The WordPress SEO Checklist I Actually Use

SEO for wordpress

I’ve been doing this for about a decade now — WordPress, SEO, and increasingly the two together — and this is the checklist I still come back to when I’m auditing a site or onboarding a new client. It’s not exhaustive theory, it’s the stuff that actually moves the needle.

A quick note before we start: good SEO isn’t a trick you apply on top of a website. It’s what happens when the site is genuinely well-built, fast, and useful. Everything below is really just that idea broken into steps.

Content: Write for the reader first

Search engines have gotten very good at telling the difference between content written for people and content written to game rankings. So start here, not with keywords.

  • Do the keyword research anyway. Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs will tell you what your audience is actually typing into Google. Work those terms naturally into your titles, headings, and meta descriptions — never force them.
  • Structure with headings. H1 through H3 tags aren’t just for SEO, they’re what let someone scan your page and decide whether to keep reading.
  • Don’t skip alt tags. Compress your images for speed, then add alt text that actually describes what’s there. It helps accessibility and it helps search engines understand your page.
  • Link internally. Point to your own relevant content. It keeps people on your site longer and helps crawlers understand how your pages relate to each other.
  • Kill duplicate content. Every page should earn its place. If two pages are saying the same thing, merge them.

Structure: Make it easy to navigate — for humans and crawlers

A well-organised site isn’t just nicer to use, it’s easier for Google to crawl and index properly.

  • Categories and tags, used properly. Categories are your broad topics, tags are the specifics. Get this right and you avoid a lot of accidental duplicate-content headaches.
  • Clean URLs. Short, keyword-relevant, no unnecessary stop words. In WordPress this is Settings → Permalinks — set it once and don’t change it later without redirects.
  • Sitemap and breadcrumbs. Yoast and Rank Math both generate an XML sitemap for you — submit it in Search Console. Breadcrumbs help navigation and sometimes show up in search results too.
  • Genuinely mobile-responsive. Not “resizes okay,” actually built for mobile — Google’s indexing is mobile-first for virtually every site now. Worth flagging: Google retired its old Mobile-Friendly Test tool back in December 2023. If you’re still checking mobile-friendliness with that (or a guide that still recommends it), use Lighthouse or the URL Inspection tool in Search Console instead.

Technical: The unglamorous stuff that actually matters most

This is the part people skip, and it’s usually the part causing the problem.

  • Speed. Compress images (WP Smush is a solid option), cache pages (W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache), and minify your CSS/JS (Autoptimize).
  • Crawlability. Keep robots.txt clean and your sitemap accurate — Yoast or Rank Math handle most of this for you.
  • Fix broken links. Run a checker periodically. Dead links waste crawl budget and quietly erode user trust.
  • HTTPS, no exceptions. It’s table stakes now, not a differentiator. Most hosts include free SSL.
  • Schema markup. Structured data helps search engines understand your content and can unlock rich results. Validate whatever you add with Google’s Rich Results Test.
  • Live in Search Console. Not once a quarter — check it regularly for indexing issues and performance drops before they become a bigger problem.

Off-page: The trust you build outside your own site

  • Earn backlinks, don’t buy them. Guest posts on relevant sites, broken-link building, or simply publishing something genuinely worth linking to.
  • Distribute what you publish. Share it on your channels and make sharing easy for readers with a well-maintained plugin. It won’t directly move rankings, but it drives the traffic and visibility that earns links.
  • Manage your reviews properly. Encourage genuine reviews on your Google Business Profile, monitor them, and respond to both the good and the bad ones professionally.
  • Show up in your industry. Relationships with others in your space compound — more mentions, more shares, more links, over time.

AI search: the newer layer on top of all this

Everything above is still the foundation — none of it has stopped mattering. But it’s not the whole picture anymore. A growing share of searches now get answered directly inside Google’s AI Overviews, or never touch Google at all — people are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude instead. That changes what “being found” actually means.

The good news: this isn’t a separate discipline you bolt on. It’s mostly the same fundamentals, done more rigorously.

  • Structure content so it can be lifted cleanly. AI systems favour content that answers a specific question directly and early, then backs it up — not content that makes the reader wait three paragraphs for the point. Clear headings, direct answers, and well-organised sections (like this one) help both a human skimmer and an AI summariser.
  • Schema still matters, arguably more. Structured data helps AI systems understand what your page actually is and cite it correctly.
  • Technical crawlability now serves more than Google. Broken links, messy robots.txt files, and slow, poorly rendered pages hurt you with AI crawlers exactly the way they hurt you with Googlebot.
  • Authority and trust signals carry over. Genuine reviews, real backlinks, and demonstrated expertise all feed into how AI systems assess whether your content is trustworthy enough to cite.
  • You can’t fully control it — and that’s fine. You can’t “SEO” your way into an AI Overview the way you once could a featured snippet. What you can do is make sure that if an AI system goes looking for an answer in your space, your site is technically sound, clearly structured, and genuinely worth citing.

I’ll go deeper on AI/LLM readiness in its own post — but the short version is: don’t treat it as a separate checklist. Treat it as a reason to actually finish the checklist above properly, instead of half-doing it.

The condensed version

Content: keyword research → structured headings → quality writing → alt tags → internal links → no duplicates

Structure: categories/tags → clean URLs → sitemap → breadcrumbs → real mobile responsiveness

Technical: speed → HTTPS → schema → no broken links → clean robots.txt/sitemap → Search Console, regularly

Off-page: backlink outreach → distribution → review management → industry visibility

AI search: direct, well-structured answers → schema → clean crawlability → genuine authority signals

Why I keep revisiting this list

SEO isn’t something you finish. I update old content, keep an eye on Search Console, and periodically strip out advice that’s quietly gone stale — like tools that no longer exist or plugins that haven’t been safely maintained in years. If a checklist you’re using still points you at something Google retired two years ago, it’s worth asking what else in it is out of date too.

Work through this properly rather than all at once, and treat it as something you come back to — not a box you tick and forget.

Need a hand?

If that list feels like a lot, that’s a fair reaction — it is a lot, especially on top of actually running a business. That’s exactly why “outsource it to someone who does this daily” is a legitimate answer, not a cop-out.

If you’d rather hand it off than work through it yourself, have a no-obligation chat with me and we’ll figure out whether I’m the right fit to help.