Most businesses start an SEO strategy by publishing blog posts. That is the wrong order.
Publishing content on a site Google cannot crawl properly is like printing flyers with a broken address. The content exists, but nothing happens. Fix the technical foundation first. Create content after. The sequence matters more than the volume.
SEO is not a one-time project, but the technical foundation is the one part you set up once and benefit from permanently. Fixing a slow WordPress site is also part of this — server response time is a ranking factor.
Crawlability
Google needs to find and read your pages before it can rank them. Three things break this more often than anything else.
First: robots.txt blocking the wrong pages. Check yours at yoursite.com/robots.txt. Blocking /wp-admin is correct. Blocking your blog, product pages, or service pages is a problem that can take months to recover from.
Second: noindex tags on pages that should be indexed. Open Google Search Console — it is free — and look at the Excluded section under Coverage. Pages appearing with 'noindex' as the reason need immediate attention.
Third: broken internal links returning 404. Google follows links. A page full of broken internal links wastes crawl budget and signals poor site quality. Run Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to find them before Google does.
Core Web Vitals
Google uses three metrics to assess page experience: LCP (how fast the main content loads), CLS (how much the layout shifts during load), and INP (how quickly the page responds to interaction). See web.dev/vitals for the technical definitions.
You do not need perfect scores. You need passing scores:
- LCP under 2.5 seconds
- CLS under 0.1
- INP under 200ms
LCP fails because of large unoptimized hero images or slow server response. CLS fails because images lack explicit width and height attributes, causing layout shifts as they load. INP fails because too much JavaScript executes on the main thread.
Fixing images and improving hosting resolves most Core Web Vitals failures. Add explicit dimensions to every image element to eliminate CLS. If you run WooCommerce, the hosting and image requirements are more demanding than standard WordPress.
Canonical URLs
If your site is accessible at both http://yoursite.com and https://www.yoursite.com, search engines see two versions of every page. That is duplicate content, and it splits your ranking signals across URLs.
Set one canonical version and redirect everything else with a 301. Your SEO plugin sets canonical tags automatically. Configure the redirect in your hosting panel or .htaccess.
Also check: does your WordPress install serve pages both with and without trailing slashes? /blog/post and /blog/post/ are technically different URLs. Pick one format and enforce it across the entire site.
Structured data
Structured data (JSON-LD) tells search engines what your content is — an article, a product, a local business, a FAQ. It enables rich results in Google: star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, and article authorship displayed directly in search results.
For a business site, implement at minimum:
- LocalBusiness schema: name, address, phone, hours, coordinates
- Organization schema: logo, social profiles, contact info
- BreadcrumbList schema: navigation hierarchy for inner pages
- Article schema on blog posts: author, published date, featured image
These take an afternoon to implement and can produce rich results in Google without any additional content work. Not guaranteed, but the cost is low and the upside is significant.
Sitemap and robots.txt
Every site needs a sitemap.xml listing all indexable URLs. WordPress SEO plugins generate this automatically. Submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps.
Every site needs a robots.txt at the domain root. At minimum: allow all crawlers and point to your sitemap. Check that it is accessible at yoursite.com/robots.txt after any hosting migration or WordPress move — it is one of the most commonly broken files after a site move.
Do this before publishing a single article
- Run Screaming Frog on the full site — fix broken links and redirect chains
- Check robots.txt and noindex settings in your SEO plugin
- Set a canonical URL and enforce HTTPS
- Compress all images and add explicit width/height attributes
- Generate and submit a sitemap to Search Console
- Add LocalBusiness and Organization structured data
- Verify Core Web Vitals pass in Search Console
That is a focused, finite piece of work. It is worth more for long-term search performance than 50 blog posts published on a broken technical foundation. Ranking #1 for the wrong keyword is worthless — and publishing on a broken foundation is essentially the same outcome. If you want help running this audit, let's talk.
