeting the same focus key phrase. This is an excellent starting point to learn SEO hygiene for your site.

Analyzing Yoast’s On-Page Scores

Another way to get a quick overview is right in your WordPress Posts list. The Yoast SEO dashboard integrates directly here. If you look at your list of all blog posts or pages, you’ll see columns for the Yoast SEO score and Readability score.

These columns show the colored bullets for each piece of content. This lets you scan your entire site and quickly spot pages with poor on-page optimization. You can see at a glance which blog posts have a red or orange light and need some work.

This isn’t a report you can download or send to a client. But it’s a powerful internal tool for prioritizing your SEO efforts. It helps you quickly identify where to focus to improve your overall content performance without opening every single post.

Building the SEO Report You Really Want (Using Other Tools)

Now for the good part. You know Yoast prepares your content. Let’s talk about the free SEO and powerful SEO tools that measure what happens next. The SEO report you imagine—with traffic, rankings, and user behavior—is absolutely achievable.

Google Search Console: Your Free Performance Report

If you use only one tool for SEO reporting, make it Google Search Console (GSC). It’s completely free, and the website data comes directly from Google. This is the ground truth for how your site performs in Google search results.

GSC tells you exactly what Google thinks about your website. Here’s a glimpse of what you can track website performance with in Search Console:

• Queries: See the exact search terms people used to find your site.
• Rankings: Check your average position for those keywords.
• Impressions & Clicks: Find out how many people saw your site in search and how many clicked through.
• Page Performance: See which of your blog posts get the most traffic from SEO Google.
• Indexing Issues: Google will tell you if it’s having trouble crawling any of your pages.
• Core Web Vitals: Check your site’s performance on web vitals metrics, which are crucial for user experience and technical SEO.

This is the SEO performance data Yoast doesn’t give you. According to Google’s own documentation, it’s a vital tool for improving your search presence. Setting it up is easy; Yoast even has a field to help you verify your site with GSC.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Understanding Your Audience

While GSC tells you what happens before the click, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tells you everything that happens after. Once a user lands on your site, GA4 starts tracking their behavior. This tool is also free and provides deep insights into your audience.

GA4 reports help you answer important questions. Where are my visitors coming from? Which pages do they spend the most time on? What percentage of them are on mobile devices?

This information helps you understand if your content is truly resonating with your audience. For example, if a page ranks well in Google Search Console but has a high bounce rate in GA4, you know the content isn’t meeting user expectations. Combining this SEO data is crucial to impact SEO results for your small business or google business profile.

Many WordPress users also benefit from Google’s Site Kit integration. This plugin brings data from both Search Console and Google Analytics into your WordPress dashboard. The kit integration means you can get a quick snapshot of content performance without leaving your site, which can really save time.

All-in-One SEO Platforms (The Paid Options)

For businesses that are serious about growth, paid SEO platforms are the next step. SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz Pro combine dozens of features into one SEO dashboard. They include data from GSC and GA4 and add their own massive databases of web data on top of it.

These platforms automate SEO reporting and offer deeper insights. They can track your keyword rankings daily across different locations, which is vital for local SEO. They analyze your backlink profile to see who is linking to you and offer a keyword explorer to find new opportunities.

They can also run a comprehensive SEO audit that checks for hundreds of technical issues, far beyond what Yoast covers. Many offer a free trial or even a month free so you can test them out. It’s hard to manage SEO without one of these once your site grows.

Tool	Primary Job	Cost
Yoast SEO (Free Version)	On-page content optimization.	Free
Yoast SEO Premium	Advanced on-page SEO & internal linking.	Paid
Google Search Console	Measure Google search performance and rankings.	Free
Google Analytics 4	Measure website traffic and user behavior.	Free
Semrush / Moz Pro	All-in-one SEO and competitor analysis.	Paid subscription

How to Combine Yoast Data with Other Reports for a Full Picture

The best SEO strategy uses these tools together. Each one plays a distinct but vital role. They are not competing against each other; they are parts of a complete workflow to help you learn SEO effectively.

Think of it as a four-step process for every blog post you create. First, you use Yoast SEO to write and optimize your post inside WordPress. Your goal is to get that green light on the title tag and content, ensuring your on-page fundamentals are solid before you even think about publishing.

Second, after a few weeks, you log into Google Search Console. You find the URL of your new post and see what queries it is starting to rank for. You might discover it’s ranking for keywords you didn’t even target, giving you ideas for how to update and improve the post.

Third, you check that same URL in Google Analytics. You look at the traffic sources to see where users are coming from. You analyze the engagement rate to see if people are actually reading what you wrote. This tells you if your content is hitting the mark with your audience.

Fourth, you use a paid platform for a broader view. Maybe you run a site audit to catch technical issues affecting your Core Web Vitals (core web). Or you research competitors who are ranking for the same terms to see how many backlinks they have. This informs your long-term strategy for building authority.

This is a workflow supported by experts like the team at Search Engine Journal. This integrated approach, using Yoast as the foundation and performance tools for measurement, is how you truly improve your SEO efforts over time.

Conclusion

So, when someone asks you, can you pull an SEO report from Yoast, you now have the complete answer. We’ll explain that while Yoast doesn’t offer performance reports, it is the essential first step in the SEO process. It helps you create content that is ready to rank.

For the actual SEO reporting—the traffic, the rankings, and the user data—you need to turn to the fantastic, and often free, SEO tools built specifically for that job. By combining Yoast with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you get the best of both worlds. This gives you powerful on-page optimization and detailed performance reporting.

Now you have the data and how Yoast reporting and keywords work, you can build a better SEO campaign in the future or you can hire a SEO company like us.

This is how you build a complete SEO system that truly works. You use Yoast to set the stage for success and other tools to measure and refine that success. This approach turns confusing SEO data into a clear path for growth.