If you search your own plugin's error message right now and your docs don't show up on the first page, that's not bad luck. It usually means one of a handful of basic things is missing, and none of them require becoming an SEO person to fix.
Your content has to be crawlable in the first place
This sounds obvious but it trips up more projects than anything else on this list. If your docs live entirely behind a Discord server, a private Notion page, or a login wall, there is nothing for Google to index. No amount of good writing fixes a page search engines can't reach. Docs need a public URL, full stop, before any of the rest of this matters.
Page titles and descriptions, written for humans searching, not for you
A page titled "Config" tells search engines nothing. A page titled "Config reference for PermissionsPro" and a description that mentions the actual permission nodes and commands gives Google something to match against real search queries. Every page needs its own title and description, not one generic tag reused across the whole wiki.
A sitemap that actually gets submitted
An auto-generated sitemap.xml matters less if nobody ever tells Google Search Console it exists. This is a five-minute task that a huge number of small docs sites just skip. Generate it, submit it, move on.
Custom domains beat subdomains beat subpaths
docs.yourplugin.com builds authority for your project specifically. A shared platform subdomain still works fine and gets indexed, it just shares some of that authority with the platform. What hurts is documentation buried three folders deep inside an unrelated site, since it inherits none of the topical relevance search engines look for.
Internal links, not just a sidebar
A sidebar shows structure, but in-content links (linking "permission nodes" in your setup guide directly to the permission node reference page) tell search engines which pages are actually related to which topics. This is also just good for readers, since it's exactly the kind of link people click when they're mid-task.
Stale pages hurt more than missing pages
A page for a plugin version you deprecated two years ago, still ranking, still telling people to use commands that don't exist anymore, actively damages trust in the rest of your docs. Archive it, redirect it, or update it. Don't just leave it up because deleting things feels risky.
What this looks like set up correctly
Every space on Nectory gets automatic sitemap generation, per-page SEO titles and descriptions, and Open Graph metadata for link previews out of the box, with custom domains available on paid plans for projects that want their docs under their own name instead of a shared subdomain. None of it requires touching a robots.txt file by hand. You can see the full list on the features page, and the domain options are on pricing.
None of this is complicated. It's mostly a checklist that gets skipped because writing the actual docs already felt like enough work.