Is Your WordPress Plugin Actually Running Your SEO? Here's What the Defaults Do

Here's a scenario that plays out in almost every SME website review:

The business owner installed Yoast SEO (or RankMath) when they set up their WordPress site, saw the green light in the plugin dashboard, and concluded that their "SEO was handled."

It wasn't. But you can't really blame them. The plugin looks like it's doing something. The status indicators turn green. There's a "SEO score" for each page. It feels like progress.

What's actually happening: the plugin is running on its factory configuration, making decisions about how Google understands, indexes, and ranks their website. Nobody has reviewed a single setting.

New data from the HTTP Archive Web Almanac confirms this is the norm, not the exception. Over 50% of pages in their dataset now run on CMS platforms, with WordPress representing a substantial plurality. The practical implication: CMS plugin defaults are now the de facto technical SEO baseline for most of the web. Yoast and RankMath's out-of-the-box settings determine canonical logic, metadata handling, structured data generation, and crawl control for more websites than all the SEO professionals in the world combined.

For most SMEs, this matters in a specific way. If you or your web developer installed an SEO plugin when your site launched and never returned to configure it properly, your "SEO strategy" is effectively whatever Yoast or RankMath decided was reasonable for an average website, not yours.

What These Plugins Actually Control

Before going through the settings, it's worth understanding what SEO plugins do at a structural level. This isn't just title tags and meta descriptions.

Canonical tags: Your plugin adds <link rel="canonical"> to every page, telling Google which URL is the "official" version. Factory settings handle this correctly for most pages, but if you have filtering, pagination, or URL parameters (think: WooCommerce product pages with sorting applied), you can end up with canonical tags pointing to filtered URLs instead of the clean product page. Google then gets confused about which page to rank.

Robots meta and noindex directives: The plugin controls which pages it tells Google to index. On Yoast, certain page types (category archives, tag pages, author pages, date archives) are set to "noindex" by default. That's often correct; you don't want Google crawling your author archive when there's only one author. But pages you want indexed might be excluded if they were created as a "custom post type" that the plugin doesn't recognize.

XML sitemap generation: Yoast and RankMath both generate XML sitemaps automatically. The default includes your posts and pages. But if you have custom post types (service pages, case studies, product categories) that aren't flagged as "public" in the plugin, they get left out of the sitemap and potentially deprioritized for indexing.

Schema markup (structured data): This is where the gap is widest. Both plugins generate schema on every page, but at factory settings, you typically get basic WebPage and Article schema. For a local service business, what Google actually wants to see is LocalBusiness schema with your NAP (name, address, phone), opening hours, service areas, and category. For an e-commerce site, it's Product schema with pricing, availability, and reviews. None of that generates automatically without configuration.

LLMs.txt handling: This one is new. A growing number of SEO plugins now support llms.txt, the emerging standard for controlling how AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) access your site. Factory settings don't configure this, which means your stance on AI crawler access is undefined by default. For most SMEs this isn't urgent, but it's worth knowing it exists.

What the Defaults Get Right

To be fair: Yoast and RankMath are genuinely good pieces of software, and their defaults are sensible for most generic WordPress sites. Before listing what needs changing, here's what the factory configuration handles well.

Title and meta description templates work correctly out of the box. The plugin generates sensible title formats (Page Name | Site Name) and puts the right charset and viewport meta tags in your header. You still need to write unique descriptions for every page; the plugin just handles the technical plumbing.

Duplicate content prevention for the WordPress homepage vs. blog archive is handled automatically. If your homepage displays your latest posts, the plugin correctly tells Google which URL is canonical without you touching anything.

Basic sitemap structure for standard posts and pages is reliable. If your site is a typical brochure-style setup (Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact), the auto-generated sitemap will be accurate.

These are not nothing. A site without any SEO plugin has noticeably messier technical foundations than one running Yoast defaults. The plugin adds real value even at factory settings. The issue is that "better than nothing" isn't the same as "configured correctly."

The Settings That Actually Need Your Attention

1. Schema configuration for your business type

Go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Site Representation (or RankMath > Titles & Meta > Local SEO). Enter your full business name, address, phone number, and business type. This generates LocalBusiness schema across your site, the structured data that helps Google associate your website with a real physical (or virtual) business in Singapore.

If you're a service business, set your business type to "ProfessionalService" or the most accurate subcategory (e.g., "AccountingService," "LegalService," "HealthAndBeautyBusiness"). Google uses this for rich results and knowledge panels.

2. Social profiles and organization schema

Both plugins have fields for your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social profiles. Filling these in adds sameAs links to your schema, helping Google connect your website to your social presences as part of the same entity. This is basic entity building that most SMEs skip because the fields are buried in plugin settings.

3. Breadcrumb navigation

Enable breadcrumbs in the plugin AND update your theme to display them. Breadcrumbs generate BreadcrumbList schema automatically, improve crawl efficiency, and appear as navigational breadcrumbs in Google search results. On a site with deep category structure (e-commerce especially), this is a meaningful ranking signal.

4. Review which page types are indexed

Go through each content type in the plugin and confirm your index/noindex decisions are intentional. Common problems found in SME site audits: tag archives indexed and crawled (creating thin duplicate content), custom service pages excluded because the custom post type wasn't registered as public, WooCommerce product attributes (color, size) generating hundreds of thin indexed URLs.

5. XML sitemap: add your custom post types

If your developer created custom post types (service areas, case studies, team members, FAQs), verify they appear in your sitemap. In Yoast, go to Settings > Content Types and check that each custom type has "Show in XML sitemap" enabled. Pages missing from the sitemap aren't excluded from indexing, but they're lower priority for Googlebot, which means slower discovery and indexing.

6. Crawl optimization (Yoast Premium / RankMath Pro)

Both paid versions offer crawl optimization settings: disable comment feed URLs, emoji scripts, RSD links, shortlinks, and other WordPress-generated URLs that add noise to your crawl budget. For small sites (under 200 pages), this is low priority. For sites with hundreds of product or service pages, cleaning up crawl waste matters.

A Quick 20-Minute Audit Checklist

If you want to check your current setup without hiring an SEO:

1. Search Console integration: Have you verified Search Console and connected it to your plugin? Yoast can pull performance data directly if connected via Google API.
2. Schema type set: Does the plugin know your business type? Check the Site Representation settings.
3. Social profiles added: Are your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram URLs in the plugin's social settings?
4. Sitemap accurate: Visit yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml and check that all major page types are listed.
5. No unintended noindex: In Search Console, check the Coverage report for "Excluded" pages. If important service pages are showing as "noindex," your plugin settings are the first place to look.
6. Breadcrumbs enabled: Are breadcrumbs showing on your pages? Are they appearing in Google search results?

None of these require a developer. They require someone to spend an hour in the plugin settings with a clear checklist.

The Bigger Picture

There's nothing wrong with using Yoast or RankMath. They're good tools, and they've raised the baseline quality of technical SEO across the web. The Web Almanac data showing CMS platforms setting the de facto SEO standard for 50%+ of websites is, in one sense, a good thing: the average website's technical foundations are better than they were five years ago.

The catch is that "better than average" and "optimized for your specific business goals" are different things. A plugin running on factory settings is calibrated for a generic WordPress site. Your business has a specific service area, specific structured data requirements, specific content types, and specific crawl priorities. Those don't configure themselves.

The SMEs who get the most from their SEO investment aren't necessarily the ones spending the most on content or backlinks. They're the ones whose technical foundations are clean and correctly configured, so that everything else they do compounds on a solid base rather than leaking through structural gaps.

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Magnified offers technical SEO audits for Singapore businesses, covering a full review of your WordPress configuration, schema setup, and crawl health. Get a technical SEO audit.