Yoast is on a large share of the WordPress sites we scan, and it quietly does about half of this work already. Knowing which half saves you from pasting in a second copy of something you have, which is worse than doing nothing.
What it already does
Your sitemap. Yoast publishes one at
/sitemap_index.xmland adds theSitemap:line to robots.txt for you. It lists every published page, which is more than any file we could write from a crawl.Canonicals. Every page states its own real address, which is the second half of the same check.
Who you are, in machine readable form. Yoast writes an
OrganizationorPersonblock with your name, logo and social profiles into every page.Share previews. Every page gets share preview tags built from its title, an automatic summary and its first image, so a shared link already shows a card.
A title and a summary box on every page. The Search appearance section of each page holds its title and meta description, and Advanced holds the switch that hides a page from search engines. Where they are.
llms.txt, if you switch it on. Built in and free, and off by default. See the llms.txt guide.
What it does not do
Say what you sell. Yoast describes the business. It does not describe your services, and that is a separate check because it is what an engine reads when somebody asks for a specific job.
Answer questions. No plugin can write the page that answers what a job costs or how long it takes.
Choose your best pages. Left on automatic, its llms.txt picks pages for you, and it does not know which of them you make your money from.
Publish your phone number and opening hours. The free version describes your organisation by name and logo only. Where you work, your number and your hours are what the business details file adds, pasted with WPCode. How.
Write the summaries. Its automatic share summary is the opening words of the page. A summary written on purpose, in the Search appearance and Social media appearance sections, is what a search result and a shared link then show.
So what should you actually do
Turn on llms.txt, and set it to manual page selection so it names the pages you sell from.
Add Service markup for what you offer, bound to the identity Yoast already writes.
Write the pages that answer your customers’ questions, which is the half no plugin reaches.
The free version of Yoast covers everything described on this page. Nothing here needs the paid one.
If your screens do not look like this, the wording has moved rather than the setting. Search your platform for the words in bold above. If you still cannot find it, send us the scan link and we will tell you where it is on your setup.