SEO for custom fields using Toolset and Yoast SEO in WordPress

Why you should include custom fields in your site’s SEO strategy

When using the Yoast SEO plugin, you need it to be able to analyze your whole page. This includes custom fields content and not only the standard WordPress fields like the title and post body.

To illustrate this, let’s consider the following image of a custom “Book” page with multiple custom fields.

As you can see, there can be a lot of vital content coming from your custom fields.

If Yoast SEO analyzes only standard WordPress content, it can report issues with missing content even though it is actually there.

Analysis when Yoast SEO cannot “see” custom fields

Analysis when Yoast SEO can “see” custom fields

As you can see, the results are quite different.

How to set Yoast options for custom fields

Toolset sets very good Yoast SEO defaults but you can easily tweak them to better suit your content.

You can set Yoast SEO options from the Toolset → Custom Fields page when creating or editing your groups of custom fields.

Different types of custom fields can have different settings.

For example, if you use a “Single line” custom field inside a heading on the front-end, you can select this in the Yoast SEO option for that field.

Using the “Raw” Options

Finally, you can select the Raw option for certain fields. It means that no additional content formatting will be added to the value of that field.

For example, if you have a single line field and select the Paragraph under the Yoast Analysis option, the value of this single line field will be wrapped in a p tag, like this:

<p>FIELD VALUE</p>

However, your FIELD VALUE may already contain the paragraph tag and using the Paragraph option would result in the following output:

<p><p>My value</p></p>

In cases like this, you can use the Raw option and prevent adding the additional formatting.