@Cindee Murphy , I dug into your account rather than guessing, and there are three things going on. Two of them I can fix from here and one is a five-minute change on your end that I think will move your score the most.
The big one. RightBlogger already sets the Yoast focus keyphrase, meta title, meta description and slug for you, and it picks them so they all match each other, which is most of what Yoast actually grades. But that only runs when you publish through our WordPress connection, and your account doesn't have one set up, so you've been filling those fields in by hand. Settings > Integrations > WordPress, our plugin takes about a minute to install, and after that those checks should go green on their own.
Related: your focus keyphrase looks like it's the full post title. Yoast wants 2 to 4 words, so "coercive control" rather than "Coercion Can Leave You Feeling Trapped." Anything longer gets flagged as too long, and it drags density and the slug check down with it. Once you're connected we pick a short one for you automatically.
You're right that something changed on our end. Your articles averaged about 2,095 words in December and about 1,640 now on identical settings, and that's not just your account. I've raised the medium-form target and tightened how sections get split. That second part matters for you specifically: Yoast flags any section over 300 words, and yours have been running 330 to 460. Your next batch should come back longer with more subheadings.
And one bit of perspective, not a brush-off. Yoast's number measures whether your text matches its checklist, not whether the page will rank. Plenty of pages in the 60s outrank pages in the 90s. It's a useful nudge, not a verdict, so please don't quit over it. If you connect WordPress and your score doesn't move, reply here and I'll look at a specific post with you.
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Andy Feliciotti
Aug 20
@Cindee Murphy , I dug into your account rather than guessing, and there are three things going on. Two of them I can fix from here and one is a five-minute change on your end that I think will move your score the most.
The big one. RightBlogger already sets the Yoast focus keyphrase, meta title, meta description and slug for you, and it picks them so they all match each other, which is most of what Yoast actually grades. But that only runs when you publish through our WordPress connection, and your account doesn't have one set up, so you've been filling those fields in by hand. Settings > Integrations > WordPress, our plugin takes about a minute to install, and after that those checks should go green on their own.
Related: your focus keyphrase looks like it's the full post title. Yoast wants 2 to 4 words, so "coercive control" rather than "Coercion Can Leave You Feeling Trapped." Anything longer gets flagged as too long, and it drags density and the slug check down with it. Once you're connected we pick a short one for you automatically.
You're right that something changed on our end. Your articles averaged about 2,095 words in December and about 1,640 now on identical settings, and that's not just your account. I've raised the medium-form target and tightened how sections get split. That second part matters for you specifically: Yoast flags any section over 300 words, and yours have been running 330 to 460. Your next batch should come back longer with more subheadings.
And one bit of perspective, not a brush-off. Yoast's number measures whether your text matches its checklist, not whether the page will rank. Plenty of pages in the 60s outrank pages in the 90s. It's a useful nudge, not a verdict, so please don't quit over it. If you connect WordPress and your score doesn't move, reply here and I'll look at a specific post with you.
Hope this helps!