WordPress SEO guide: a five-layer plan for site owners

Five layers in one table

This post is a map. Each layer has its own more detailed guide, and here you'll see how they connect and where to start. Google itself describes the basics in its SEO starter guide.

An order of work that makes sense

Owners lose the most time on cosmetics while the site still has a technical block. Improving descriptions does nothing if Google can't get onto the site. So the order is fixed:

1. Remove blocks. Check the visibility option in Settings → Reading, noindex on important pages, the robots.txt file and the sitemap. A new site? Start with our guide on how to add a WordPress site to Google.
2. Fix URLs people land on. Redirect 404 errors that get traffic to the closest equivalent. See our guide to the 404 error in WordPress.
3. Improve the titles and descriptions of your most important pages. The home page, services or product categories, contact. Each should have its own title with what the customer is looking for.
4. Fill out the content of the pages that sell. A three-sentence service page rarely beats competitors who answer questions about price, timing and scope.
5. Link your pages together. Every guide post should lead to the service or product it talks about, and to one or two related posts.
6. Describe your images. Alt text helps blind visitors and image search.
7. Only now write new content. Ideally on topics customers ask about by phone and email.

Two technical things are worth setting once and leaving alone: the URL structure in Settings → Permalinks, described in the WordPress documentation, and the sitemap in your SEO plugin, for example following Rank Math's guide to sitemaps. Changing the URL structure on a live site without redirects is one of the most common reasons for a sudden drop in traffic.

This order doesn't change for years. Only the details change, such as how Google shows results.

What not to do

Some of the advice going round online does harm. Google describes this in its spam policies, and on WordPress the most common cases are:

• Keyword stuffing. A title with five versions of the same phrase reads badly and doesn't help.
• Batches of town pages with the same text and only the town name swapped.
• Mass-produced text nobody checked. Content written with help from AI is fine if someone has read it, corrected it and stands behind the facts. Hundreds of unchecked posts are a risk.
• Buying link packages. The quick effect is often short, and the trouble long.
• Two SEO plugins at once. Yoast SEO and Rank Math installed together duplicate tags and sitemaps.

Where TellMyShop helps, and where it doesn't

Each of the five layers involves a lot of repetitive work: open a page, check a field, fix it, save, next one. The TellMyShop plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce connects your site to your chat (Claude or ChatGPT), which does this work across the whole site at once.

In the free TellMyShop Free version the chat reviews the site: missing and duplicate titles and descriptions, thin content, images without alt text, the 404 report, technical health. It also opens pages the way Google sees them. The result is a fix plan, in order from what blocks the site to what's cosmetic. Free saves nothing.

In TellMyShop Pro the same conversations end in a change. The chat saves titles, descriptions, post and page content, alt text, redirects and internal links straight after the licence is activated, with no switches, in batches with a preview. On top of that comes the Consultant, a written set of an adviser's rules on content and Google visibility that the chat draws on in every conversation.