Quick start
Ten minutes to a site that search engines and AI assistants can find and understand. The Overview's "Your next steps" follows the same checklist.
1. Let search engines see your site
Under Settings → Reading, make sure "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unticked once the site is ready. While it's on, WordPress hides every page and serves no sitemap.
2. Describe your site
Under Settings → General, write a one-sentence Tagline that says what you offer and for whom. It's used in the homepage title and description and by AI assistants.
3. Add your logo and business
SEO → Schema & Entity: choose whether the site represents an organization or a person, add your logo and official social profiles, and fill in Local Business if you serve customers at a physical location. See Structured data.
- "Who the Site Represents" with organization name, logo and profiles
- Local Business with address and opening hours
4. Publish your sitemap
Crawl & Indexing → Sitemaps & Robots: check the sitemap is Active, then click Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to submit it once. Paste their verification codes under Webmaster Tools.
5. Review titles and visibility
- SEO → Titles & Meta: choose a title separator and check the homepage title. See Titles & meta.
- Sitemaps & Robots → Search Appearance: switch off content types that shouldn't appear in search.
6. Run the content audit
Content Audit → Run Content Audit. It scores every entry for SEO, GEO and AEO, finds orphans, thin and duplicate content and missing alt text, and fills the Overview and the SEO column in your lists. See Content audit.
7. Optimize your first page
- Open an important page
Start with the one with the lowest score under "Content to improve first".
- Set the focus keyphrase
The phrase people would search to find it.
- Write the SEO title and description
Watch the search preview and keep the meters green (30–60 and 120–160 characters).
- Work through the checks
Click Re-check after edits, then update the page.
8. Check Health Checks
Crawl & Indexing → Health Checks lists anything that could keep pages out of search, each with how to fix it. See Health checks.