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I would like my WordPress site to rank more organically

May 18, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

Hope you’re well.

I have an adult product site that has been running for a few months and we are using a Google AdWords campaign to get traffic to it, but even though you do get some sales, I would ideally like it to rank more organically. Could you possibly have a quick look and send me some recommendations and cost so that i can start a campaign to get it more popular?

Thanks for your time!

Thanks for contacting me.

I would recommend having me overhaul your SEO ASAP actually. I don’t often say that, but the combination of your theme and the current SEO plugin means it’s outputting SEO not about your site, but them theme!

For example the homepage description is:
“Shoptimizer is a fast and light-weight new WooCommerce theme from CommerceGurus. Built to best practices and focused on both speed and conversions.”

In fact if you look at the below image you’ll see Google is picking that up and showing it in search results!

I’d love to sort all this out and take care of it for you.

Proper, Google-friendly SEO will eventually have a much higher ROI than AdWords anyway.

Longer term SEO is absolutely the best, most cost-effective digital marketing (or to my mind any form of marketing) you can do.

But putting that to one side, right now your settings are going to be seriously hurting your SEO.

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Website Speed, Wordpress

Should I get you involved now or after launch?

May 18, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

I am about to launch a landing page on my website for a new online business. I have a hair salon and will be selling haircolour kits off of website and social media. I have just written the copy. Would now be the time to get you involved or would it be after I launch?

Thanks for contacting me!

And congratulations for getting the new landing page up.

The best time to get me involved with your SEO is actually right after the site goes live. That way when I do the work I can do it all:

  • Keyword research
  • Devise the best strategy
  • Deploy all the SEO and related settings on the site
  • Do all the search engine submissions work (including sending the sitemap to them, pages, etc.)

I do from time to time get involved earlier though if a client really wants. The way I manage that is I do everything except that final step, and we wrap the job up when I’ve done all I can at that stage.

But when they do put the site live they just let me know and I jump back in to do the Google, Bing and other search engines work – obviously without any further charge.

I hope that helps!

So the short version would be – after it’s live is best. But I can work on your site’s SEO earlier if you’d really like.

I hope that helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Social networking, Wordpress

I’m starting a small business and checking out SEO options

May 17, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

I’m thinking of starting a small business and I’m in the process of checking out SEO options.

As you are so highly recommended I thought I would try here first.

My question is if I created a Wix website could you help me in anyway on the SEO front?

Thanks

Thanks for contacting me!

I can do Wix SEO, absolutely. But there’s some important notes to consider if you’ve not already chosen the content management system you’ll be using.

Quite simply (and despite what they might say) Wix doesn’t offer anything like the range of SEO configurations that WordPress does.

Their SEO options are very limited.

As such, while I can technically SEO your site, a Wix site simply isn’t going to be able to compete in search results with a well SEO’d WordPress based competitor’s site.

It would still be better to have all the SEO you can get on it, but really I always recommend WordPress for anyone seriously looking to make the most of organic search ranking.

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

 

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Wordpress

I need to improve my sites’ SEO and Page Speed.

May 17, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

Hi Peter,

I hope you’re well.

I am in need of some help with my website to have some work done to improve its SEO and also its Page Speed.

I have done a fair bit with the SEO but I do need more help. The Page Speed score is currently only 10 and I really would like this up there in the 90s without changing the structure of the site (which I am having difficulty with).

Thanks for contacting me! I can certainly help with your SEO (the homepage description I can see isn’t in line with best practice – and that’s the first thing I check!)

But speed might be another matter. My work is based around making the site load faster – NOT trying to improve Pagespeed % scores.

Here’s a little background on that:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/problems-with-google-pagespeed-insights/

But the short version is unless I was to totally recode your WordPress theme, and change a lot of it to reduce bloat – it’s probably impossible to go from 10% to 90%. That would be just huge.

WordPress is great in that it is so extensible, it’s easy to make it pretty much anything you want. But that comes with a lot of extra code. It’s not a great platform for % scores.

But it came be fast – my work usually reduces a sites loading time by 30-40%. (I can’t make promises on that though.)

Where my hands are tied is if the reason a site is slow is the server – if load balancing isn’t great, or a bunch of sites are thrown on the same web server – because I can’t affect that.

Anyway, some food for thought.

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Website Speed, Wordpress

I noticed that in the ‘Coverage’ section there are a few URLs marked ‘noindex’

May 14, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

Hi Peter

thanks for that advice. I’ll look into int. I was just looking at Google Console and noticed that in the ‘Coverage’ section there are a few URLs marked ‘noindex’ – do we need to worry about this in terms of it negatively impacts our SEO or anything else?

Thanks.

Thanks for checking – those are all pages we want marked as noindex!

They’re the ‘Stock’ pages I referred to in my initial report when I delivered your SEO. In this case they are all just policy pages, terms & conditions and cookie policy pages.

I’ll re-paste that section at the bottom of this message in case that’s helpful.

The reason they’re marked as ‘submitted but not indexed’ is because they used to be submitted before I marked them otherwise. So really this is just Google letting you know about that change – eventually they’ll stop reporting these because they’ll see they are in fact not being submitted anymore.

I hope that’s helpful!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

5)
A couple of pages on your site were “stock” pages, for example policy information. In order to make sure your site is compliant with the latest Google update, these were marked as “noindex”.

The reason those sorts of pages are considered “stock” is they’re essentially standard pages (also known as ‘boilerplate’) that don’t reflect what your site is actually about.

A lot of sites use standard content for those, copied and pasted from elsewhere. So there can be duplicate content issues – but at the very least they don’t reflect the main purpose of your site, so they water down the message so-to-speak.

Google and Bing both recommend these sorts of pages be marked as “noindex”, meaning they won’t scan them and add them to the body of data about your site.

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Wordpress

Do you add all the below to each pages? Page titles, Keywords, Description.

May 14, 2020 by Peter Mahoney

Do you add all the below to each pages? if so is there a set number of pages you do and is it different descriptions for each page?

Page titles, Keywords, Description

What your turnaround at present?

Thanks for contacting me, it’s great to hear from you again.

My turnaround is the usual up-to-three business days.

Your other questions actually have quite a bit to unpack though. So I’ll go through them all in turn.

1)
Up to 40 pages per site is usually considered fair. But that just refers to the number of pages you might want to have tags crafted for manually. You don’t always want that for all types of content.

So, the main pages on a site should always have manually strategised and written tags. But the same isn’t always true for other types of content. Sometimes for posts, and nearly always for products, you want those to be created on-the-fly (when a visitor loads the page) based on a series of rules, or schemas, that Google recommends.

There are several reasons for that, but the two main ones are:

AUTOPILOT
When those more dynamic content types can be set up to create tags for you, it saves you having to worry about that going forward. You’re free to focus on creating new content, posts, products, etc.

RELEVANCY
This is the biggie. Google cares a lot about the ‘relevancy’ of your SEO settings and tags. Does the content in the tags match the content on the page? This sort of setup gives a 100% relevancy for description tags which is awesome.

And of course search engines don’t just judge each page by itself, they look at the site as a whole and ascribe SEO authority to the domain too.

So let’s imagine a site has 10 static ‘Pages’ in WordPress, but 100 ‘Posts’. If all those posts have a full, 100% relevancy score then we have a bit more leeway with the main Pages. So we can make them more keyword rich without risking triggering a ‘lack of relevance’ problem.

2)
On to keywords. Those keyword meta tags haven’t been used in a very long time, well over a decade. Google confirmed in 2009 they didn’t (and hadn’t) used them:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Bing never used that tag, and Yahoo stopped around ten years ago.

In fact while the Yoast SEO plugin does have an option to use keyword meta tags, but it actually has a comment next to the option:
“I can’t think of any reason you’d want to use this.”

There’s even strong evidence (from Bing) that using them incorrectly will get you penalised!

It can be confusing because in the industry people do still talk about keywords, but they mean it in a different context. You can read about that here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

That’s rather a lot of information about on-page SEO – but I hope it’s helpful!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Wordpress

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