Bulk Updating Titles and Descriptions for Improved SEO Performance
November 28, 2025 Posted by Matthew Widdop Round-Up 0 thoughts on “Bulk Updating Titles and Descriptions for Improved SEO Performance”When optimising a web page, titles and descriptions are two of the most fundamental elements for improving SEO and boosting performance. Titles themselves are a ranking factor, which means search engines, such as Google, will analyse your titles and their relevance to your content and the audience before deciding where they rank. Google does not use descriptions to determine where you rank, but they are still important for improving click-through-rate (CTR), the number of customers that see your webpage versus the number that click on it.
Updating titles and descriptions can often be a lengthy process, as some sites have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages, so going into each web page to manually edit the titles and descriptions one by one can be a task that takes several months. In today’s guide, I will be taking you through the process of optimising titles and descriptions in bulk for a WordPress site to improve efficiency and increase SEO performance.
Step 1: WP All Export

To be able to edit the titles and descriptions in bulk, you first need to pull them out of WordPress onto an Excel sheet, which means you can edit them all in one place. To do this, I used a plugin called WP All Export, which lets you export different types of data, including posts, pages, taxonomies and custom post types. Once you’ve decided what type of data you want to export (let’s say you’ve decided you want to edit the titles and descriptions on all your blog posts), then you can choose which data will be exported with your posts on your Excel sheet.

For example, if exporting blog posts, the data we would want (and need for our import to work later on) is the ID column, and any relevant custom fields you use on your site to add titles and descriptions to your web pages. Most people use either Yoast or Rank Math to input their metadata. For Yoast, you would want the_yoastwpseo_title (title) custom field and the yoastwpseo_metadesc (descriptions). The ID column is the most critical column you need when exporting data. This is the ID of each post you are exporting, and without it, WordPress won’t know which metadata belongs to which post when you re-import later on.
Step 2: Microsoft Excel and ChatGPT
The next step of the process, once you have exported the data, is to actually write your new titles and descriptions. You can obviously do this meticulously by hand, but as mentioned, with a large number of pages on your site, this may be exhaustive, even if you can now do it all on one sheet. Using ChatGPT to create new engaging titles and descriptions based on your existing ones is the quickest way to optimise performance while maintaining consistency and clarity. However, make sure when using ChatGPT, you follow some key rules, such as setting character limits. Titles that are too long are truncated and changed by Google. Also, descriptions should be short and snappy to attract users’ attention. For Titles, the character limit is typically between 50-60 characters, whereas for meta descriptions, it lies between 140 and 160 characters. You also run a risk of having your titles and descriptions rewritten by Google if they are too short. Typical minimum character limits include 30 for titles and 70-90 for meta descriptions. Also, try not to get it to create all your titles and descriptions in one go if you have a lot; trying to do too many at once can cause issues. I’ve found updating in batches of 50 is usually safe, but make sure you are double-checking for any errors. Here’s an example of a typical prompt I would use below:

Step 3: WP All Import
Once you have created your title and descriptions, The Import is the most crucial stage of the process because it has the most potential for things to go wrong. Understanding how to import with the correct settings is crucial in order to map your new titles and meta descriptions to the correct post.
- Upload your CSV (Excel Sheet)
- Choose a post type to modify – This will be posts for this, as we are updating blog titles and descriptions, but could also be pages or a custom post type.
- Choose which Fields to Modify – This is one of the most important steps, as you need to tell the plugin when it runs your import, what fields you actually want it to update. For this import, it will be Yoast titles and descriptions as discussed previously.
- Extra Settings – Make sure to click the box “Attempt to match to existing WordPress [posts before creating new posts” and then use Post ID as the identifier so it knows what post to attach your titles and descriptions to. If you don’t select this, it will create new WordPress posts and not try and update your existing content, leaving you with a slew of blank posts with descriptions and titles that you will then need to delete.
- Make sure to tell WP Import to only update the custom fields you have specifically selected. You can see where to select this below.

Once you have updated all these settings correctly and are ready to run your import. It should only take a few minutes, and hundreds of your web pages will be updated with new and improved titles and descriptions.





