Install Yoast or Rank Math, fill in your meta descriptions, submit an XML sitemap — that's the extent of the SEO advice most WordPress guides offer. If your site is already past that stage, here's what tends to get missed.
Crawl Budget & Indexation
For most small-to-medium WordPress sites, crawl budget isn't an issue. But for larger sites — or sites with lots of taxonomy pages, tag archives, and parameter-driven URLs — it matters significantly.
Faceted navigation (filter combinations on e-commerce or listing sites) can generate thousands of unique URLs, most of which you don't want indexed. Handling these with canonicals, noindex tags, or parameter handling in Google Search Console is important and often missed.
Structured Data
Schema markup helps search engines understand your content and enables rich results. WordPress sites frequently have no structured data, or have it implemented incorrectly via a plugin that outputs generic markup without being configured for the specific content type.
Custom implementations — Article schema for blog posts, LocalBusiness for service businesses, Product schema for e-commerce, FAQ schema for frequently asked questions — done correctly can noticeably improve how your pages appear in search results.
Canonical Tags
Duplicate content issues are far more common on WordPress sites than most people realise. The same content can be accessible at multiple URLs (www vs non-www, trailing slash vs no trailing slash, paginated versions, preview URLs) without canonical tags pointing to the preferred version.
Internal Link Architecture
The structure of your internal links communicates to search engines which pages matter most and how content is related. Many WordPress sites have weak internal linking — they rely on navigation menus and recent posts widgets but don't systematically link from relevant content to important pages.
A content audit that maps which pages should be linking to which other pages, and then implementing those links, is one of the highest-ROI SEO tasks for established WordPress sites.
Search Console as a Diagnostic Tool
Most site owners have Search Console connected but don't really use it. The Coverage report shows indexation issues. The Core Web Vitals report shows performance problems. The Enhancement reports show structured data errors. These reports tell you exactly where your technical SEO needs work — the data is there, it just needs to be acted on.