How Stuurlui keeps 500+ WordPress sites SEO-ready
Utrecht-based WordPress agency Stuurlui shares how Yoast became a fixed part of the way they build, hand over, and maintain websites for clients across the Netherlands.
The agency challenge
Running SEO across a single website is manageable. Running it across hundreds of custom WordPress builds, for clients ranging from healthcare institutions to municipalities to international corporates, is a different problem entirely.
That’s the daily reality at Stuurlui, a full-service WordPress agency based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Since its founding in 2014, Stuurlui has focused on delivering high-quality custom WordPress websites, with a strong emphasis on performance, security, and accessibility. Today they manage well over 500 active WordPress sites.
The challenge wasn’t just technical. It was human.
- Clients across very different sectors, each with different content teams
- Handover moments where SEO knowledge had to transfer to non-specialists
- Custom-built sites with schema and structured data that needed to connect cleanly with plugins
- No off-the-shelf themes: every site built from scratch, every time
- A team that needed a shared, consistent SEO baseline across all of it
“We don’t use themes because we believe a website should fit your organization like a tailor-made suit,” says Sjoerd Kuipers, co-founder at Stuurlui. “But that also means we can’t rely on generic SEO setups. Every site needs to be configured properly and then handed to a client who may never have touched SEO before.”
The solution: a shared foundation everyone can actually use
Stuurlui made Yoast SEO a standard part of their WordPress stack. Not as a one-off recommendation, but as a fixed component of how they build and deliver sites.
“A lot of our clients already know Yoast,” says Sander Kartman, business innovator at Stuurlui. “That familiarity with the traffic lights means we don’t have to explain what the plugin does at handover. We can focus on what’s specific to their site (the keywords that matter for them, how their content structure works) rather than spending time on the tool itself.”
For a vast amount of sites where SEO is a more active priority, Stuurlui runs Yoast SEO Premium. On those projects, the team makes use of Yoast’s more advanced schema options: something that integrates particularly well with the way Stuurlui builds.
Where Yoast and custom development meet
Stuurlui’s developers build WordPress sites from scratch, which gives them full control over how schema markup is implemented. On eligible sites, they build custom schema directly into the theme and structure it to connect cleanly into Yoast’s schema output.
The result is structured data that is both technically sound and maintainable. Yoast handles the standard schema layer; the custom development extends it where needed for specific content types or rich result targets. It’s the kind of integration that only works properly when the underlying site is built to support it, not bolted onto a theme.
“We use Yoast’s schema tools as part of a deliberate setup,” says Sander. “When you build everything yourself, you can make the plugin work the way it’s supposed to, rather than fighting against whatever the theme is already doing.”
Consistent SEO at handover and beyond
The other place Yoast earns its place in Stuurlui’s workflow is at the moment of handover.
Stuurlui’s focus on WordPress means all websites (whether custom-built or low-code) are tailored to the client’s specific requirements and include key SEO tools as standard. Yoast is part of that package across the board.
During the workshop when delivering the new website to the client, the client’s content team gets a configured setup: focus keyphrases are explained, readability analysis is live, and the meta structure is already in place. The traffic light system gives non-technical editors immediate, actionable feedback without needing an SEO specialist on standby.
Where SEO meets AI visibility
Stuurlui’s team is increasingly focused on what comes after traditional SEO. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the discipline of optimizing websites so that AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews pick up and cite your content. It’s a fast-moving area and one where Stuurlui is already advising clients.
“Having Yoast set up properly on 500 sites means those sites are already better positioned for how search is evolving.”
Sjoerd Kuipers – co-founder, Stuurlui
The connection with Yoast feels native. Structured data, clean metadata, and well-configured schema markup are foundational to how AI systems parse and prioritize content. The SEO hygiene that Yoast helps enforce at scale turns out to be exactly what good GEO practice requires.
“The fundamentals haven’t changed: they’ve become more important,” says Sjoerd. “Having Yoast set up properly on 500 sites means those sites are already better positioned for how search is evolving. That’s not a coincidence. It’s how we’ve built it.”
Stuurlui is a full-service WordPress agency based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. They design, build, host, and maintain custom WordPress websites for over 500 clients across government, healthcare, non-profit, and corporate sectors. Find them at stuurlui.nl.