I know in your monthly WordPress SEO reports you include statistics for clicks from search engines, the number times my site was seen in search engines – and of course search rankings. I note you include up to 12 rankings for different search queries – do you have different packages and options for that?

Do you only track 12 regardless of what package someone is on?

Ah! I thought we discussed this before, but perhaps not.

Have a read here about keywords:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

The key thing there is ANY words in your site can (and are!) picked up for ranking.

So my work doesn’t just ‘target’ 12 queries. And it never has. I’m targeting every area, every service, and more things besides.

I simply TRACK just 12. I settled on that for a variety of reasons, from the amount of time it takes to track and report on them to requests from my clients – when I’ve experimented with say, the top 50 I found people stopped engaging with the reports (and therefore their own SEO) as much.

So my recommendation is to pick a spread of terms you want to rank for, so that we can see the general site-wide trend over time. Not just to focus on the core things you want to rank for.

If you’d like me to come up with a bespoke reporting package for you though which does track every permutation you might like I can – I’ll just need to adjust the price accordingly.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Just thinking about the next stage for my WordPress SEO and how your expertise can help with that to get more visitors to the site. I know you’re something of a WordPress SEO expert. 🙂

I’m about to start adding/writing copy to each product I’m adding to the site.

I know you’ve set everything up for me already, but I’m wondering what I would need to do when writing to ensure results from my site move up to the top of the results when people search for particular products? Would it just be ensuring I reference key search terms in each short description?

And how might I integrate star ratings into my results in SERPs?

Happy to pay for additional work, I just need to understand what is achievable – so I ask for your patience as I try and cement my learning/reading

Rightio… so from my perspective the next stage really would be to engage in an regular SEO campaign with me.

Short, free advice to your queries though would be…

Would it just be ensuring I reference key search terms in each short description?
Yes, that’s important. Also try to make sure the name of the cheese appears on the page itself 3x.

How might I integrate star ratings into my results in SERPs?
Reviews are based on a couple of different possibilities.

They’re supplied from structured data (special code) which can be generated either:

• Manually, with manual code places in each page. This though is time consuming.
• Sites that use an ecommerce product plugin, like Woocommerce, can turn it on relatively easily. It would pull them from the reviews people leave on your site – because you do have Woocommerce.

So that latter one seems the best option. Also, including this structured data usually gives a bit of an improvement to your SEO generally. But bear in mind that just because you have the code doesn’t mean Google will definitely show star ratings in your search results.

Ultimately that’s up to them.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Hi Peter, that was fast work. Just got a couple of questions.

1. How do i set keywords for each post using all in one SEO?
2. I noticed that since moving to all in one SEO a lot of my posts are missing the meta description.
3. Can you make it to target the US audience?

I believe that is it at the moment having a quick look around.

Yes, I’m trying to get SEO jobs as quickly as possible at the moment. Particular in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs – digital marketing has never been more important.

Questions are, of course, always welcome.

1)
‘Keywords’ is a bit of a loaded term to be honest.
I wrote a basic primer on the subject which became a very popular post:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

But the specific answer is I presume you’re talking about meta keyword tags? They haven’t been used in well over a decade – heck, we’re talking nearly two in some cases at this point! Back in 2009 Google blogged about how they didn’t (and never had) used those tags:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Bing actually never used keyword tags, and Yahoo stopped reading them at all about ten years ago.

In fact the plugin you used to use, Yoast, does have an option to turn on meta keyword tags, but it comes with a message: “I can’t think of any reason you’d want to do this.” 🙂

There’s actually evidence that suggests using them can harm your ranking, on Bing at least. Because it looks a lot like you’re relying on outdated techniques which of course isn’t ideal.

2)
Can you please double check that? I’ve just checked and it appears they’re all there…hopefully this was just a caching or some other issue with your host and what you were able to see in the SEO settings?

One thing I noticed is a lot of them (if not more!) were just copy and pastes of the first line or two from the blog post anyway. There’s no need to manually set that anymore – All In One SEO pack is set up to do that automatically. You won’t see it in the editor, but if if you look at the live code for a page all the meta tags will be in there, based on that schema.

3)
Done! I’ve set the country target to the USA.

As to the monthly SEO, you can see the details of that here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

Thanks again!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Hi Peter,

I love how you presented yourself and feel pretty confident that you can help us with our project. We have to recruit our first 9 patients from the US who can give us testimonials for our service within 2-4 weeks of time. Our team thought of putting some ads on Facebook to find those participants.

How does your service work in order to make this happen? Could you please tell us about the process? Also, could you please tell us about the time duration and fees even?

I look forward to hearing from you very soon.

Thank you for contacting me!

I appreciate the background information. In essence, my WordPress SEO work gives you higher ranking sin search results.

In terms of your specific needs though (9 US patients in 2-4 weeks) I’m not sure SEO would be the best route forward. It can take Google up to a week to scan the site after work is carried out to see the changes anyway, and then it tends to build over the coming fortnight.

SEO is absolutely the best digital marketing you can do – and the most cost effective – in the mid to long term. For a short term need, I wouldn’t recommend relying on it as your sole marketing attempt.

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert