How To Analyze Content in Custom Fields for SEO - Using Yoast SEO and Meta Box

Any website owner knows that analyzing website content for SEO is very important. To do it, people usually use SEO plugins. Among these plugins, Yoast SEO is one of the most well-known and popular. It’s undeniable that this plugin has done its job incredibly. However, it still has a minus point which is the lack of custom fields' content analysis. To solve this problem, Meta Box has launched a free extension called Meta Box for Yoast SEO. Without any further ado, let’s spend the next 5 minutes reading to know how to set up SEO analysis for contents in custom fields created by Meta Box.

Video version

Before Getting Started

Make sure that you have already installed and activated the following plugins for your website:

• Meta Box plugin: Install it from wordpress.org or download it on metabox.io
• Meta Box for Yoast SEO: It is also free and available at wordpress.org. If you use Meta Box AIO, you just need to access Meta Box > Extension and turn on Meta Box for Yoast SEO. This extension also works well with Yoast SEO version 3.0+ which allows you to live preview the result with Javascript.

But even when you have fully installed them, Yoast SEO will not analyze the content of the custom fields yet. For example, in my post about book information, Yoast only analyzes the content of the post. The text length section, for instance, announces that there are only 945 words and the words in the custom fields are not counted.

To analyze content in custom fields for SEO using Yoast SEO and Meta Box, to be more specific, the Description field as shown in the above picture, we have to set things up a little bit as below.

Analyze Content in Custom Fields for SEO in Yoast

Option 1: Configure Custom Fields Using Meta Box Builder

Not everyone knows or wants to code manually to create custom fields. In this case, you can use Meta Box Builder - a premium extension of Meta Box letting you easily create fields with UI on the back end. You can learn more about how to use Meta Box Builder to create and configure custom fields here.

For instance, I have a field group as following and want to analyze SEO for a field named Description:

Click this field to open the settings, access the Advanced tab, and move to Custom Settings.

After that, click Add New to add a new custom setting and fill in the following values:

In the Enter key box: type add_to_wpseo_analysis.

In the Enter value box: type true.

Then click Save or Update.

Note:

You can do the same thing to any text fields in which you want to analyze content for SEO using Yoast. It is also possible to apply it to many fields at once. Moreover, you can also use a similar way to analyze the content of cloneable fields or groups.

Option 2: Configure Custom Fields Using Code

If you don’t use Meta Box Builder, there is no UI to configure fields visually. As a result, you have to code manually or generate code by the Online Generator tool from Meta Box. In that cases, to analyze the content of any fields, you just need to write the following code in the field configuration of the fields you want:

'add_to_wpseo_analysis' => true

Check the Result in Yoast SEO Content Analysis

Now, in the SEO content analysis section of Yoast, you will see that all the data from the custom field have been analyzed by Yoast.

The text length section now also includes the content of the Description field so the number of words is 1053.

Last Words

It is very very simple to analyze the content of custom fields created by Meta Box with Yoast SEO. That is the reason why since its release, Meta Box for Yoast SEO has been extremely welcomed by users from both communities. Be sure to make great use of this feature to easily level up your website in any search engine.

In addition, you want to know how to edit and analyze content for SEO, learn more here.

If you are using Rank Math instead of Yoast SEO, you can do a similar thing with MB Rank Math integration. For more details, you can read here.

Hope your website will be ranked on the top of search result pages and don’t forget to keep track of our latest articles.