Yoast has gone to the dogs. Rankmath have grown into a mature product. I only use SEOPresser and Rankmath today, but going with SEOPresser you still need an additional schema plugin with proper mark-ups.
Yes, you will need a SEO optimisation expert who specialises in maximising exposure without buckling the domain quality. Yes, keywords are still bloody important. I use Ahrefs for 'most' of my analytical work for websites.
You cannot have good SEO without optimal caching and this is entirely server dependent to what and whatnot you must use. New plugins like Flyingpress which is developed by a Wordpress industry veteran is a superb caching plugin which I believe will overtake WP Rocket and Nitropack in time to come. I use explicitly use Litespeed cache with Cloudflare.
At this time, a very good Wordpress optimal CDN is BunnyCDN, and I am pondering at this moment to move to BunnyCDN.
There are other things like your theme design, but that is up to your developer or whoever is maintaining the website.
No, I can't help you I only manage IT. All the above is tips.
