How to change SEO on WordPress for a single page: open the page in the editor, scroll below the content to the Yoast SEO or Rank Math box, and edit three fields: the SEO title, the meta description, and the focus keyword. Change the URL slug in the page settings sidebar. Those four fields are what “the SEO settings” means on a page, and they need an SEO plugin to exist, because WordPress itself only offers the title, the slug and a site-wide search visibility checkbox under Settings, Reading. Site-wide settings (title templates, sitemap, social defaults, noindex rules) live in the plugin’s own menu. This post walks through both levels, with the screens in Yoast and Rank Math, the settings that are worth changing and the ones to leave alone.
How to change SEO on WordPress for one page
- Edit the page or post.
- Open the Yoast SEO box below the content (or the Rank Math tab in the sidebar, or click Edit Snippet in its box).
- SEO title: 50 to 60 characters, the main keyword near the start, the page’s promise after it. Leave the site name variable in unless the title is already long.
- Meta description: up to 160 characters, a direct answer or offer, with the keyword once. Google rewrites weak ones, so make it specific.
- Focus keyword: the phrase the page targets; the plugin scores the page against it. The score is a guide, not a target.
- Slug: in the page settings sidebar under Permalink or URL; short, lowercase, hyphenated, matching the keyword. Changing it on a published page needs a redirect, which both plugins offer to create.
- Update or publish. Check the live page’s source or the plugin’s preview.
Yoast’s guide to the home page fields covers the one page that behaves differently: a static front page uses its own page fields; a latest-posts front page is set under the plugin’s Homepage settings. The WordPress SEO title post goes through the title field in detail, including the difference from the page title and the site title.
What else is in the page SEO box?
| Setting | What it does | When to touch it |
|---|---|---|
| Social (Open Graph) title, description, image | What Facebook, LinkedIn and X show when the page is shared | When the featured image or title is wrong for sharing |
| Canonical URL | Tells Google which URL is the original | Only for deliberate duplicates; otherwise leave blank |
| Robots: noindex / nofollow | Keeps the page out of search | Thank-you pages, internal tools, thin archives; never on pages you want traffic to |
| Breadcrumb title | Shorter name in the breadcrumb trail | Long page titles |
| Schema type | Article, page, product and others | Set it when the page really is one; add an FAQ block for question pages |
| Cornerstone content (Yoast) / Pillar (Rank Math) | Flags the page for internal-link suggestions | Your five to ten most important pages |
| Readability analysis | Sentence and paragraph length hints | Ignore for technical pages |
How do you change site-wide SEO settings?
In the plugin’s menu, not on pages. The ones worth setting once:
- Title templates: Yoast, Settings, Content types; Rank Math, Titles & Meta. The default
%%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%in Yoast (%title% %sep% %sitename%in Rank Math) is right for most sites. - Site name and organisation details: Yoast, Settings, Site basics and Site representation; Rank Math, Titles & Meta, Local SEO. This feeds the site name and knowledge panel; changing the title Google shows for the site explains how.
- Archives: noindex tag archives, author archives on single-author sites, and date archives. Both plugins have toggles per archive type; why WordPress tags rarely help SEO covers the reasoning.
- Media pages: redirect attachment URLs to the file (both plugins default to this; confirm it).
- Sitemap: on by default; exclude post types you do not want crawled.
- Social defaults: a fallback share image for pages without one.
- Search Console: verify the site through the plugin or directly, then submit the sitemap URL.
What is the difference between Yoast and Rank Math?
| Yoast SEO | Rank Math | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-page fields | Below the content, or sidebar | Sidebar tab, with a modal editor |
| Focus keywords | One in free, more in Premium | Several in free |
| Redirects | Premium | Free module |
| Schema | Article and page types, plus an FAQ block; more in Premium | Wide range in free |
| Internal link suggestions | Premium | Free |
| Variables | %%title%% style | %title% style |
| Interface | Simpler, fewer options exposed | More options, more to ignore |
Either is fine; the mistake is running both. If a site has two SEO plugins active, it outputs two sets of meta tags and two sitemaps, and Google picks unpredictably. Deactivate one, and use its import tool to carry the settings across first.
Which SEO settings should you not change?
- Slugs on ranking pages without a redirect. The plugin will offer one; accept it.
- Canonical URLs unless you understand exactly why. A wrong canonical removes a page from search silently.
- Noindex on the home page or blog index. It happens by accident more than you would think, usually via the WordPress Settings, Reading checkbox left on from staging.
- Meta keywords. Both plugins hide the field because Google ignores it, as adding meta keywords in WordPress explains.
- Chasing a green light. The plugin’s score measures keyword placement, not quality. A page written for the score reads like it.
How do you check the changes took effect?
- Open the live page in a private window, view source, and search for
<title>andname="description". - Clear the caching plugin if the source still shows old values.
- In Search Console, use URL Inspection and request indexing; titles and descriptions update after the next crawl, usually within days.
- Watch the page’s impressions and click-through rate in the Performance report for two to four weeks.
Per-page SEO settings are the routine part of on-page SEO and the last thing I set on every page of a WordPress build before launch, because a page published without them gets a title and description Google invents, and those are rarely the ones you would have chosen.
Frequently asked questions
Edit the page, open the Yoast SEO or Rank Math box, and set the SEO title, meta description and focus keyword. Change the slug in the page settings sidebar (with a redirect if the page is live). Update the page and clear the cache.
Only the page title, the slug and a per-site search visibility setting. Meta descriptions, social tags, schema, sitemaps and per-page noindex all need an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math.
Per-page settings are in the SEO plugin’s box on each page or post. Site-wide settings (title templates, archives, sitemap, social defaults, site name) are in the plugin’s own menu: Yoast SEO, Settings, or Rank Math, Titles & Meta.
Both cover the essentials. Rank Math includes redirects, multiple focus keywords, wider schema and link suggestions free; Yoast keeps those in Premium and has a simpler interface. Use one, never both.
Google shows the new title and description after it recrawls the page. Request indexing in Search Console, clear your site cache, and allow days to a couple of weeks. Google may also rewrite titles it considers unhelpful.
Only on new pages, or on existing pages when the slug is clearly wrong, and always with a 301 redirect from the old URL. Slug changes without redirects lose rankings.
