How To Do WordPress SEO The Right Way

Since updating this article as of Nov 2025, as I sit in Web Summit, I realise there is so much to say about AI search, Content AI, and generative AI, that it’s too much to include here, so this still focuses on best practice for basic page optimisation in WordPress. Things I wrote about earlier, AMP, Page experience, FAQ Schema, and the way Google sees all those things have changed, but the rest remains true.

It’s hard to believe WordPress has been around since 2003, the year I graduated with my degree in multimedia computing and back when I was still using Dreamweaver – but it’s slowly risen from a small open-source project to the most ubiquitous platform on the web, powering about a third of all new sites. If you want to show up on the first page, you need to learn how to do WordPress SEO the right way.

With such a significant market share and millions of people and businesses using WordPress as the platform of choice, how does it perform from an SEO standpoint?

Is WordPress good for SEO?

A lot of people ask, “Is WordPress good for SEO”? If you search on the topic, the general answer you get is yes. But WordPress itself doesn’t do anything to help with SEO: it’s all down to proper configuration and technical know-how.

A well-engineered, well-structured WordPress website can do wonders for a strong SEO strategy. On the other hand, a poorly built site with little regard for design, speed, or content won’t perform just because it’s WordPress.

So, if you’re asking how I can make my WordPress website more SEO friendly? Then I’ll share my step-by-step guide to WordPress SEO.

Which WordPress SEO Plugin Should I Use?

Another common myth is that installing a WordPress plugin will improve your SEO. SEO plugins offer a set of handy tools and serve as a good monitor, but unless you know how to use them properly, the tools by themselves won’t help your website.

But in answer to the question of which WordPress SEO plugin I should use, I would suggest either RankMath or Yoast Premium. If you don’t already pay for Yoast Premium, such as redirects and multiple keywords, use RankMath. It has a lot of premium features for free. I love it. If you need shopping listings, go with Yoast, because it has better built-in support for Google Merchant Centre.

In this article, I am using RankMath for images, but you should be able to get the gist and use either. Ok. We have a WordPress website that needs SEO, and we use SEO plugins such as RankMath, All in One SEO, or Yoast SEO. So let’s get started.

WordPress SEO Step 1. Audit Your Website.

The whole point of SEO is to drive more clicks to your website, build domain authority, and trust and rank. So a great place to start is to scan your site for errors and to improve its speed. We already know speed is a ranking factor.

It’s also pretty pointless adding and optimising content if your WordPress website is slow and full of errors, so this is the best place to start.

Using a few tools like Google Page Speed Insights and SEMRush Site Audit (free for one individual project), give your site an audit. We also offer this as a free service from our paid SEMRush account. If you want a quick overview, drop us a line and we’ll email you an audit.

Website Page Speed.

I won’t go into every issue about speed here, but check out this article on why your website speed matters. But I will say the biggest issue is often image size. Depending on your commitment and the size of your site, you may need to install an image optimisation plugin, such as Smush. If you have the resources to recreate your images, I will attempt to do so, keeping smaller images under 100k and larger ones under 150 if you can.

Remove irrelevant plugins from your site. How much code is your website generating? This can really improve speed. If you want to check this out, in the Chrome web browser, right-click on your website page, select ‘view source’, and see how much code is on the page. This website is pretty lightweight. If your page is relatively small and still generates several thousand lines of code, you know there’s a problem.

Use caching. If Site Health suggests it, or your site is database-heavy (e-commerce, large blogs). WordPress added official Site Health checks for this in 6.1. When you visit a web page, it reloads from scratch every time. Caching prevents this by serving a static (or cached) version, saving precious time during load and preventing users from leaving your page due to slow load times.

Page Experience & Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals: 2026 targets
INP ≤ 200 ms (responsiveness)
LCP ≤ 2.5 s (loading)
CLS < 0.1 (stability)

You’ll probably have noticed this in Google Search Console. Here’s what Google has to say about it.

“Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems. We recommend that site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals to succeed in Search and to generally ensure a great user experience. Keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report or third-party tools doesn’t guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of Google Search results; there’s more to great page experience than Core Web Vitals scores alone. These scores are meant to help you improve your site for your users overall, and trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time.”
So we can conclude that page experience is no longer a direct ranking factor; instead, these new metrics measure that experience at a technical level. And as CEO, John Mueller said, “It’s not going to make your site’s rankings jump up.”

It’s not going to make your site’s rankings jump up

• John Mueller, Google, on Core Web Vitals

Mobile Friendliness

It’s 2026. Mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic 12 years ago. So if your site isn’t responsive, you really need to get a new one. I’m not going to mince my words here. Google Search Console will also tell you if your text is too small, the content is too wide for your mobile screen, or tap targets are too close together.

Google has finished mobile-first indexing. Simply treat mobile as the canonical view, and ensure that content, structured data, and internal links match across mobile and desktop. This shouldn’t be an issue if you aren’t running a separate mobile site.

Upgrade PHP Version

I will file this under ‘speed’ because outdated PHP can affect your website’s overall performance. PHP is a web programming language, and it’s what WordPress is written in. If your PHP version is outdated, the WordPress Dashboard will politely inform you. You must update this in your hosting account; it can’t be done from within WordPress. If in doubt, contact your hosts and make a backup. WordPress no longer supports PHP version 5.6 or lower. PHP 8 is twice as fast, and it has been available for years. So there’s no excuse. As of the time this blog post was updated, version 8.2 or 8.3 is recommended.

Don’t do this without developer support; your website can break if its underlying code doesn’t support this version.

Website Technical SEO Errors

Semrush will check for a variety of errors and issues. It will check for broken pages and broken links, missing title tags, duplicate content, and more. Quite often, these are simple fixes you can resolve yourself quickly and without needing a web developer. Do this first before moving on to a more comprehensive SEO strategy. SSL Certificates

If your website isn’t secure, it may be blacklisted or, at the very least, show the ‘This site is not secure’ message in Google search results. You really don’t want that to happen. Your rankings will tank.

Any decent web host will offer free SSL or Let’s Encrypt. You shouldn’t have to pay for it. We include it in our hosting packages. If you read this post and want better hosting, we can migrate you for free and give you three months of free hosting on our awesome WordPress servers if you quote this article! If you have crappy shared hosting, your website will be slow, too. All the more reason to give us a call!

Now. Let us get on to the good stuff.

WordPress SEO Step 2: Check Your WordPress Settings

In your WordPress dashboard, go to “settings > reading”. Ensure the checkbox that says ‘prevent search engines from indexing this site’ IS NOT checked. – It shouldn’t be, it isn’t by default, but it could be that it was turned on for development mode and forgotten about. Most web designers don’t know much about

SEO.

In “settings > general”, you can set a tagline. If the site says “just another WordPress website,” it shows up in Google search results and looks awful!

Next, in “settings > Permalinks”, make sure your URLs are set to pretty. What I mean is that, by default, WordPress sites use the post ID as the query parameter, which looks like www.example.com/?p=123. This is terrible for SEO: a word of warning. Changing your permalink Structure can harm your site if it ranks highly. That said, if it’s ranking well, it’s doubtful you have a poor URL structure, so now might be the time to make sure it’s right before carrying on.

www or non-www?

Ensure the version you want to show up is set in the WordPress dashboard. This has little to no impact on your SEO, but consistency is essential. Stick with it though, as changing down the line can have an impact on traffic. Search engines see them both differently.

WordPress SEO Step 3: Content Optimisation For SEO

It should be your aim as a website owner to write the best, most comprehensive content you can. See each post or page on your website as looking after a specific keyword or keyphrase, and then you can optimise each page accordingly.

Every page should have a unique topic; otherwise, your content can start cannibalising itself. Scary huh? All it means is your pages are competing with one another for ranking, and so link juice is diluted.

If you don’t know which keywords and search terms to optimise your pages for, then you will need to do some keyword research. This article on keyword research can help. Generic keywords, for example,’ shoes’ or ‘mortgages’, can be almost impossible to rank organically.

Those words also have little to no intent behind them (intent to buy). So you should try to rank for longer, more niche phrases (long-tail keywords). Add your keyword to Rankmath or Yoast, and a list of useful suggestions will appear.

Don’t feel you have to follow them religiously. A 100% score does not mean you will rank on Google, and a low score doesn’t mean you won’t. It’s just a set of suggestions. I can’t stress this enough! A high rankmath score has no bearing on where you show up!

Once you have chosen a primary keyword for your page, these days, it’s not about the old ‘keyword stuffing’. Google looks at the overall relevance of your article in the context of what you want to rank for.

So you want to add what’s known as ‘proof keywords’ or ‘LSI Keywords. Check out Neil Patel’s Uber Suggest for similar keywords or LSI graphs. The idea is that if you enter a keyword, the software will give you lots of suggestions for additional and related keywords you should add.

The more of these you can naturally fit into your content, the more ‘proof’ the article will have that your page is relevant to the topic and will be indexed accordingly. Keep your website on the subject.

I’ve worked with many small businesses, and most owners are savvy enough to know that content can help. But they say a little knowledge is dangerous. My experience is of business owners creating a blog and then just writing about unrelated topics out of ignorance.

Let’s say, for example, your business is selling cars, and you have a website and create a blog. But your blog post starts to talk about things that don’t relate to cake in any way. You blog about travel or your favourite restaurants. This dilutes the overall theme of your website and makes it harder for Google to work out what it’s about,

So if you sell cars and want to blog about travel and food, that’s fine. Just make your travel blog about driving, and your food one about using a car in the city. It’s all about context, people.

Titles & Meta Descriptions

These can be added via your SEO Plugin. Include the keywords you are trying to rank for and potential other combinations. These ‘snippets’ are what will appear in Google’s search results. Google won’t always show your description and can generate its own, but it’s best to specify one anyway. Currently, there is no way to force Google to use your specified snippet. And never let your theme or website auto-generate them. This is a shortcut and shouldn’t be used in SEO.

FAQs and HowTo rich results were de-emphasised or removed for most sites, but keep FAQs for users on the page, not for SERP decoration. Only include the back-end schema where it adds genuine help.

Page Title (SEO Titles)

By default, an SEO plugin will generate a page title, but it’s far better if you write your own. If your page is default SEO Agency | Made By Factory, it’s not as effective as setting it to “Improve Your Traffic With Our Award Winning SEO.” You can see which one is more compelling. You want users to click, so your words need to stand out.

Search engines will likely weigh words earlier in the title, so think about that too. “Buy Kee Klamp Tube & Fittings” is better than “We Are John Smith’s Car Dealership & VW Sellers”.

Here’s a great post from Yoast on how to create good page titles

Make good use of page headings.

Headings are an excellent way to structure your content, and paired with a table of contents, they can give search engines lots of information about what is in your content. The order of your headings is also a useful clue to web crawlers. Your content is displayed in a nested order: H2, H3, and so on. Also, you should have only one H1 (main header) tag per page.

Optimise Images and Media.

Like I said before, pay attention to image size. But aside from that, every image should have an ‘alt’ attribute. Use your keywords in your alt text attributes too. Not only does it help your SEO, but it can also help out readers using assistive visual technology. With this in mind, describe your images and avoid keyword spam.
The way to do this now is to use WebP or AVIF formats: Blazingly fast images that load pretty much instantly. Most caching plugins will handle this for you, or you can use one like Smush.
Lazy load anything below the fold and explicitly define the size (again, plugins can handle this) for LCP (Core Web Vitals) or Google will have a wobble.

As of WordPress 6.5, we have native AVIF support, so you can drag those suckers right into your media library.

What To Focus On If your blog is huge

Your primary focus here should be your main pages and posts (sometimes known as cornerstone content), and to watch out for keyword cannibalisation. SemRush has a handy tool that can scan your site for this and let you know if two or more of your pages are competing for a keyword.

If you find you have cannibalised content, see which page has the best engagement and either remove or reword the other. If the lesser page contains keywords that your better page is ranking for, then link that phrase from the less mediocre performing page to the better performing one. That will pass all the link juice to the new page.

Keep Your Content Up To Date

Your website content should always be relevant. If it’s outdated and adds no value to the user, consider removing it. If it’s only out of date but can be amended, then rewrite it and resubmit to Google.

Make sure you don’t have duplicate content.
This is effectively cannibalisation. If, for some reason, your content is duplicated or in two places, then set a canonical URL.

WordPress SEO Step 4: Website Structure

Your website should be organised; a well-organised website is much easier for search engine robots to get their heads around. A proper website structure also makes it clearer which pages on your site are more important. For a more detailed commentary, see this post on website structure for SEO.

Control how your brand appears in SERPs: implement structured data (schema) on the homepage, set a clean site icon, and keep title links short and unique. This improves attribution and CTR on both mobile and desktop.

XML Sitemaps.

Your SEO Plugin will generate XML Sitemaps. You MUST submit your sitemaps to the search console if you want them to be crawled correctly. That way, they know to look out for any changes in your content, and the search console will always have the latest sitemap.

Website Navigation

Firstly, create a clear navigation structure. Our website is organised into services, projects, and blog posts. Our blog posts are also categorised. We try to keep these to a minimum, as too many categories can be chaotic. We also link to our most-read blog posts from each blog page. Always make your site easy to navigate. Breadcrumbs can be useful. Especially if your website is retail.

Categories and Tags

WordPress uses categories and tags to organise your site, and in some cases, custom categories or tags are known as taxonomies. This helps to create a hierarchy for your content. For example, if your website is about height safety, the categories could be types of fall protection (e.g., collective), and the tags could be products (e.g., guardrails). It’s up to you to decide, but the key is to be consistent and avoid cluttering your site.

As a rule of thumb, categories are broader, and tags are more specific. You can just use categories and ignore tags. Pick a group of categories and set these up to group your posts into.

If you plan to use tags, don’t use them like Instagram -WordPress creates archive pages for every category and tag, so you will have a page in your sitemap for every tag. I recommend checking if these are indexed in your SEO plugin. I de-index my categories and tags, as they are effectively duplicate content, and I don’t want users to land on a category page. De-index any page that’s not valuable for your users to land on. We don’t have date-based archives, authors, or tags indexed.

Internal Linking

Use plenty of internal links. Ensure the anchor text (The text in the link) contains keywords for the page you are linking to. Avoid using any links like ‘here’ or ‘click here’; they don’t help your SEO or the user. These links will also help search engines understand how your pages relate to each other.

The more content you have, you will find that much of it starts to fall into related categories. Creating relevant links between these pages will help your users and search engines to understand how the content fits together.

WordPress SEO Step 5: Measure & Track Progress

There’s no point in doing anything if you can’t measure the results. Make sure your site is hooked up to Google Analytics and Google Search Console at a minimum. It’s also useful to track your website as a project in an SEO package like SEMRush. These tools will not only track and measure but also often suggest opportunities for improvement.

AI Overviews – You can’t “optimise for AI Overviews.” Do the basics brilliantly: Make sure you have fast pages, concise answers, authoritative sources, and structured data. Look at topic clusters as a whole, not individual keywords.

Outreach, Engagement & Audience Growth.

I haven’t gone into these topics in depth here because I am focusing on on-page and technical SEO. But lots of visits, links, and shares will grow your overall domain authority, and that will have the most significant impact of all on your rankings. A good backlink strategy is essential for any serious SEO campaign. Getting a company to do it can be costly, so you need to do your research and ensure white-hat techniques are used.

A small note on this. Avoid site reputation abuse: that means no renting subdomains, no third-party “parasite” posts to harvest your authority – ensure backlinks are high-quality and earned. If you use a company for this, find out how they are getting those links. Mark paid links rel=“sponsored”. Always keep editorial control, or you can just expect them to vanish with a core update.

Quick AI Segue

Like I said, this blog post can’t cover it all, it’s toooo big, but a few points here:

What about AI Content? AI-assisted content is fine in Google’s eyes; quality isn’t negotiable. Publish people-first, accurate work with clear expertise and sourcing. Treat LLMs like drafting tools, not a content strategy. AI content often has zero soul and no human personality. It sounds off, and quite frankly, no matter how good people say they are at prompting, and ‘you can’t tell’, 99% of the time, you can.

To Conclude

This is just a basic overview of what you can do to help your SEO on your WordPress website. If you are a business owner, you probably have way more important things to do, so it’s better to find a trusted digital media partner to work with you. As SEOAs SEO experts, we can develop an overall digital marketing strategy to help your business grow. u want to know more, get in touch today!