Building SEO-Friendly WordPress Sites: Our Approach

There’s no point having a beautiful website if nobody can find it.

That’s a hard truth we’ve seen play out time and time again. Businesses spend months (and thousands) on shiny new websites, only to wonder why their traffic hasn’t improved, leads aren’t flowing, and rankings are stuck on page 7 of Google.

Here’s the thing: SEO has to be baked into your website from the start — not sprinkled on at the end like digital parsley.

At First Internet, we specialise in building SEO-friendly WordPress sites that look great, perform brilliantly, and get found by the right people. In this article, we’ll walk you through our approach — what makes a site truly SEO-friendly, and how we make sure every WordPress build is primed for search from day one.

Why SEO matters (even before design)

If you’re running a business website, SEO isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s how people discover you. It’s how you drive traffic without paying for every click. It’s how you compete — even with bigger players.

Yet too often, SEO is treated like an afterthought. A few keywords here, a plugin there. But if the site hasn’t been built to support SEO at a structural level, you’re always playing catch-up.

That’s why our process starts with SEO — even before we write a line of code.

The Foundations: Our SEO-First Approach to WordPress

We don’t rely on plugins or SEO hacks. We build websites that search engines love — because they’re fast, clean, structured, and easy to crawl.

Here’s exactly how we do it.

1. Planning for search, not just design

• Research your target keywords
• Map out your core landing pages
• Analyse what your competitors rank for
• Identify content gaps and opportunities
• Understand your audience’s search intent

2. Clean, semantic code

We build WordPress websites using:

• Lightweight, custom Gutenberg blocks
• Proper heading hierarchy
• Semantic HTML5
• Minimal dependencies
• Optimised CSS and JS

3. Site speed and performance

• Compressed images (WebP + lazy loading)
• Minified code
• Browser caching + CDN
• Clean themes with no bloat

4. Mobile-first, always

• Responsive design
• Optimised for Core Web Vitals
• Easy tap targets and layouts

5. Optimised URLs and metadata

• SEO-friendly URLs
• Titles, meta descriptions, OG tags
• Canonical URLs
• Schema markup

6. Smart internal linking

We connect your pages with contextual internal links, related content, and intuitive navigation to help Google (and your visitors) find everything.

7. Content blocks with SEO in mind

We design flexible Gutenberg blocks that give your team the freedom to structure and optimise content on the fly — without needing a developer.

8. Technical SEO built in

• Sitemaps
• robots.txt
• Redirects
• Error handling
• Structured data

SEO-friendly from day one — not added later

SEO isn’t a service we add on at the end — it’s part of how we build from the beginning. That means a better-performing website from day one, without all the “fix it later” drama.

Bonus: How we futureproof your site for SEO

• Reusable templates and blocks
• Custom post types
• Scalable menus and categories
• Easy blog management and CTAs

Results that speak for themselves

We’ve helped clients across industries get higher rankings, faster websites, and better leads through smart, SEO-first WordPress development.

Is your WordPress site holding your SEO back?

If your site is slow, outdated, or invisible to Google — it’s probably time for an upgrade.

Get in touch with us and we’ll show you how we can help.