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Lasse Pettersen

WordPress sites

WordPress SEO, without adding another plugin

WordPress is not bad for SEO. What is bad for SEO is eleven years of plugins, three abandoned page builders, and a theme that renders your headings in the wrong order.

Before you read the rest

This is the platform I see most often in client work, and most of what is wrong with a WordPress site is not WordPress. It is what has been installed on it.

What is usually wrong

The plugin that was meant to fix SEO is often causing it. Two SEO plugins installed at once will fight over the title tag and the canonical. A caching plugin set up by somebody in a hurry will serve a stale page to Google and a fresh one to you, which makes every diagnosis unreliable until it is sorted.

Page builders generate heading markup that looks right and is not. A heading styled to look like a subheading but marked up as an H1 will confuse the structure of the page. I see this on most builder-based sites I audit.

Then there is bloat. A site loading nine hundred kilobytes of JavaScript to display a contact form is slow for everybody and slowest on the phone, which is where your customers are.

How I work on a WordPress site

I start by measuring what Google actually receives: the rendered HTML, the headers, the canonical, the indexation status of every page. That usually produces a short list of faults that explain most of the problem.

Then the fixes, in the order of what they are worth. Usually that means the title and heading structure first, internal links second, speed third, and new content last. New content on a site with a structural fault is money spent on a page that will not be found.

I do not rebuild sites. If a rebuild is the right answer I will say so and you can hire a developer, and I will write the brief so that the rebuild does not throw away the rankings you have, which is the classic way a redesign loses a business a third of its traffic.

What this search page looks like right now

I measured "wordpress seo expert" in Canada on 2026-09-21, running it 3 times rather than once. Google wrote its own answer above the results on every run, which changes the job: the page has to be the kind of source an AI answer draws from, not just a page that ranks under it. The full measurement across eleven searches is here.

#Domain
1 pro.fiverr.com
2 firstrank.ca
3 www.lucatagliaferro.com
4 www.lovarank.com
5 en-ca.wordpress.org
6 www.upwork.com
7 vocal.media
8 www.outerboxdesign.com

Asked alongside it

  • How much do SEO experts cost?
  • Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
  • How can I hire WordPress experts?
  • Who is the top SEO expert?

Other industries

  • Dental practices - Most dental SEO is sold as content marketing.
  • Ecommerce - Ecommerce SEO splits into two jobs that need different people.
  • Shopify stores - Shopify makes a good store easy and a good URL structure impossible.
  • Software and SaaS - I build and market software as well as consult on it.
  • Law firms - Legal search is expensive, crowded and regulated.

Questions from wordpress sites

Which SEO plugin should I use?
One of them. The specific choice matters far less than having exactly one, configured deliberately, with the defaults reviewed. Most of the damage I find comes from two plugins overlapping or from nobody ever opening the settings.
Do you write the code?
Small changes yes, structural work no. I will hand your developer a brief that is specific enough to build from, and check it afterwards.
What does it cost?
$499 for an audit, retainers from $750 a month, $2,500 for a full programme with paid search. Details here. The price does not change by industry.

Start with a 15 minute call

No deck and no discovery phase. Tell me the site and the problem, and I will tell you whether I can help and what it would cost. If I am the wrong person, I will say so on the call.

Book a 15 minute call Email me instead