Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Following the SEO report I do have some questions

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Hi Peter, I just caught up with your message.

Thank you for the report again and after I send this message I will be paying your next invoice.

It makes for an interesting read and i do have some questions and points:

  1. “The number of times your site was seen in search results has increased by 26%
    Clicks to your site from search results are up 15%”
    Are there any statistics on:
    1. what people are looking at when they get to the site
    2. If people are coming from facebook or instagram to look?
    3. what are the actual numbers?
  2. Search terms: we have found others seem popular so you may want to add them to your list.
  3. The speed enhancement and error update tidy up sounds good. the 404 error and searching for yourself info was very interesting too
  4. Just to clarify: we don’t sell from our office so location is irrelevant to us. We only sell online – and will deliver anywhere within the known universe
  5. I will try to write some how-tos – does they have to go on the homepage?
  6. Do you think the blog which I started on your advice is having any effect? I’m thinking it should fit in with the Bert update – if I am doing it right…

That’s it. Thanks for your input and help.

Cheers!

Questions are, of course, always welcome.

1)
To give an idea of the actual figures (although I do usually track the growth, which is considered the optimal way to measure an SEO campaign)…
In the past month actual clicks to the site from organic search results were: 1,149
Impressions in the same period in organic search were: 36,941

You’ll note I made a real point there of specifying ‘organic search’ – that’s very much the domain SEO (and therefore my work) exists in. So I don’t have any stats for Facebook or Instagram. I can say the figures above really are just from search – so anything you get from social would be on top of those in your overall stats.

Similarly I don’t measure what happens to a visitors pathway after they get to your site either – that sort of thing is either considered the realm of generic Analytics (as opposed to search specific) or more explicitly – the realm of US (user experience) which is a whole different discipline.

🙂

2)
In terms of reporting I include up to 12 in the reports. Of course I’m targeting many, many more than that but for the sake of measuring growth and demonstrating the success 12 is more than sufficient.

But I can definitely swap some out for others if you’d like! Maybe you could just send me back a list of 12 you’d like and we’ll use those from now on.

4)
Oh I know – it’s just extra stuff Google likes to see in place even if it’s irrelevant to the operations of the business.

5)
It’s best on the homepage. Think of any content on the site like this – the more ‘steps’ away it is from the homepage the slightly less import it has for your SEO authority.

So if the FAQs are on the homepage we can use the structured data approach to full effect. If they’re on a page that’s one click away from the homepage they’ve worth less. If they’re buried in a link from the footer or something… even worse.

The higher any content on the site (both in terms of how many clicks through the navigation it is to get to, AND how high it sits on a page) the more weight it has for SEO.

So, with the FAQs, I recommend they go on the homepage, but towards the bottom so they’re not in the way of other stuff.

6)
Yes! It is, and will continue to as you add more. It’s amazing how much of a difference blogging couple with an SEO campaign is.

Case in point is my own site:
petermahoney.com

I have great SEO on it of course, but being my own site it’s never really finished or up-to-date – my clients get all my time and my own ‘house’ is never really finished. So I go through phases of blogging a lot and then I get busy and forget about it.

Well, just three weeks ago I started adding regular content again. One of my targets is ‘seo expert peter’. Google that – see where I suddenly am after just a spat of blogging and SEOing it all properly!

🙂

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

How many pages do you SEO on each WordPress site?

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How many pages do you SEO on each WordPress site? I’ve got about bout 25-30 pages. I’ve got someone working on the site speed as we speak right now.

So I guess here’s my real question. Do you look at each page individually re: seo meta tags and key words etc or just setup Yoast etc for the entire site.

Also do you do a more long term offer with monthly review etc.

Cheers

Yes it’s complicated. (SEO isn’t straight forward!)

🙂

Some pages will have bespoke tags written, others left to have them generated on-the-fly. For example, a News of Blog page that just has lists of the recent posts would need to be om-the-fly. Because the content is 100% dynamic – it changes as new content is added – there’s no static content to reinforce with search engines.

And in turn if we reinforce content through meta tags that have no relevancy to the page content itself, that can hurt the SEO setup.

So I do site-wide work of course, and then look at every page on an individual basis. But that doesn’t necessarily mean every page will end up with bespoke tags.

I hope that makes sense!

And yes, I do offer ongoing campaigns for people that really want to commit to organic search as a marketing strategy. You can read more about that here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

Cheers!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

What SEO gig should I buy?

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Can you let me know what gig I should buy? Keep in mind we haven’t set up GA, GSC, my business or anything so would be good if you can do the end to end setup and onsite.

Do you also do PPC a setup. Eg if I wanted a campaign to run just for one product category?

The best gig to buy would be the £120 one:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

I set up GSC as aprt of my work as standard – but not GA to be honest. Because I focus on organic search, well the best data Google reports on for organic SEO is in Google Search Console. And setting up ‘My Business’ is also a different kettle of fish – and usually includes having to verify your address which really does need to be done by you.

I could set up GA easily enough if you’d like – but not My Business.

I would just need you to send me an email address you use to access Google services (just the address, not the password) and I can happily do that as part of the work, adding you to the accounts.

As for PPC I’m afraid don’t offer it at all. Google Ads usually have a very low ROI, so low in fact that I stopped offering Adwords services myself years ago.

I used to offer it back when Adwords first launched, but the ROI on it is so low every single one of my clients wanted to drop it in favour of more SEO work; so I stopped offering it altogether.

I hope that all helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Our rankings really seems to have fallen

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Hi Peter

Our rankings really seems to have fallen, is this normal?

Also since changing to All in one SEO our homepage title is loading correctly. Could you advise?

Can I ask how you’re testing your ranking please? And also, things are worse than that – all my settings have been removed from the site?! All the meta tags, titles, and general SEO settings too. Was that intentional?

I’d very much like to put them back in if I may. (I keep backups.)

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

We use a system called Rankinty.

Strange, we haven’t changed anything. I did ask our web developers why and they said that maybe Yoast and all in one are conflicting. I did check and I’m pretty sure you deactivated Yoast (from what I can see).

No one our end would have changed anything.

That wouldn’t cause the issue anyway. Both can be activated and have settings in the backend (although that’s awful for the actual SEO settings that get output – but it’s technically possible.)

It looks like a completely ‘fresh’ install of All in One SEO Pack. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say it looks like someone accidentally deleted All In One, realised their error and reinstalled it (not realising that as of about 16 months ago, WordPress doesn’t keep settings for plugins if they’re deleted anymore).

That’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense of it.

Anyway – I just want to double check – you’re happy for me to put all the work back in place?

Peter Mahoney

That is really odd. Could that be why the rankings took a bit of a dive?

Yes if you could please reinstate the work that would be much appreciated.

Another thing I wanted to ask you. How do companies have the below?

Well, there’s a couple of things with the issue of the rankings drop.

The first is I don’t love those third-party systems for reporting on organic search stats. I get all my stats directly from Google and Bing webmaster systems, which are the only official ‘from the horses mouth’ places to get that data.

BUT, having said that – yes, it’s entirely possible the rankings dropped when the SEO work was removed.

I actually blogged about this recently, you can read the post here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/case-study-turning-seo-work-off/

but the short version if removing search engine optimisation rank has a nearly immediate, massively damaging effect on rankings and SEO stats!

I’ll put the work back on for you right away.

As to your query about the ‘sub links’ in search results, those are called ‘site links’, and Google chooses which pages to use itself.

Now, that’s not 100% true – we’re able to say in our sitemap.xml file that certain pages have a greater ‘weighting’ than others, which we have done. (For the top level navigation.)

But we can’t then do anything more than that to influence Google’s choice of site links. They only show them for something like 10% of sites that have all the right setup for them anyway – it’s all down to your overall website SEO and domain authority.

(They actually did use to have an option in their Search Console system to nominate pages they SHOULDN’T include as sitelinks. But that was removed some time ago.)

All we can do to influence them with site links is already done I’m afraid.

Thanks for the above, Peter. Much appreciated.

SEO for plumbing & heating business

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Hi Peter,

Thanks for your prompt professional service, appreciated and will wait to see how the changes impact the site. I would also like to take you up on the one month free SEO campaign and can you also let me know how much it would be monthly after that.

I also have the AdWords campaign but looking to pause this for a couple of months or so, to see what enquires are coming from where as. It to bothered if it doesn’t generate much revenue for a few months.

Also is there any stats showing current ranking for keywords i.e like a report that I could compare to next month etc?

I also have a plumbing & heating business, would you be able to look at that website and see if it’s worth running some additional SEO or OK to leave like it is with some Google AdWords like we are doing at the moment?

Thanks!

I’ll carry on with that free month for you.

If you want to carry on afterwards the price here via PPH is just £100+VAT a month. You can read more about the service here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-support/

I’ll send through a thorough SEO report at the end of the month for you.

I can certainly SEO the plumbing site too – it looks like most of the SEO setup relies on the outdated ‘keyword meta tag’, which hasn’t really done anything for nearly 20 years. (Google never used it, nor Bing, and Yahoo stopped 12 years ago. In fact there’s evidence to suggest Bing might even penalise sites for using it!)

I do recommend SEO over Adwords if you have to choose between the two. SEO obviously can take a wee while to build but the ROI always ends up beating out an expensive PPC campaign.

I hope that helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

One category has no SEO meta information typed in?

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Hi Peter

Since you did your work on this page the writing at the side of the picture has disappeared? And I notice on one category of pages there’s no SEO meta information typed in?

Thanks for coming back to me – questions are of course always welcome!

I’ll reply to each in turn.

1. I notice on one category of pages there’s no SEO meta information typed in?

Correct! Those 4x pages are ones I left to load the tags from the content on page-load. They fit the criteria for that well, the content is strong from the outset. Plus it means those pages give is a 100% relevancy rating, which is one of Google’s top metrics. By having several pages with the 100% relevancy it gives us extra leeway on the other pages to make them keyword rich in the tags without triggering any relevancy-warnings from Google.

2. Since you did your work on this page the writing at the side of the picture has disappeared?

I had noted that too, and made a note of it when I first looked at the site. It pre-dates me (it’s not uncommon for people to bring me sites with the odd problem, usually they already know about it so I don’t often bring it up.)

As a test to demonstrate that I quickly just removed all my work, by turning off the plugins:

  • All In One SEO pack
  • AMP
  • PB SEO Friendly Images

and the problem persisted. Feel free to give it ago yourself!

I can see that page uses a specific WordPress theme template – I wonder if that’s been changed? Or perhaps the theme or WordPress was updated recently, and it means some part of the custom template no longer works?

I do note that template file tries to bring in the WordPress page content with the function:
the_content

while other custom templates you have bring it in with the slightly different:
get_the_content

I’m not sure if that might help steer your investigations?

But yes, that issue isn’t related to the work I did at all.

Have you made any other updates over the past few days? To the theme, or WordPress itself?

Actually, I had a good look through the template file and fixed it.

I can’t say why or when it happened (I don’t touch templates as part of my SEO of course!) but that template file didn’t have the WordPress code to relate it to the post, so it couldn’t grab the content.

I added that in, et voila!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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