WordPress SEO: how to optimize your site, and what you can automate

WordPress SEO consists of five settings you get right once and four tasks that come back every week. Those four tasks are: page titles, meta descriptions, internal links and alt text. The settings take an hour. The four tasks are where you make the difference.

Is WordPress good for SEO?

Yes, WordPress is a strong base for SEO, because it serves your pages as plain HTML. Google reads it directly. So do the crawlers of ChatGPT and Perplexity, which do not execute JavaScript. Sites built entirely in JavaScript have a harder time there. More in how AI crawlers read your site.

What WordPress does not do is decide what is on your pages. A site with the title “Home” on the front page and ten services without a description ranks just as badly as any other site.

First: five settings you get right once

Go through these five before you start on texts. If something goes wrong here, the rest does not help.

1. Open your site to search engines

Go to Settings, Reading. Is “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checked? Then you ask Google not to index your site, and WordPress also turns off the sitemap. Web developers check this box during the build and sometimes forget it at launch.

2. Choose post name permalinks

Under Settings, Permalinks, choose Post name. A URL then looks like /water-heater-replacement instead of /?p=123. Only change this on a new site. On an existing site your old links stop working unless you redirect them, with a 301 redirect: a permanent forward to the new address. The explanation is in the WordPress documentation on permalinks.

3. Use one SEO plugin

Choose Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress or AIOSEO. They give you a field per page for the title and description, and they build the sitemap. They also set up basic structured data: code that tells Google what is on your page. Which one fits you is in the best WordPress SEO plugins compared. Never install two at once.

Which plugins have AI on board and what that AI does on its own is in AI plugins for WordPress SEO.

4. Submit your sitemap in Search Console

Since version 5.5, WordPress builds its own sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml. If you use an SEO plugin, it takes over. With Yoast the sitemap is at /sitemap_index.xml, for example. Submit the right one in Google Search Console. Then you see which pages are indexed.

5. Choose one address for your site

Your site must be reachable on exactly one variant: with https, and with or without www. Type the other variants into your browser. They should all redirect to that one.

Categories, tags and attachment pages

WordPress creates a page for every category and every tag, with a list of posts. On older sites even every image gets its own page: the attachment page. Google sees all those pages too. On a small business site they are often thin pages, with many links and no text of their own. Our choice: keep categories, take tags out of Google, redirect attachment pages.

Keep categories in Google if you make them real pages. Yoast recommends that too, because a category page can be a good landing page (Yoast on categories and tags). So give every category a short text of its own, under Posts, Categories, in the Description field. An HVAC contractor in Columbus writes three sentences on replacement, maintenance and repairs for the category Furnaces. Do check that your theme shows that text.

Set tags to noindex: a signal to Google not to show the page in the search results. Here we differ from Yoast, which usually keeps tag pages in Google too. A tag like “repair” with two posts looks almost like your category page and adds nothing in Google. If you do write a text for a tag, it can stay. In Yoast you turn this on or off per type under Settings, Categories & tags.

Redirect attachment pages to the image itself. Since WordPress 6.4 they are off on new sites and redirect to the file. On sites from before that version they still work the old way. WordPress names as the reason that such pages end up in Google and sometimes even rank. Yoast redirects them by default (Yoast on media pages). In Rank Math the setting is in the general settings, under Links (Redirect Attachments). Was your site built before WordPress 6.4? Check in your SEO plugin that this is on.

Then the four recurring tasks

After the settings, the real work begins. Your pages change, your competitors too, and Google sometimes shows your titles differently. That is why these tasks keep coming back.

Task	Why it counts	Doing it yourself in WordPress	How often
Page title and meta description	Decides whether someone in Google clicks you or your competitor	Per page in your SEO plugin’s field	For pages with many impressions and few clicks
Internal links	Points Google and your visitor to your most important pages	By hand in the text, or with suggestions from your plugin	With every new page and a round every month
Alt text	Describes your images for Google Images and screen readers	In the media library or per image block	With every upload, and once for the backlog
Content for questions you miss	No page, no position	A new post or an extra section on an existing page	When Search Console shows a question you have nothing for

The same HVAC contractor quickly has a hundred fields to maintain with thirty pages. It is not hard. It is mainly a lot.

Read how to write an SEO title that earns the click.

Which pages do you tackle first?

Start with the pages Google already shows, but few people click. How to find them in Search Console, step by step, is in improve your SEO.

Speed: how fast is fast enough?

Fast enough is a site that is usable on a phone within a few seconds and does not jump around while loading. You do not need a score of 100 in PageSpeed Insights.

In WordPress most speed is won in three places: images that are too large, a theme or page builder with many scripts, and cheap hosting. Compress images on upload and check which plugins you really use. Then measure with PageSpeed Insights on mobile. More free tools are in the best SEO tools.

Are your titles still “Home” and “Services”? Fix those titles first. That brings more than tweaking cache settings.

Running an online store? There are extra points: see WooCommerce SEO.

Building your pages with a page builder? Read Elementor and SEO.

WordPress SEO and AI search engines

Good WordPress SEO is also the foundation for being named by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Those systems take their answer from pages they can read and that answer the question directly. A page with a clear title, the answer in the first paragraph and good internal links does better there.

The difference with Google: Search Console does not show whether ChatGPT names you. You have to measure that separately. How that works and what to do about it is in getting found in ChatGPT and at the prompt tracker.

What you can automate, and what you keep doing yourself

The four recurring tasks are exactly the work you can automate. They follow fixed rules, you measure them in Search Console and a mistake can be undone. Your offer, your prices, your photos and your own experience stay yours. What software may do on its own, and where you keep an eye on it, is in what is an AI agent.

Which tasks software takes over now and which it does not is in automating SEO with AI.

With GreatCompany Automatic you connect your WordPress site through the GreatCompany plugin. Every Monday GreatCompany prepares up to five improvements for titles, descriptions, internal links and alt text, and then applies them to your site. Want to see everything first? Then every proposal comes by email and you click Yes or No. Do not like a change afterwards? Put the old version back with one click. It works next to Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress and AIOSEO.

Take the HVAC contractor in Columbus. His furnace page was called “Furnaces”. After the Monday round it is called “Furnace Replacement in Columbus: Prices and Scheduling”. And three old blog posts now link to that page.

A thirty-minute weekly rhythm if you do it yourself

Prefer to do it yourself? Keep this rhythm. It fits in half an hour on Monday morning.

1. Open Search Console and find one page with many impressions and few clicks.
2. Rewrite the title and meta description of that page.
3. Add a link to that page from two other pages. Make the search query the anchor text: the clickable words of the link.
4. Give the images on that page alt text.
5. Note the date, so you can compare in four weeks.

One page a week sounds like little. After six months you have done your 25 most important pages. On many small business sites, those pull in most of the traffic.

More on this rhythm is in DIY SEO. Prefer someone who does it for you? Read hiring a WordPress SEO specialist.