Three-quarter angle view of an open silver laptop on a wooden desk, the screen showing a website content-editor interface mid-edit — a heading block at the top, paragraph blocks below, and a right-side panel of settings. A printed article draft with pencil annotations sits beside the laptop in soft window light.

If you already run a WordPress site and you want it to actually rank, read well, and pull its weight — this is the day where the content side stops being guesswork.

Who delivers this: Christopher Ross · WordPress trainer for content and marketing teams · WordPress training delivery since 2007 (broader training practice since 2004) · MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University

WordPress 201 is the practical day for people who already publish on WordPress and want their content to do real work. By the end of it you will know how to structure a page so a human and a search engine both find what they came for, you will have audited one of your own pages live in the session, and you will leave with a short, opinionated checklist that you can apply to every post you write from Monday onward.

Who this is for

  • Fit. Marketing managers, content leads, and communications staff who publish on WordPress weekly and want better outcomes from the same effort.
  • Fit. Site owners who have a working WordPress site, an SEO plugin installed, and a quiet suspicion that they are not getting what they should out of either.
  • Not fit. People who have never logged into the WordPress dashboard before. Start at 101 and come back to this once you are comfortable publishing a page.
  • Not fit. Agency SEO specialists looking for advanced technical SEO. This is a day for the people writing the content, not the people auditing the crawl.

Prerequisites: you can publish a post on your own site without help, you have an SEO plugin (Yoast or Rank Math) installed, and you can show me one page you wrote in the last six months. That is the bar.

What you’ll be able to do after

  • Plan a page or post around a single search intent, so it has a chance of ranking for something specific instead of nothing in particular.
  • Use headings as a structural outline that a reader can scan and a search engine can parse, not as a font-size picker.
  • Write internal links that pass useful signal between your own pages, and notice when you have orphaned a page from your own navigation.
  • Upload images with sensible filenames, sensible dimensions, and alt text that earns its place — without slowing the page down.
  • Read what your SEO plugin is telling you, take the advice that matters, and ignore the green-light theatre that does not.
  • Run a quick redirects-and-404 check so old URLs stop bleeding traffic the moment you change a slug.

What your manager will see different on Monday

  • New posts ship around one search intent, with a headline that matches what the page delivers — not a clever line that buries the topic.
  • Headings get used as an outline, not as a font-size picker, and the team can now scan a draft and tell where the structure is weak.
  • Images go up with sensible filenames, sensible dimensions, and alt text that earns its place — without slowing the page down.
  • Internal links start pointing somewhere useful, and the team notices when a page has been orphaned from the site’s own navigation.
  • The SEO plugin’s green-light theatre stops driving editorial decisions, and the team reads the advice that actually matters.

Curriculum, in four themed blocks

  1. Writing for search and humans at the same time. One page, one job. Picking a primary intent before you draft. The headline that earns the click and matches what the page actually delivers. Why a great post can lose to a mediocre one with a clearer promise.
  2. Structure and internal linking. Headings as an outline. Paragraphs that respect the scanner before the reader. Internal links that point somewhere useful, anchor text that is honest about where it goes, and the cluster shape that quietly outperforms a random pile of posts.
  3. Images, schema, and the plugin layer. Filenames, alt text, and dimensions before you upload. What schema your theme and plugins already emit on your behalf, what they do not, and where Rank Math or Yoast helps versus where it gets in the way. Core Web Vitals as a content lever, not a developer-only problem.
  4. Hygiene that compounds. Permalinks you do not change casually. Redirects when you have to. The 404 report most owners never look at. A monthly content review that takes thirty minutes and saves a small site from quietly rotting.

Real examples we’ll work through

  • A live audit of one page from your own site, with a rewrite plan you can execute that week.
  • A blog post planned from the keyword in, headlined honestly, structured as an outline, and internally linked to two siblings on your site.
  • A media-library cleanup pass that gets your image sizes, filenames, and alt text under control without breaking any existing pages.

Where this fits in the WordPress training pathway

Shaped for: Marketing leads, content managers, and editorial contributors who publish on WordPress weekly.

Most learners come here from: WordPress Training 101.

From here, the most common next steps:

The four WordPress courses are role-routed, not strictly sequential — each segments by the work you actually do on a WordPress site rather than by how long you have been around the dashboard. The full training catalogue shows how they sit alongside the Microsoft Office track.

Delivered as part of these service engagements

This course is included in the training scope of the following build and ongoing engagements — either at full public-cohort scope, or as a compressed version tuned to your specific build. The audit-and-build credit policy on the service pages covers the training surface too: training hours already delivered as part of a build credit forward against any larger engagement that follows.

Looking to book the public cohort or a private team session directly, separate from a build engagement? The pricing and booking surface below covers that path.

Format, duration, and pricing

201 runs online only, over Zoom or Google Meet, with the recording sent to your team if you need it. The full-day session is the format most teams book; the half-day is a compressed option when your team can only spare a morning. Pricing is by format, not by group size.

Training investment — up to 12 participants
FormatInvestment (CAD)
Half-day (3 hours, focused)$1,495
Full-day (6 hours, comprehensive)$2,495
Two half-days (split across one week)$2,795
In-person delivery within Niagara / GTA: add $500/day. Teams larger than 12, custom curriculum, or multi-cohort rollouts — let’s scope it.

Currently booking through Q3 2026. Two virtual cohorts per month.

Christopher Ross

Written by

Christopher Ross

I've been building WordPress sites since 2007 and on the open web since 1996. I've shipped editorial systems for the Postmedia national newspaper network and brand sites for Sherwin-Williams industrial brands, and I write about WordPress and editorial decisions from Fort Erie, Ontario.

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Common questions

How do you price this for a team?

Private on-site training: $2,250 per day for up to 3 participants, $175 per additional participant (maximum 10). Half-day: $1,400. Travel within 50 km of Fort Erie is included; beyond that, travel is billed at cost. Remote delivery: $1,800 per day. After a short discovery call I confirm the format, recommend the right starting level, and send a fixed quote.

Can you tailor this to our team's actual workbooks and templates?

Yes. If you can send me a sanitised example or two before the day — a real workbook, a recurring report, the spreadsheet someone always asks about — I build the exercises around it. People learn faster when the examples are theirs, and the workbook usually goes back to the team in better shape than it arrived.