WordPress SEO advice usually starts with a plugin. Start with whether the site is allowed to be indexed. Plugins cannot outrank a sitewide noindex.
Minute 1–4: the hide switch
Settings → Reading. If “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is ticked, untick it, save, then View Source on the homepage. You should not see noindex. This is still how launches die.
Minute 5–9: what the plugin is actually emitting
Pick Yoast or Rank Math, not both. Open a published page: title tag, meta description, canonical should be unique. Then open /sitemap_index.xml. If you see author archives, date archives, or WooCommerce attribute URLs you do not want in Google, exclude those post types in the plugin and let the sitemap regenerate.
Minute 10–14: permalinks and HTTPS
Pretty permalinks (/services/boiler-repair/) not ?p=123. Site Address and WordPress Address both https:// with the same host you canonicalise to. Mixed http:// media after a migration is a mixed-content fail and a sloppy look.
Minute 15–20: crawl what the theme prints
Themes inject extra H1s, skip heading levels, and forget alt on the slider. A plugin dashboard will not show that. Paste three URLs into the SEO checker: homepage, your best service or product, one article. Fix reds. If the checker reports a sitewide robots block, open /robots.txt — some security plugins Disallow /wp-admin (fine) and accidentally Disallow / (not fine). Use the robots.txt tester if you want that file in isolation.
Leave for later
Schema tweaks, FAQ blocks, llms.txt. None of it matters if Reading is still ticked. When the three URLs are clean, write better service copy than your competitors. That is the rest of WordPress SEO, and no audit tool will do it for you.