WordPress SEO Service for Sites That Should Be Ranking Better
Plugin, speed and structure fixes for the WordPress or WooCommerce site you already have, from a UK agency that builds WordPress sites as well as ranking them. No rebuild unless you genuinely need one.
At a glance
- 5.0 from 50+ Google reviews
- Local SEO from £400 a month
- National £1,000–£4,000 a month
- No long contracts
- Written by Amit Saini, updated November 2026
WordPress SEO is the work of making a WordPress site rank for what its customers search: stopping WordPress from offering Google pages that shouldn't be indexed, setting up one SEO plugin properly, fixing the speed problems themes and plugins cause, and giving every service its own clear page. WordPress runs 39.3% of all websites (W3Techs, November 2026), so most of the sites you compete with are on it too. Our WordPress SEO service works on the site you have. Local campaigns start from £400 a month; national campaigns run £1,000–£4,000.
- Local campaigns start from
- £400a month
- National campaigns run
- £1,000–£4,000
We checked 16 WordPress sites already on page one
On 10 November 2026 we took the websites that appeared on page one of Google for a handful of Leicester searches (plumbers, accountants, office space and SEO agencies) and looked at the 16 that run on WordPress. For each one we read the home page and its public sitemap. These sites are already winning. Here's what they still leave on the table.
| What we checked | Result |
|---|---|
| Running an SEO plugin | 14 of 16 (Yoast 8, Rank Math 6, All in One SEO 1) |
| Signs of two SEO plugins at once | 1 of 16 |
| Built with Elementor | 7 of 16 |
| Home page has a meta description | 15 of 16 |
| Home page images in a modern format (WebP or AVIF) | none at all on 9 of 16; every image on 2 |
| Separate script files loaded by the home page | median 12, ranging from 5 to 51 |
| Separate stylesheets loaded by the home page | median 10.5 |
| Sitemap offering author archives to Google | 2 of the 14 sitemaps we could read |
| Sitemap offering tag archives | 2 of 14 |
| Sitemap offering category archives | 6 of 14 |
What it tells you:
- The SEO plugin is installed. It's the settings that slipNearly everyone runs Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO, and nearly everyone has a meta description on the home page. The gaps are in what the plugin is told to do: which archives go in the sitemap, and whether two plugins are both writing to the page.
- Images are the cheapest speed winMore than half the sites served only JPEG and PNG images on their home page. Converting to WebP is usually a setting or a single plugin, and one of the quickest ways to lighten a page.
- One home page loaded 51 separate scriptsThe median was 12. Every one is a request the phone has to make before the page settles. Page builders and add-on plugins are usually where they come from.
- Archive pages still get offered to GoogleAuthor and tag archives on a small business site are thin copies of real pages. A few sites in our sample still list them in their sitemap, which is an invitation to index them.
How we did it: one home page and one public sitemap per site, read on 10 November 2026, with no logins and nothing beyond what any visitor's browser receives. A home page isn't the whole site, and plugin detection relies on the code each plugin leaves in the page, so treat this as a pattern, not a verdict on any business. That's why we haven't named them.
Why WordPress sites underperform in search
WordPress is SEO-friendly only if someone makes it so. After a few years of plugins, themes and updates, most sites have some of these problems:
- Archive pages indexedWordPress creates a page for every category, tag, author and date. Since version 5.5, WordPress's own sitemap lists users, which means author archives, by default unless an SEO plugin or a developer changes it. On most business sites those archives are thin duplicates of real pages.
- Media attachment pagesOlder sites can have a separate page for every uploaded image. WordPress 6.4 turned these off for new sites, but sites created before then keep them switched on after upgrading.
- Generic titles"Home", "Services" or the business name repeated on every page.
- Oversized imagesUploaded straight from a phone or camera, often in older formats.
- Page-builder weightHeavy builders can load large amounts of code on every page, a common reason sites struggle with Core Web Vitals (Google's measures of loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability).
- Two SEO plugins fightingYoast and Rank Math both active, each writing its own titles, schema and sitemap.
Plugins are also where most WordPress security problems start. Our WordPress web design page sets out the figures. The short version: fewer plugins means fewer risks and faster pages.
What our WordPress SEO service includes
Technical audit and clean-up
We crawl the whole site and compare it with Google Search Console. Then we decide which archives should and shouldn't be indexed, fix redirect chains and broken links, tidy the XML sitemap and work through the pages Search Console reports as excluded.
Plugin and speed review
We list every plugin, what it loads and on which pages, and whether a theme feature or a few lines of code could replace it. We test Core Web Vitals on your real service, product and location templates, not just the home page, convert images to modern formats and check whether your hosting is holding you back.
SEO plugin configuration
Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO, set up once and properly: title templates, sitemap contents, breadcrumbs and noindex rules. We add schema markup (code that describes your business to search engines) for your organisation, services, FAQs and reviews, and remove the duplicate output if two plugins have been running.
Structure and content
One clear page per service, each with its own title and headings. Location pages only where you genuinely serve the area, written so each one says something different, not doorway pages with the town name swapped. Content is built in the block editor so you can keep editing it yourself.
Links and mentions
Link building is part of every plan, not an extra: suppliers, partners, trade bodies and local directories that matter for your trade. Never bought. See how we approach link building.
WooCommerce SEO
For WooCommerce shops we add category structure, product data and filter URL handling. Our ecommerce SEO page covers this in depth.
Security and updates
Rankings depend on a site that stays up and stays clean. If you'd rather not manage updates and backups yourself, our website management service starts from £50 a month for a standard site, and usually £75–£100 a month for a shop.
A ten-minute WordPress SEO check you can do yourself
If you'd rather we did this, the free website SEO audit covers all six. A full technical review is a paid SEO audit, about £300 for a small site and back within 48 hours.
- 1Open yoursite.co.uk/wp-sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xmlIf you see sitemaps for users, authors or tags on a business site, ask whether you really want those indexed.
- 2Right-click an image on your home page and open it in a new tabIf the address ends .jpg or .png and the file is several megabytes, your images need converting and resizing.
- 3Check Plugins in your dashboardMore than one SEO plugin active? Pick one and deactivate the other, after checking which one your titles come from.
- 4Search Google for site:yoursite.co.ukLook for tag, author, date or "attachment" pages in the results.
- 5Run your main service page through PageSpeed Insights on mobileLook at the Core Web Vitals section first, not the overall score.
- 6Read your page titles in Search Console's Pages report or a site: searchIf several say the same thing, they're competing with each other.
Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO: does it matter?
Less than people think. In our sample of page-one sites, Yoast and Rank Math were both well represented, and one site ranked with All in One SEO. What separated them was configuration, not the brand. Our rule: if your site already runs one properly, we keep it, because switching plugins on a site that ranks creates risk for little gain. If two are running, we choose one and remove the other carefully, so titles and redirects carry over.
Fix your current WordPress site or rebuild it?
Most WordPress sites can be fixed. We recommend a rebuild only when:
- The theme or page builder makes it impossible to pass Core Web Vitals without starting again
- The structure can't support a page per service without breaking navigation or design
- The site is so out of date that updating WordPress or PHP would break it
- You can't edit the content yourself, so pages never get improved
If none of these apply, fixing is cheaper and keeps what already ranks. If a rebuild is right, we build WordPress sites too (see WordPress web design) and protect existing rankings with website migration SEO. The audit tells you plainly which route makes sense.
WordPress work, with numbers where we have them
An East Midlands solar installer, WordPress, ongoing SEO. The old site had been hacked, so we rebuilt it cleanly on WordPress and have run its SEO since. Google Search Console, whole site, by quarter:
| Quarter | Clicks | Impressions | Average position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul–Sep 2025 | 167 | 15,176 | 49.7 |
| Oct–Dec 2025 | 156 | 23,173 | 26.9 |
| Jan–Mar 2026 | 337 | 35,557 | 23.5 |
| Apr–Jun 2026 | 245 | 34,285 | 21.5 |
| Jul–Sep 2026 | 349 | 39,863 | 20.4 |
Average position moved from around 50 to around 20 in a year, on WordPress. That's not page one yet, and we'd rather show you that than round it up. We don't publish clients' traffic under their names.
WordPress sites we built with SEO set up from day one:
- Blinds 4 DecorAn established West Midlands blinds and shutters business with excellent reviews and a site that struggled to rank. We rebuilt it on WordPress with SEO set up from the start.
- Doors Doors DoorsA WordPress supply-and-fit site with service and location pages for Nottingham and nearby areas, clean URLs, schema, image optimisation and our own product photography.
"We've already seen the benefits of the SEO work, with improved Google visibility and a much stronger online presence." Frankie, Google review
How much does a WordPress SEO service cost?
WordPress SEO uses our published SEO prices:
£400
Local SEO from £400 a month
For businesses serving customers in one area.
£1,000–£4,000
National SEO £1,000–£4,000 a month
For businesses selling UK-wide. What moves the price is volume: keyword groups, new pages a month, outreach and locations.
£300
One-off SEO audit about £300
For a small site, back within 48 hours, if you want a diagnosis your own developer can work from.
Prices exclude VAT. Contracts are rolling monthly with one month's notice, with a review every 90 days. For comparison, one UK agency ranking for "wordpress seo service" when we checked in November 2026 started at £3,000 a month on a three-month minimum. If you leave us, every account and page stays yours.
How a WordPress SEO campaign runs
- 1AccessYou create a separate administrator account for us, so you never share your own login and can remove us at any time. We set up a staging site (a private copy) for changes that need testing.
- 2AuditCrawl, Search Console review, plugin list, speed tests on real templates and a hosting check.
- 3FixIndexing, redirects, plugin clean-up, SEO plugin settings, images and schema, tested on staging first, in the first six to eight weeks.
- 4ContentNew and rewritten service and location pages every month, written to be read by people and quoted by AI answers.
- 5LinksSupplier, partner and directory links built steadily alongside the content.
- 6ReportEnquiries tracked to the page that produced them, Search Console clicks, impressions and position, monthly, with a 90-day review.
WordPress SEOquestions,answered
Not covered here? Call and ask. We reply within 24 hours.
Yoast or Rank Math: which is better?
Either works. What matters is running one, not two, and configuring it properly. If your site already uses one and it's set up well, we usually keep it.
Do I need a developer for WordPress SEO?
For titles and content, no. For speed, theme changes, redirects and schema, it helps to have someone who knows WordPress code. We handle that as part of the campaign.
Is WordPress good for SEO?
Yes, when it's set up properly. It gives you full control of URLs, titles and structure. Its weak spots are archive pages, plugin weight and heavy themes, and all of them can be fixed.
Will WordPress updates break my SEO?
Rarely, if updates are tested. Problems usually come from plugin conflicts or a theme that's no longer maintained. We test changes on staging before they go live.
Can you work on a WordPress site another agency built?
Yes. We'll tell you honestly if the build itself is holding you back, and if it isn't, we work with what's there.
Should my author and tag pages be indexed?
On most small business sites, no. They repeat content that already lives on your real pages. A blog with several genuine authors is the exception, where author pages can be useful.
How do WordPress SEO experts differ from a general SEO agency?
A general agency may treat WordPress as a black box. Someone who knows WordPress knows which archives to keep out of the index, which plugins slow which templates, and how to fix the theme instead of adding another plugin.
Find out what's holding your WordPress site back
Send us your website address. We'll run the checks above and reply with the three issues costing you the most visibility, and whether fixing or rebuilding makes more sense.
Related: local SEO · WordPress web design · SEO services
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