First of all, well done, you have chosen a rather brilliant CMS-that’s WordPress. This is something that not all businesses do; they sometimes choose content management systems that are not as well built, can go wrong, and cause so many glitches.

However, now you’re wondering, well, how do you turn your WordPress website into a lead-generating machine? How do you start getting more sales and enquiries through your website?

Well, in terms of local and organic search engine optimisation, it is a slow process. It does take time, often months. However, do not be deterred; if you follow the right steps and use the right on-page and off-page optimisation methods, that WordPress website can be your business’s best marketing asset.

I am: Ryan Walsh

The date is: 13/06/2026

20-minute read (don’t worry, it will be worth it)

A WordPress website is a bit like a Lego structure that has not been built just yet. It’s good, but it will require some skill and work.

And when you go to various SEO companies’ websites, they will be talking about new ways you can increase the visibility of your website, such as GEO and AEO.

That’s all well and good, yet before you even start to contemplate how we can make our business more visible on ChatGPT, you have to do a lot of work on your WordPress website. And we don’t just mean a few hours on the odd Friday afternoon; we mean a lot of optimisation work spread over a long timeframe.

Good WordPress website hosting

Regardless of what your business sells, it’s important to invest in high-quality website hosting. Sometimes a business, especially when starting, wants to save as much money as possible.

This can mean they might, for example, buy the cheapest website hosting, which can be very slow.

Slow hosting needs to be avoided because Google prioritises businesses with fast websites on the first page.

Speed & Uptime

Therefore, your WordPress website needs high-quality, fast hosting. This means that the website should be live and have reliable uptime. If the website keeps going offline for any reason, such as hosting issues, it can cause SEO problems.

For example, if a website goes down due to hosting issues, Googlebot will try to crawl and index it.

If Googlebot, for example, tries to crawl and index, say, the homepage too many times when the website is down, then this can mean that

Google’s algorithm deems the website as being unreliable.

If the website is deemed unreliable, organic search engine optimisation rankings can drop.

Therefore, whether you have a 5-page website or a 5-million-page website, you need the website hosting to be ultra-reliable.

SSL Certificates

It’s important to install an SSL certificate as well. You should also talk to your web developer about enabling HTTPS.

SEO Plug-ins

It’s fair that many people advise against using certain SEO plugins, as they can slow down your business website.

Now, sometimes that advice would be fair; however, some WordPress plugins are really good. For example, some allow XML sitemaps to be generated and basic on-page optimisations to be implemented.

For example, some plugins allow you to add meta titles and meta descriptions quickly in a box, making it a piece of cake to edit such on-page elements.

Keyword research

Regardless of which CMS your business uses, whether it’s Magento or WordPress, it’s important to conduct keyword research.

Keyword research enables the marketing team and the business to understand which product and service descriptions people are using most.

For example, search volume could vary significantly depending on how an item is described.

One set of customers might describe an electric bike just as “E-Bikes,” and this could have, say, 10,000 search volume per month.

Another set of customers may describe the item as “e-mountain bikes”, and that might only have 1000 in terms of search volume per month.

Therefore, the business needs to understand, through keyword research, which keywords to optimise the website for, as this can have a dramatic impact on the number of organic visitors the website receives per month.

Keyword difficulty

Now, this is where the skill set of SEO consultants should come in: it’s all well and good to go after keywords with massive search volumes, but can that goal be achieved?

All e-commerce businesses, for example, will want to draw in as many organic visitors as possible from Google.

However, what this means is that potentially hundreds of other businesses are ploughing their marketing budgets into that area as well.

More competition, more businesses, in terms of marketing agencies like us, all going after the same keywords for our clients, means more competition.

More competition means more work is being implemented. Because search engine optimisation is cumulative, other businesses may have been chipping away at this for years before a new business starts its ongoing organic search engine optimisation work.

The point we are making, therefore, is about the standard, or where the bar has already been set.

If it’s been set high, it can mean there’s often a lot of work to do. We SEO consultants refer to this as keyword difficulty, basically meaning how hard it will be to get that business on page one of Google’s organic results, or, for example, within the 3-pack of Google Business results.

 

Website architecture

This sounds super complicated, but it’s not really.

Website architecture is all about organising the pages and navigation, including links, so that customers can get to where they need to go with the fewest clicks.

For example, if your best-selling products or services are far down the menu, well, you do have to ask why.

Why is that so?

You want to make it super simple for customers to get to the right products. It’s also a matter of using, say, internal links, breadcrumb navigation, and links through visual icons to get people where they need to go.

Sometimes, a marketing agency will have completed all of the hard work. That means the SEO business may have got that e-commerce website ranking for several keywords that are difficult to rank for on page one of Google.

However, if the web design is not simple to use, you can actually start to see a high bounce rate.

An increased bounce rate, when sustained for, say, many months, tells Google that the average shopper on the website is not that interested in the e-commerce website when they get there. For example, the bounce rate could be high, while the dwell time is low.

 

On-Page SEO

Now, what is important to understand is that off-page search engine optimisation is very important. Backlinks are often what make an SEO campaign work. However, you could sit for a whole day trying to build a good link and not earn a single valuable backlink.

Therefore, the elements that are more easily altered, such as on-page signals, should be optimised first.

Therefore, a lot of attention should be paid to making sure the content marketing, that’s the text on each page, is of as good quality as it can be. You need to know about Google EEAT. You need the text to provide high-quality information.

Then, on top of that, you can start adding on-page elements, such as H1 tags, meta descriptions, and alt text.

Now, the on-page SEO needs to be done right, white hat, and follow the advice of Google E-EAT.

When you do this high-quality work, if it’s done right, Google bot can crawl and index it. Then your business will rank higher, say initially on page 3 of Google for that keyword.

Now you might be thinking, well, that’s no good, we want to be on page 1.

However, you always have to keep in mind how Google’s algorithm works.

 

Meta titles and meta descriptions

You know, when you’re buying, say, a house, you obviously form an opinion of the house from the front elevation.

Now, this is the same with your business’s organic search engine optimisation. That is because the meta title and the meta description are what Google often uses to show in search engine results pages.

Therefore, this is just a title, and 2 short lines to describe the page. Now, with WordPress, you can install a plugin such as Yoast SEO, which makes it a piece of cake to edit this area.

However, it’s important to note that those lines of text are giving you an opportunity. That you need to sell why someone, that is a shopper, should select your business. Just writing the relevant keywords in the meta title and meta description is often not enough.

For example, why not add something your business offers that the competition might not? For example, free next-day delivery on orders above £100.00.

Now the meta titles and the meta descriptions therefore have the primary purpose of informing the shopper what the page is about. If they can’t read, for example, that page sells exactly what they want, they’ll often go elsewhere. So, include keywords that you know your shoppers will be searching for, such as brands and, for example, product names.

 

Header Tags

It’s important on your WordPress website to use H1, H2, H3, and so on to help Googlebot and Google’s algorithm understand what that page is selling.

The header tags, therefore, signal to the search engine what information the page offers.

For example, if all the header tags describe window wiper blades for a certain classic car, then Googlebot knows what that page is about.

Therefore, it helps with the indexing process of working out where to rank that page.

Now it’s important to note that the H1 tag is the most important. You can, therefore, on certain pages, such as blog posts, structure the content as an FAQ.

For example, you could structure the content so that a customer asks the question, then you answer it. You could use the H1-H6 tags to mark up the questions, Googlebot indexes the work, and it has a much better understanding of what the page is about.

 

Content marketing

It will be nearly impossible to get any WordPress website to page one of Google, where the majority of pages are “content-thin”.

Now, it is actually a really common issue among many small-business websites that use WordPress. The simple reason is that the business often doesn’t take the time to add well-written content marketing to the page. The reason is that, even with a WordPress website with relatively few pages, it is incredibly time-intensive to write all the content marketing.

However, our top advice is this: content marketing needs to be the business’s best effort.

The reason is that this is central to determining where the website ranks in Google’s index.

The information used by the Google algorithm is compared with information in Google’s Knowledge Graph to ensure accuracy. Therefore, the more helpful the advice, the higher the website will often rank in Google.

 

Avoiding common mistakes

A common mistake with many WordPress websites is paying a designer a small fee to design the site. Neither the business nor the web designer has written the text; therefore, AI-generated text is sometimes used. This will never rank as highly as content marketing written by someone with real-life experience and expertise in that area.

Therefore, we would encourage you to read as much advice as possible regarding Google EEAT.

Google EEAT encourages you, through your business’s content marketing, to demonstrate as much experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness as possible.

Therefore, using AI to write the text will not substitute for someone writing a comprehensive and well-written guide.

Now, we do appreciate that, for example, a plumbing and heating business is not going to have the available capacity of a plumber to sit down and write 3,000-word articles on a Saturday morning.

However, you can work with the company to incorporate their knowledge and expertise into the article. This could mean a lot of WhatsApp messages, for example, between the copywriter and the business; however, it is sometimes worth doing to ensure as much information as possible is incorporated into the article.

 

Internal links

Think carefully about how you will apply internal links throughout your WordPress website.

The main reason is that with internal links, you can help keep a shopper on your WordPress website for longer.

Now, with internal links, you can do several things: the pages that are linked to most internally tell Google that they are your most important group of pages.

That’s worth thinking about. Also, you have to use various tools, such as Google Analytics, to see where organic visitors are coming from. For example, the visitors could mostly be coming from the blog posts that the business has written.

However, these blog posts could be what we in SEO refer to as “orphan pages”- now, what this means is there are no internal backlinks back to another page. This is a massive missed opportunity because you can direct some of those organic visitors to pages where, by what happens, they might buy a product.

For example, a detailed article about the different diamond options in a diamond engagement ring could direct visitors to the products you sell.

 

Spreading link equity

The other aspect to think about is link equity, now when a link builder or link building team have built good backlinks, you will have a strong backlink profile.

Now having a strong backlink profile means have a lot of do-follow and no-follow backlinks, which have a high DA score. This means that the website has then strong authority, and this is where internal links can be used. You can use internal links to filter link equity to different pages.

For example, The Guardian newspaper might link to a blog post, which will send a lot of link equity through to that page. You can then use internal links, to direct the link equity to the right main pages. The benefit of doing so is that the organic rankings for the main pages which have been linked to can improve.

This means for example, let’s say you link from the blog post to a main service page, that service page can move up Google’s organic ranks.

 

Technical SEO is important regardless of the type of content management system you have.

However, it’s important to get right, the technical SEO, because if Googlebot can’t crawl a page, then it will never appear in Google’s organic results. Therefore, for example, let’s say that a page has been set to no-index, well this means it can’t be indexed. Therefore, it might not appear in the LLM’s it won’t appear in Google’s organic results neither.

 

Can all the important pages get indexed?

It’s therefore important to make sure for example that all the product pages and all the main pages can get indexed.

If for any reason, they can’t get indexed, then you should with the marketing team and web developers to see why this is so. It could be that a robot.txt document has not been set up the right way. Meaning that there are still instructions within robot.txt not to crawl and index say the about us page. Therefore, this would need to be fixed.

 

Do add XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps help the search engines to know which pages and blog posts to crawl. They look a shopping receipt, but what they are is a long list of pages which have been added to your website.

The reason that adding an XML sitemap is important for your WordPress website is, because the website will often a limited crawl budget assigned to it.

This means that Google will only spend so much time looking for changes which have been made to the website. Also, will only spend so much time looking for new pages that have been published.

Therefore, if you add an XML sitemap, what you are basically doing is saying that this is the list of pages and blog posts you want to appear in Google’s results.

Then Googlebot can work down the list and crawl them.

 

Adding new blog posts

What’s great about WordPress is that it has an in-built editor, which means editing the text, adding on-page SEO elements is a piece of cake.

Now, key to improving any businesses search engine optimisation, whether that be a PLC business with over 10,000 staff or you’re a sole trader, key to the optimisation process will be writing blog posts.

Therefore, you should create what is called a “content calendar” this is to set out what topics your going to be writing about in the months ahead.

 

You need to write content that helpful.

For example, when a customer comes into your shop or lets say contacts your business for advice, what questions do they normally ask?

What questions do they ask right at the start? Because if you can answer these, via say a helpful blog post, you then have the opportunity to convert that visitor into a customer. For example, you could encourage them to follow you on social media, you could direct them to a product page or you could ask for say a contact number to call that person.

Therefore, when your writing content marketing, such as articles or blog posts, write the work as if your answering commonly asked questions.

Then you can answer follow up questions that customers tend to ask.
If the work is really helpful, then these blog posts will have a high dwell time. When Google’s algorithm sees that a shopper is spending a huge amount of time reading a long blog post, like this, then that shows that the work must be helpful for the customer. Therefore, it will then move that page higher up Google’s serps because it has a high dwell time.

 

NAP consistency this is important for local SEO

Now we are onto the off-page SEO elements. So, let’s say that you have set out your main pages on your WordPress website. You have written good quality content marketing, which has a good Google EEAT score.

Now its time to start thinking about how your going to improve the local SEO.

We would also recommend at this stage, starting to build backlinks as well. This can improve the authority of the website.

For example, if your website has a lot of relevant and high quality links, this can make a massive SEO improvement for your company.

 

What are NAP citations?

NAP citations are mentions of the businesses name, your current business address, as well as the company phone number.

This NAP information needs to be cited on websites such as Thomson Local and other online business directories such as Yelp or for example Hot Frog.

When you talk to any top SEO agency, they will tell you that key to improving a businesses local SEO is what called “NAP consistency”.

This means all your NAP citations need to be consistent.

 

The user experience is important

The user experience is really important, because if you don’t get the design right on your WordPress website, then people may not find the page they want. They may also not find the products that they want. This causes an increase in the bounce rate.

Therefore, you have to carry out a user experience audit and figure out ways to make the website simpler to use.

Use Google Analytics to find which pages have a super high bounce rate.

Then try to work out why the bounce rate is as high as it is, is it because for example the page is just lacking information.

SEO companies call these pages “content thin” pages, meaning pages which basically have a low word count, or just don’t offer any helpful information. They are therefore often quickly written pages.

Now if a shopper can’t find an answer to a question they have, they often won’t go looking for other articles to read on your site, they simply just leave, which contributes to the bounce rate increasing.

If the bounce rate increases substantially, and this prolonged, for example for many months, these pages often then get moved down Google’s ranks.

For example, the page might have been on page 1 of Google for that keyword.

However, if the bounce rate is too high for that page, for too long, it will move that page down the organic rankings.

 

Make sure you monitor your WordPress websites backlinks

You only want to have high quality backlinks. Therefore, if your backlink profile has spammy links or toxic links, you will need the help of an SEO agency to rectify this.

 

How we can help:

Walsh & Partners is one of the most established and longest running SEO companies within the city of Cardiff. For example, Ryan Walsh, who runs the business, has now over 14 years’ experience as an SEO agency owner. We can help to get your WordPress website onto page one of Google.

We have worked with many businesses that have WordPress websites. We have experience of local and national SEO. We have some of the very best SEO consultants working for us.

If you would like further information regarding WordPress SEO, or perhaps you would like a quote, then do not hesitate to call the team today.