Yoast SEO is the plugin we reach for most often on WordPress builds, and the first thing we tell clients is that it doesn’t do SEO for you. It gives Google clean signals about what each page is and who you are. The ranking still comes from having good pages for the services people search for.
The other thing we tell them: Yoast works straight after install, but its defaults are written for every kind of website, not a local business. Below is what we change, in the order we change it. Menu names are as they appear at the time of writing (late 2026). Yoast reorganises its settings now and then, so if a label has moved, look in the same general area.
Before you start
Install Yoast SEO from Plugins > Add New. Everything in this guide is in the free version.
If another SEO plugin is already active (Rank Math and All in One SEO are the usual suspects), import its data, check the result, then deactivate the old one. Two SEO plugins running at once means doubled-up titles and conflicting sitemaps.
Do this on a quiet day, or on a staging copy if the site is busy. Our guide to WordPress staging sites covers when that’s worth it.
Step 1: Run the first-time configuration
Go to Yoast SEO > General and open the First-time configuration tab. It’s a short wizard that optimises Yoast’s data for your existing content, then asks whether the site represents an organisation or a person, your business name and logo, and your social profiles.
Do it, but everything it asks for also lives in the Settings screens below, which is where you’ll make changes later.
Step 2: Site basics and site features
Go to Yoast SEO > Settings. Under General, start with Site basics:
- Website name: your business name as customers know it.
- Title separator: pick one and stick with it. A pipe or a plain hyphen is fine.
- Site image: upload a default image (1200 x 630 pixels works well) for when a page is shared on Facebook or LinkedIn without its own image.
Then check Site features. Leave XML sitemaps, SEO analysis, Readability analysis and Open Graph data on. Under Site connections you can paste a Google Search Console or Bing verification code if you haven’t verified another way.
Step 3: Site representation
This is the part that feeds the structured data Google uses to understand your business, so fill it in carefully. Per Yoast’s Site representation guide:
- Organization or person: Organization, unless you genuinely trade as yourself. Yoast’s own advice is that local businesses should choose Organization.
- Organization name: your business name exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile.
- Alternate organization name: only if people genuinely know you by a short form or acronym.
- Organization logo: a square version if you have one.
- Other profiles: add your Facebook page, Instagram, LinkedIn and any trade association listing, using Add another profile for each. These go into your organisation markup as sameAs links, which tie your scattered profiles to one business.
One thing to know: the free version doesn’t publish your street address, phone number or opening hours as structured data. That’s what Yoast’s Local SEO add-on does, and at the time of writing it comes bundled with Yoast SEO Premium. A single-premises business can manage without it. Two or three clinics with their own hours is when it earns its keep.
Step 4: Content types
Under Content types, each post type (Posts, Pages, and any custom ones like Projects) has its own section.
- Show in search results: on for Posts and Pages. On for custom post types only if they’re real public content. Off for anything used behind the scenes, such as testimonial snippets pulled into a slider.
- SEO title and meta description templates: the defaults are fine as a safety net. You’ll write the important ones by hand in step 7.
- Schema: check that pages are set to a sensible page type and posts to an article type.
Step 5: Categories & tags
Under Categories & tags, turn Show in search results off for Tags if you use them loosely (most people do). Leave Categories indexed only if your category pages are useful in their own right, with an intro paragraph and a sensible number of posts.
Step 6: Advanced
Most of Advanced is for developers, but four sections matter.
Author archives. On a business site with one or two people writing, author archives are just a duplicate of the blog. Switch them off. Do the same for Date archives.
Media pages. WordPress can create a useless separate page for every upload. Keep media pages disabled so attachment URLs redirect to the file itself. Older sites often have them on.
Breadcrumbs. Turn these on if your theme or page builder shows them. Elementor’s Breadcrumbs widget can use Yoast’s breadcrumbs.
Crawl optimization. Yoast’s crawl optimization settings strip out things WordPress adds that search engines don’t need, such as shortlinks, extra feeds and emoji scripts. Removing emoji scripts and the post comment feeds is low risk on a typical business site. Leave the URL cleanup options alone; Yoast itself flags those as expert settings.
llms.txt
Yoast can also generate an llms.txt file, a plain summary of your key pages written for AI tools. Per Yoast’s instructions, it’s under Site features, in the AI tools section. Switch it on, and if you’d rather choose the pages yourself, use the manual page selection option and pick your homepage, main service pages and contact page. It’s cheap to turn on, but don’t expect it to change your rankings.
Step 7: The Yoast box on each page
The settings above are the plumbing. The bit that affects whether people click is the title and meta description on each important page. You set these in the Yoast box, which appears below the WordPress editor and as a Yoast panel inside Elementor.
For each core page (home, each service, about, contact, each location), fill in:
- Focus keyphrase: one phrase per page, so you’re not targeting the same phrase on five pages.
- SEO title: under about 60 characters, service first, place second, brand last. For example: “Switchboard Upgrades in Ballina | [Your Business Name]”. The Google preview shows you how it will look.
- Meta description: one or two plain sentences saying what you do, where, and what to do next. Around 150 characters.
The Readability tab is a useful prompt on blog posts. On a short service page with a form, ignore most of it.
XML sitemaps
With XML sitemaps on, your sitemap index lives at yourdomain.com.au/sitemap_index.xml. Anything you’ve hidden from search results drops out of it automatically.
Submit sitemap_index.xml in Google Search Console under Sitemaps. Add it to Bing Webmaster Tools too. It takes two minutes.
What to leave alone
These cause more problems than they solve on small business sites:
- The traffic lights. The green SEO and readability dots are a checklist, not a ranking factor. Chasing them leads to awkward, keyphrase-stuffed copy. Write a page that answers the question better than competitors and move on.
- Changing permalinks on a live site. Changing URLs can cost rankings if redirects aren’t handled. If you must, plan the redirects first. (Automatic redirects when you change a slug are a Premium feature in Yoast. The free Redirection plugin is the usual alternative.)
- Editing robots.txt or .htaccess through Yoast’s file editor unless you know exactly why. One wrong line can block Google from the whole site.
- The Advanced tab in the Yoast box. Setting “Allow search engines to show this page in search results?” to No, without a good reason, is how pages quietly vanish from Google.
A quick check after setup
Open your homepage, right-click and view the page source, and search for application/ld+json. You should see your business name, logo and social profiles in there. Then search Google for site:yourdomain.com.au a week or two later and see whether the titles showing are the ones you wrote.
If they are, the plumbing’s done. The ongoing work is the content itself, which is what our SEO service spends most of its time on, and where what a small business website should actually do is a better next read than any plugin setting.
Every website we build launches with SEO foundations in place and Google Analytics, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools set up. Inherited a site where nobody remembers why half the pages are hidden from search? Send us the address for a settings check.