Technical SEO ownership
Own the prioritised issue backlog: indexing, canonicals, redirects, structured data, internal navigation, templates and crawl diagnostics.
WP SEO Management / services
Managed WordPress SEO with an actual issue owner
Updating a plugin and improving a site's ability to win qualified search demand are different jobs. A valuable retainer needs both technical discipline and commercial priorities.
WordPress release QA
Check SEO-critical templates, page metadata, sitemaps and mobile rendering after theme or plugin changes. Document what changed and how to reverse regressions.
Content and search planning
Use first-party query evidence to improve meaningful service pages, remove competing intent and measure qualified enquiry outcomes rather than publish pages by quota.
Where the work starts
SEO stagnation, unowned technical changes, inconsistent CMS governance and unresolved search-indexing issues.
We would first agree the target pages, the technical owner and what we can verify. Implementation effort, third-party access, and any specialist development must be scoped before a fixed commercial commitment.
What an accountable retainer should produce
Begin with the priority pages, WordPress content types, theme, plugin owners and approval rights. The work queue should show what was observed, why it matters to search visitors and the business, how it can be changed, who owns the change and what a passing verification test looks like.
- Initial baseline: indexability, canonicals, sitemaps, important navigation, templates and a tested mobile sample.
- Release verification: before/after evidence for plugin, theme or structural changes that could alter search signals.
- Commercial opportunity review: query and landing-page evidence used to improve existing useful pages before commissioning more articles.
Hosting, uptime commitments, malware recovery, backups, security incident response and coding capacity are separate services unless expressly agreed. SEO ownership should not imply authority over systems for which access and delivery capacity have not been confirmed.
Compare WordPress Site Health with Google's canonicalisation guidance: they answer different questions.
What this isn't
Not a £50/month maintenance package; security response times, hosting and development commitments require an agreed scope.
WordPress is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation. This is an independent service and not an official WordPress offering.