WordPress and SEO Advice

Just about any new theme gives you the control you are looking for.  Keep in mind that SEO means 2 different meanings. One is just what the name is, optimizing your site coding for search engines.  This means adhering to coding standards https://www.w3.org/standards/. Using a CMS like Wordpress virtually assures your site will adhere to standards unless you are copy and pasting some bad code from somewhere else.

I think what most people are referring to is marketing or getting your site to show up in search results.  When it comes down to it, content is the main driver. It is easy to say to make sure you use heading tags properly ( I like to to say your page should be like a highschool term paper with 1 topic sentence-your heading h1 tag and several sub topic sentences - h2 tags each supported with paragraphs - p tags. )  In the end, you will do better with superior content  and a poorly coded site than well coded site with no content with poor content.

An SEO plug in like yoast does help a little, but you would want to use the paid version. However, using Google Search console https://search.google.com/search-console/about and making sure your Google My Business is up to date https://www.google.com/business/ are going to be more important.   Instead of a plug in you may want to look into using SEMRush https://www.semrush.com/ or https://moz.com/. The tools found on https://neilpatel.com/ are also very insightful.  Those tools will help you determine what your competition is doing and possible trends. Your job is to see what those trends are and generate unique content that is so compelling people will want to share it.  That is what will keep you on top.

I have sites using yoast but I have not found it to be much help as compared to the other sites I just mentioned.

As a good WP alternative, look to https://www.squarespace.com/. It is a lot easier to manage than a WP site.

I know this is very general information. It is hard to give more specific without knowing more details about the site, your own goals, category, what content you have know, what is working, what is not etc.

This is great information!  Thank you!  My hosting company pushes WordPress and, since I have always designed through HTML and CSS, this is a new world for me.  I was just following their lead.  Does WP or Squarespace allow you style control through additional CSS files or inline code?

Thanks so much!