SEO data transfer / sync: move your SEO between AISA and your SEO plugin

What it is

SEO data transfer / sync moves the SEO you already have between AISA and your SEO plugin — Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO — in either direction, for content and for terms. Three fields travel: SEO title, meta description and focus keyphrase. Nothing leaves your site: it is a read and a write on your own database.

AISA is the hub. A one-step move from one plugin straight into another does not exist: to go from Yoast to Rank Math you import into AISA first, then transfer to Rank Math. The card says so, instead of leaving you to guess.

Before anything else, the card tells you whether there is anything to do at all. A status line compares the two sides on the three fields, contents and terms, and reports what it finds: everything already identical (“AISA and Yoast SEO are aligned: 19 posts and 6 terms carry the same SEO on both sides. Nothing to transfer”), how many values are missing at the destination, how many exist only on the other side, and how many are simply different on the two sides. Aligned means equal, not “filled on both sides”. Template variables are not normalised either: %%sitename%% and the expanded site name really are two different values, and the card says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Where to find it

AISA → Utility, first card: SEO data transfer / sync. If you are coming from the old SEO Dinamico plugin or from a snippet, its own import link is at the bottom of the same card.

You may well meet the feature before you go looking for it. When an SEO plugin is active and at least five published pages carry an SEO title written by AISA while the plugin's own field is empty, an admin notice appears: “{Plugin} is now handling your SEO, but N pages still have SEO written with AISA that {Plugin} does not see.” The notice is the point of the whole feature: without it, a site that looks empty right after you install an SEO plugin reads like lost work.

Requirements & tier

Free, on every tier, and it needs the administrator capability (manage_options).

To transfer AISA data to a plugin, that plugin must be active: writing into the storage of a plugin that is switched off is wasted work and, for All in One SEO, impossible, because its SEO lives in a custom table. To import into AISA, the data alone is enough: a plugin you deactivated yesterday still appears in the list today, because the import reads its storage directly.

One limit worth knowing before you start: All in One SEO stores term SEO only in its Pro version. Where that table is missing, terms are skipped and the card states the reason instead of silently doing half the job.

How to use

Pick the operation: Import into AISA from (the plugins that have data on this site, active or not) or Transfer AISA data to (the active plugin). Each entry carries its own count — “Yoast SEO — 12 posts, 3 terms to import”, “Yoast SEO — 18 posts, 6 terms to receive” — and the status line preselects the direction that makes sense.
Choose the fields: title, meta description, focus keyphrase. All three are on by default.
Choose what happens to existing values: Only fill empty fields (the default, recommended) or Overwrite existing values. There is no silent overwrite in either mode.
Decide whether to include terms — categories, tags and the taxonomies you enabled in AISA.
Leave Create an SEO backup first ticked. If the backup cannot be created the transfer stops and tells you, rather than writing without a safety net.
Press Preview. It is read-only and it is mandatory: you get a table, per field and separately for content and terms, of will fill, will overwrite, kept (already set) and empty in source. Until the preview has run, Run transfer stays disabled and a line under the buttons explains why.
Press Run transfer and confirm. The run goes in batches of 100 with a progress bar, so no single request has to survive a long site.
Read the result, which is made of numbers: filled, overwritten, kept, skipped (empty in source) and errors, content and terms apart. With Yoast as the destination you also get “Yoast index rebuilt (N rows)”, because from Yoast 14 the page is served from that index and not from the fields. From then on the card carries a “Last transfer” line.

To undo a transfer, restore the backup it created: it is in the SEO data backup / restore card, on the same page.

Questions people ask

I installed Yoast after using AISA and the site looks empty — have I lost everything? No. The SEO is still there, written in AISA's own fields; Yoast simply does not read them, and AISA steps aside when an SEO plugin is active so that no page ever gets two meta descriptions. Run Transfer AISA data to Yoast SEO and the work becomes visible again.
I have years of SEO in Rank Math and I want to move to AISA. That is the other direction: Import into AISA from Rank Math. The import reads Rank Math's storage directly, so it works even if you have already deactivated it.
Can I go from Yoast to Rank Math directly? Not in one step. Import into AISA from Yoast, then transfer from AISA to Rank Math. Two runs, one preview each, and your data is never in mid-air: nothing is deleted from the source plugin.
What happens to variables like %%sitename%%? The common ones (site name, separator, title, page, excerpt) are converted to the destination's own syntax; anything the map cannot be sure about is left exactly as it is and counted in the result, so you know how many values still contain variables to look at.
And Rank Math's multiple keyphrases? Only the primary one travels — AISA works with a single focus keyphrase — and the result tells you how many lists were reduced.
Will it overwrite what I wrote by hand? Only if you pick Overwrite existing values, and even then the preview shows you every value that would change before a single one is written. In the default mode, a field that already has content is kept and counted as kept.
Does an empty source field wipe the destination? No. An empty value is never written: it is counted as skipped (empty in source) and the destination keeps what it had.

Backup and Restore SEO
Migrate SEO between plugins
SEO-plugin adapters: Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress, AIOSEO
Repair invisible SEO and database maintenance