How to edit SEO titles and descriptions from the WordPress Posts list

Step by step

1. Find the posts that need work

Use the All SEO dropdown above the list to narrow it, then click Filter:

• SEO score: poor (under 60) or needs work (60–79) for the weakest posts.
• No focus keyword for posts nobody has assigned a target to.
• Not scored yet for posts the analysis has not reached.

Click the SEO column header to sort by score, lowest first. Combine the filter with a category or a month to work through one section at a time.

2. Open Quick Edit and read the fields

Hover a post and click Quick Edit. In the Hydrogen SEO group you will find:

• SEO title
• Description, the meta description
• Keyword, the focus keyword
• Indexing: Default, Index or No index
• Pillar content, a checkbox, from version 0.0.31

Each field opens with the post's current value. An empty title or description shows Empty: the template is used, meaning the post is following the template for its post type.

3. Rewrite the title against the counter

Type in SEO title. A live count such as 52 / 60 shows next to it and changes colour when the text falls outside 30 to 60 characters. Lead with the words the post should be found for, and keep the brand at the end. If you use variables such as %separator% or %site_name%, the count is marked before variables are filled in, because the final length depends on what they expand to.

4. Write the description

In Description, write one or two sentences that say what the reader gets. The counter grades it against 120 to 160 characters. These are guides, not hard limits: Google cuts snippets by pixel width, so front-load the part that matters. Leave the field empty if you are happy for the template to supply the description.

5. Set indexing only when you mean to

Indexing shows Default (index) or Default (no index), with the brackets telling you what the post type's setting is. Leave it on Default unless this post is an exception. Index forces the post indexable even if its type is noindex. No index hides this post from search. For changing many posts at once, Bulk Edit has the same Indexing choice.

6. Update and move to the next row

Click Update. Only the values you changed are written, so a field you did not touch cannot overwrite an edit someone else made in the meantime. The score ring in the row refreshes straight away. Move to the next post. With practice a row takes under a minute.

7. Spot-check on the front end

After a batch, open two or three of the posts in a private window and view the source, or run:

curl -s https://example.com/a-post/ | grep -oE "<title>[^<]*</title>|<meta name=\"description\"[^>]*>"

Purge the page cache if the old values still show. For titles that use variables, check the pixel width in the snippet preview inside the post's SEO Settings sheet.

What Quick Edit cannot do

It covers the four fields people change most. Canonical URLs, Open Graph and X fields, schema and the other robots directives are in the SEO Settings sheet inside the editor. Bulk Edit, for many posts at once, offers Indexing and Pillar content only: titles and descriptions have to be written per post, which is deliberate, since the same title on fifty posts is the problem you are trying to fix. The full reference is in SEO on the Posts screen.

A routine for a backlog

Do not try to rewrite everything. Open Search Console's Performance report, sort pages by impressions, and note those with many impressions and a low click-through rate. Those are pages already being shown where a better title can earn more clicks. Find them in the Posts list, fix the title and description in Quick Edit, and write down the date. Compare click-through for those pages after a few weeks, since Google needs time to recrawl and show the new text. Then take the next batch.

Without the plugin

Core WordPress stores no SEO title or description, so Quick Edit has nothing to edit. The nearest built-in equivalents are the post title, which feeds the title tag, and the excerpt, which a small snippet can print as the meta description; see add a meta description without a plugin. Neither appears as an extra field in Quick Edit without custom code.