RankMath guide for SEO

If you’ve ever worked on SEO in WordPress, you’ll know you need a plugin to manage the core SEO aspects, although you can complement it with others specialized in specific areas. We can’t honestly recommend a single one, because each professional or project may be better suited to a different plugin… and we don’t get any commission either ;).

If you’ve decided to go with RankMath, it is currently a very competitive option. It keeps adding new features, offers a preconfigured version that practically works on autopilot, and also gives you a lot of room for custom settings. It has both a free and a paid version, like most plugins, and the paid one is very affordable for everything it does. Depending on your needs you can choose either, but if you want to work on SEO in WordPress at an advanced level, you’ll need the PRO version. 

1. Installing Rank Math

If you want to install the free version, go to Plugins => Add new plugin, search for it and install it. Done:

If you choose the PRO version, it’s best to go directly to their website, select the plan, download the file, and then go to Plugins => Add new plugin => Upload plugin.

2. RankMath setup wizard

Once you install RankMath, a very intuitive setup wizard will appear:

If this is your first project and you’re just starting out, select the Easy mode and that’s it. If you have advanced SEO knowledge and time for a proper setup, we recommend the Advanced mode. If you’re a SEO power user and already have default configurations you like to apply across projects, then choose the Custom mode and upload your config file (PRO feature).

If the project already had YOAST installed, you can either stick with it or, if you want to move to RankMath, use its great importer so you don’t lose previous settings:

If you go with the Easy setup, here’s what you’ll find:

First, if it detects any plugin that might conflict (another global SEO plugin or partial SEO plugin, like the one shown), it will suggest importing those settings or not. If you import them, it’s sensitive stuff, so you should always REVIEW everything. 

Next: your site info.

Here it will ask for your business information. Beyond the corporate details, the most crucial part is choosing the right business type, as this will define the Schema type you send to Google. In our example, it’s a local business. If you’re not familiar with the options, check Schema Organization and find the one that best fits your case.

The next step is to connect with Google services (Search Console and Analytics). This is optional; you can do it later or via other tools:

3. Advanced configuration

Let’s assume you choose the middle option, which is usually the best choice if you’re unsure. Or that you’ve done the basic setup and now want to configure advanced elements.

We can open a post and, on the right-hand side, we’ll see a panel with RankMath options:

You’ll see a preview of the snippet (what will appear in the SERPs), which you can review or edit:

You can choose a manual setup or use rules. For large sites where you don’t have daily control, our advice is to implement rules, even though manual, fully customized work for each piece of content will always be ideal. In the example, you can see we configure the title to be the post title + separator + company name, while for the meta description we tell RankMath to use the excerpt (summary field). Keep in mind this only works well if your titles already make SEO sense and your excerpts are well written and optimized for CTR.

Under the Social tab, you’ll see how the content will look when shared on social networks: headline, image, short description and author. The image will be taken from the featured image field; if needed, you can upload a specific one for social. Remember these HTML attributes implement open graph tags, explained in another post and key for SEO and business. As for the author, in EEAT times (and just out of basic transparency), it’s usually better to use the client as author, not the developer (in the example it’s a dev site, so it makes sense).

All this applies to that specific post, but the really interesting and time-saving part is setting up global rules for each WordPress content type, which you can then override. Go to Rank Math => Titles & Meta:

We’ll start by configuring global rules for all content types:

Here, in most cases, you’ll want to mark content as Index, select the kind of separator you prefer (personal taste—mine is the pipe or slash), and you can enable title capitalization (this can affect CTR and also hurt the eyes of many linguists at once). You can also set a default open graph image. This ensures every page has an image when shared, but makes it harder later to see which ones lack a dedicated image.

Then we configure posts, which are usually the core of WP. Here we define general rules, but also set the Schema type for blog posts. Remember that earlier we set the site Schema as Local Business, but blog posts will be BlogPosting or Article-type entities.

From there, you should do the same with the rest of your structures: pages, post categories, tags, products, product categories, or any custom post types.

Next, we recommend configuring your breadcrumbs. Go to RankMath => General Settings => Breadcrumbs, enable them and set them up.

Keep in mind:

• if you know a bit of SEO, you already know you need breadcrumbs
• if you implement them via RankMath, make sure they don’t conflict with other breadcrumb systems, and you’ll need to insert a small code snippet RankMath provides:

You have several configuration options here, some more aesthetic (separator style) and others more strategic: for example, whether to include the home page, or use more SEO-focused anchor text.

After that, let’s move on to configuring sitemaps, the crown jewel. Go to Rank Math => Sitemap Settings:

On the general settings screen, RankMath gives you a URL where you can view the sitemaps being generated. From this point on, it’s a good idea to keep that URL open in a second tab or screen so you can see the changes as you tweak settings. The sitemap index is usually under domain/sitemap_index.html. It will look like this:


When you see this, you should ask yourself if you’re missing sitemaps or have too many. Not everything has to be in your sitemaps. As we’ve explained in other posts: only high-quality URLs that you want indexed should be present in the sitemaps.

As for general configuration, these defaults will usually work well:

For large sites, limiting sitemaps to 200 URLs can be a logistical and monitoring nightmare. Google can handle many more, so don’t be afraid to raise it to a few thousand if your site is big. You can also exclude specific content types from sitemaps here, though it’s unusual—you’d typically do that directly on the relevant posts. In general, avoid getting too fancy: if you don’t want a post indexed, it’s often better to delete or properly noindex it. Ping search engines sounds useful, as the plugin will “notify” Google when you add or update content, but there’s no guarantee it will act immediately—test it and combine with other methods.

For the next step, go to Dashboard => Instant Indexing:

Assuming someone out there uses Bing or Yahoo, this will help your content get indexed there. If it’s not a lot of work for you, it certainly won’t hurt. And jokes aside, in some projects there really is market share in these search engines, especially B2B and/or international projects. If you want to go deeper, check out SEO in Bing.

Here, the key is to configure, as shown in the example, which content types from your site you want to send automatically when they are published, which will usually match what you include in your sitemaps.

Once that’s done, go back to the dashboard and you’ll see all the modules RankMath offers for this project. The general advice is to only enable those that are relevant and truly useful, since each module adds weight and configuration overhead:

URL structures are, in my view, one of the most overrated aspects in SEO, both among professionals and clients. Their impact is minimal. That said, if you want things clean and pretty, go ahead. Beyond aesthetics, you should also consider:

• impact on final URL length
• how close the main keyword will be to the domain
• whether a folder structure will help you later analyse the site by segments without doing complex work in Screaming Frog

With that in mind, I’d go to RankMath => General Settings => Links and remove the category base:

This way we avoid domain.extension/category/something and sleep better. This affects posts; if you want similar behaviour for products, refer to the earlier section on WooCommerce.

Note: only consider changing URL structures on brand-new sites or during well-planned migrations. Doing it on an established, live site is pretty much SEO harakiri.

4. RankMath with WooCommerce

If you have an online store, which will usually be built with WooCommerce, you need to pay special attention to its SEO and configuration implications. 

We can start with titles and meta settings that apply to products and their categories, assuming you’re reasonable and block product tags—otherwise, good luck. This choice must be consistent when you go through the sitemap settings, enabling and disabling only the WooCommerce elements you want to rank, and skipping the “noise”, just like with your blog. VERY IMPORTANT: by default, product categories are not included in the sitemap; unless you like taking unnecessary risks, enable them.

Here you can define rules; for example, if you sell products, you can target transactional search intent by using titles like “Buy” + product name, or highlight key selling points in the meta description. And for products, make sure Schema is set to Product.

Then go to RankMath => General Settings => WooCommerce. This is powerful but delicate: it allows you to define URL rules and, if you work with brands, choose which field is used for Schema—very powerful stuff. Here’s one configuration proposal (others are possible):