WordPress generates category pages, tag pages, author pages, and date archives on its own. On most sites nobody has ever decided what should happen to them, and that decision is worth more than any plugin setting.
Publish one blog post and WordPress can create half a dozen extra URLs pointing at it. Some of those are useful. Most aren't, and on a site with a few hundred posts they add up to thousands of near-empty pages.
What WordPress generates by default
And what we do with itSorting this out is often the single biggest thing available on an older WordPress site. It doesn't add anything new, it stops the site spreading itself across thousands of pages that were never meant to rank.
WordPress lets you pick a URL structure, and the default on older installs is one of the worst options available. Fixing it is worth doing carefully rather than by ticking a box.
Structures that cause problems
The first says nothing to anyone. The second makes a still-useful article look five years out of date in the search results. The third is long, and it breaks every time you move a post between categories.
What works for a business site
Short, readable, and stable. It doesn't age, it doesn't break when you reorganise categories, and it tells someone what the page is before they click it.
The important part: changing your permalink structure changes every URL on the site at once. Done with redirects mapped first, it's fine. Done by changing the setting and hoping, it's the fastest way to lose the traffic you already have. If your structure is bad but the site is performing, we'd often leave it alone and spend the effort elsewhere.
An SEO plugin has a few hundred settings. Around a dozen change anything. These are the three groups worth going through properly.
The settings that decide which of those automatic page types appear in search. Where most of the value is.
The pattern used when a page has no title written for it. Left at default on almost every site we look at.
Most SEO plugins output markup automatically. It's usually close to right and rarely exactly right.
One thing worth saying plainly: the green light or score the plugin gives each page is not a ranking signal. It's a checklist written by the plugin's authors. Chasing it produces keyword-stuffed pages that read badly, and we'd rather you ignored it entirely.
WordPress has more SEO advice written about it than any other platform, and a lot of it is old, or written to sell something.
"Add tags to every post so they get found"
Actually
Tags don't help a post rank. They create a listing page for each tag, and if you use fifty tags across thirty posts you now have fifty thin pages. It's one of the most common causes of bloat we find.
"Install an SEO plugin and you're done"
Actually
A plugin gives you the controls. It doesn't decide anything. Installing one and leaving it at default is roughly like buying a camera and never changing a setting.
"Get the plugin's page score to green"
Actually
The score checks whether you repeated a phrase often enough. Writing to satisfy it makes pages worse for the people reading them, and Google doesn't see the score at all.
"Add a caching plugin to fix speed"
Actually
Caching helps, and it hides the cause. If the page is loading four hundred kilobytes of unused code, caching just delivers that faster. The weight still has to come off.
"Run two SEO plugins to be safe"
Actually
They'll both write titles and both output markup, and the results conflict. Pick one, configure it properly, and remove the other cleanly rather than just deactivating it.
"Publish something weekly so Google sees activity"
Publishing frequency isn't a ranking factor. What matters is whether the pages are worth ranking. Weekly posts nobody searches for add pages without adding traffic.
Anything that could affect what's already ranking gets tested first and changed in a way we can reverse.
A full crawl plus Search Console, which usually turns up several times more URLs than anyone expected the site to have.
Going through the automatic page types one by one and deciding each, rather than accepting whatever the plugin defaults to.
Titles, headings, and internal links on the pages already getting seen. The fastest returns are almost always here.
Plugin conflicts, leftover code, and anything loading on pages it isn't used on. Tested on a staging copy first.
Whichever one you already have, in almost every case. The main options are close enough in capability that switching costs more time than it gains.
What matters is that one is installed, configured deliberately, and that it's the only one. We'd rather spend the time on settings than on a migration between plugins that do the same job.
Yes, and it gives you more rope than most platforms. Nearly everything is editable, which means nearly everything can be set up badly.
Sites that struggle on WordPress usually aren't struggling because of WordPress. It's accumulated decisions: plugins nobody removed, tags nobody planned, and settings nobody looked at.
We check before touching anything. Occasionally a category page is genuinely earning traffic, in which case it stays and gets improved rather than removed.
Usually the data shows these pages getting almost nothing, which is exactly why they're worth removing from search. Nothing is deleted, and visitors can still reach them.
Rarely for SEO reasons alone. Themes affect speed and heading structure, and both are usually fixable within the theme you have.
Where a theme is genuinely the problem is when it's unmaintained or so heavy that nothing else moves the numbers. That's a rebuild conversation rather than an SEO one, and it's covered under WordPress web design.
Anything structural is tested on a staging copy first. Content and settings changes go in directly since they're reversible.
Before starting we check backups exist and work. That's not a formality, it's the thing that makes everything else safe to do.
Yes, quite a lot. It adds product and category pages, and filtering that can generate a very large number of URLs, so decisions about what should be listed matter far more.
The store-specific side of that is covered under eCommerce SEO, and the two run together on a WooCommerce site.
It runs alongside the general technical and on-page work rather than replacing it. Pricing sits on the main SEO page.
Other SEO services
Thirty minutes on what WordPress has been generating and what's worth keeping.
Or email hello@culmen.digital