Wordpress SEO Expert

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

WordPress speed & CLS for SEO. Oh yeah, and can you use this audit I paid for?

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We have been looking at your WordPress SEO gig and just wanted to ask some more questions.

We have set up our site and the google console, everything was running smoothly but in the last few days we now have some errors showing in the console.

The current errors showing are:

Mobile – LCP issues longer than 4s
CLS issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)

CLS issue: more than 0.25 (desktop)

If we were to go for any of your packages is this something that you would be able to sort for us? if so can you let us know how many errors you can do as well.

We recently had a site audit performed by someone from Fiverr which had some errors on – if we were to send that to you would you be able to help with that as well?

Thanks for contacting me. I’ll go through each of your SEO questions in turn.

1) SPEED
I wouldn’t be helping in the way you seem to want, no. I do have a speed add-on available with the SEO, but it’s 100% based around making your site load faster, in seconds. I explain why that’s important in more detail here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/problems-with-google-pagespeed-insights/

But the key thing is they’re just giving recommendations – they’re not always possible to resolve (especially on WordPress!).

Also they don’t use those % scores when ranking your site, they look at the real loading time in seconds.

2) CLS
You should get this fixed, but a lot of the time it requires a re-write of your theme. Hopefully it’s something simple though – in about 70% of cases this can be fixed by just turning Lazy Load Images off on your site.

3) WEBSITE SEO AUDIT
Chances are that site audit you paid for was actually just automated generated in about 10 seconds using one of the major software packages that claim to do that. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it! I see people doing this all the time.

Those automatic audits aren’t very good to be honest. They’re riddled with problems, which makes sense when you think about it. All they’re doing is looking at each page and checking for matching strings of code they want to see – totally ignoring site wide SEO, the fact there are usually several ways to approach the same SEO task (they usually just look for one), etc.

They’re certainly no match for a professional with 23 years experience looking at it all manually for you!

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

SEO doesn’t shouldn’t your site’s front-end

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On my SEO Emails section (where I share helpful responses to commonly asked queries) I recently shared a not uncommon occurrence, where a site owner gets the SEO work delivered and then blames the work for causing problems with the front-end of the site.

It’s actually very rare for that to happen. On-site SEO has two main components:

  1. site wide SEO work. For example, default settings for social sharing, sitemaps, robots.txt files, all manner of things.
  2. page specific work. This includes title and description tags, social sharing meta tags, image alt and title tags, things like that.

When clients do suggest that SEO has somehow changed their site’s layout or display, it’s usually related (to their mind) related to that second part, that certain pages don’t show like they should, or used to, etc.

But the information output there is all very standard. Title tags are ubiquitous, descriptions, social tags and the like are all just meta content. They live in the head of the page’s code – meta head tags of this nature are there to be read by search engines and browsers – they don’t impact the display or front-end of the site at all.

And image tags like alt and title tags are added to the code that makes an image display – it was showing anyway, so again there’s no change to how the page looks.

So what’s going on? Why do clients occasionally worry search engine optimisation work has impacted how visitors will see their site?

Quite simply – and when you think about it this makes perfect sense – the problem were already there. A lot of website owners don’t check their site thoroughly regularly. They might just preview new blog posts, or see the homepage fairly often. So they’re not always going to notice errors.

But after paying an SEO professional for a service as vital as organic search marketing, or indeed paying any web developer for a service, they’re much more likely to flick through their site to see if anything has happened to it.

And that’s when they notice the historical problems.

Fortunately from my perspective as an SEO expert who works in this field full-time there are ways to illustrate that. Google has a recent cache of the last time they scanned a page (so as long as that’s not been updated in the meantime, it can be used to show the problem existed before any SEO work was done) and the Wayback Machine (from the Internet Archive) can fulfill the same role.

So it’s usually fairly easy to prove.

When I complete an SEO task for a new client I usually get a great big thank you in my inbox. But when something like this happens the email will usually be quite accusatory and aggressive, not allowing for the the possibility something else could have caused the problem – even quite a long time ago.

I suppose the moral of the story is quite simple. Website owners, keep an eye on your websites and make sure they work. This is important for a whole host of reasons; I really recommend checking your contact forms work too. My SEO work brings extra visitors (consistently) but if they can’t get in touch with you because something isn’t working it’s a tragedy. And if you do notice a problem be open to a variety of causes and reasons before placing blame. (Quite often problems with sites are caused by updating your theme, plugins, the WordPress core – those things can even auto-update which means you might not even know there’s been a change).

From my end of things I’ll keep doing my best to explain things to anyone with a question, matter-of-factly and politely, knowing full well when someone else is wrong it’s simply because they didn’t know something.

And who could blame someone for that?

Website display problems after SEO work?

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Thanks for doing the SEO work. However, I noticed several unwanted changes throughout the site as follows:

  • There solid wide green line that runs through the top of the site, horizontally, and usually contains the page heading or some introductory text. There used to be a one line space underneath it before the main text begins – this has disappeared on nearly all pages. Please can you replace the one line space throughout the site – thanks.

Three other errors I have noticed so far:

  • On the meet the team page the order of people has changed.
  • On the services page – the order of services has changed.
  • On the front page the click through on the 4 orange buttons now leads to a 404 notice.

Peter, these mistakes are obviously a bit disappointing as I’ve just had to spend an hour going through the site checking on it. However, I realise mistakes can slip through so I’d be grateful if you could sort them as soon as you can.

Many thanks.

This is all a bit awkward – but actually my work didn’t affect this at all. In fact it can’t – it’s impossible for this work to impact the display of the site (the overwhelming changes it makes is in to ‘head’ section of a pages code which doesn’t impact layout. The only other things on a page are to add ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags to the images on the site – which again doesn’t affect the display.

I do get asked this sort of thing maybe once a year. Typically it’s because people don’t always check their own websites very often – it’s only when they pay for work they look through it and find issues that in fact pre-date the work they’ve just had done. 🙂

Now, I’m not saying 100% that’s the issue, maybe something else in your theme, WordPress core, or a plugin coincidentally was updated (which can be an automatic process) recently.

I’m very au fait with WordPress, having been developing for it even before it was called WordPress. So no doubt I can help, but this is all unrelated to my work.

To help demonstrate that I’ve temporarily turned OFF everything I did. You’ll see the lack of white space is still on all your pages. I can probably fix that with a bit of CSS code for you – but again I can’t say this enough…it’s not related to my SEO work.

On the services page – the order of services has changed.
Looking at that for you, it seems the order has been reversed. Which suggests some programmatic error (in the code somehow).

It took a while to find the problem here. But ultimately in your theme is a file called:
template-parts/content-page-services.php

That’s what places those 6x services on the site. I had to edit that code to tell it to flip the order of the sections. Obviously this is not something I had any cause to touch during my work.

Now this doesn’t mean someone necessarily changed something in this template file – more likely a recent theme update caused the way it works to change and this code needed changing nto br brought in line with that.

One thing I can’t replicate though is the issue with the homepage orange buttons not working. They always worked for me, and still do? (Both when logged in, and not logged in using a private browsing window.)

Please do get back to me asap – as I say I’ve turned my work off currently so you can see it’s not changed the lack of white space at all.

But I was fortunately able to (over about 45 minutes) find and fix those issues with the ordering.

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO & Speed

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Right, this is an interesting one. It’s technical, but has a very simple main recommendation (in large text, below).

Google has started to include something they’re calling CLS in their ranking metrics.

Essentially it means ‘how long before elements loading on the site stop moving around’, and their target is just 0.25 seconds.

If things move around as your page loads for longer than that it’ll get a warning in their system. (This isn’t general loading time, just a very specific part of how a site loads.)

Think about when a website loads, the first thing it does is load the layout – where the menu is, where images will go, text, etc. That’s the elements they’re talking about.

It’s fine for a image to take longer to load, as long as the space it will take is already reserved for it when it DOES load. To be honest most of this happens so quickly you can’t even see it.

But there is one very common thing lots of sites have turned on that means layout changes happen long after a page is loaded – and that’s “lazy load” for images.

Lazy Load was a great technique when it became popular a decade ago. It meant images didn’t load on a page until the browser needed to se them. If an image was at the bottom of a page, and the user wouldn’t see it in the browser until they scrolled down, it waited until it needed to load it to do so.

But when that happens, it moves elements on the page around accordingly to make space for the image – and therefore will always fail the CLS test Google does for all sites and pages.

So ironically something that used to be recommended to help a page load faster is now a problem for passing loading time tests!

Personally I’ve not used Lazy load for years (in most cases it was unclear if the speed enhancement it brought was actually better than the extra Javascript it needed to work) – but now my recommendation to all website owners is clear:

If you use Lazy Load, turn it off.

Large Google Algorithm Update

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We’ve seen another core update from Google to their algorithm. They usually make updates of this size a few times a year – not usually over the New Year period but this hasn’t exactly been a normal year by any measure.

Bulk analysis of tens of thousands of sites has revealed which industries were affected for the better, and which for the worse.

This is how Google tends to treat these larger core updates – rather than just looking for smaller changes to SEO settings, punctuation, word use, etc. – they’re actively trying to impact entire industries and sectors.

Industries that saw a strong, positive effect:

  • Accounting & Taxes
  • Arts & Entertainment
  • Business Services
  • Finance
  • Food & Drink
  • Health
  • Health Conditions
  • Insurance
  • Law & Government
  • Nutrition & Fitness
  • Religion
  • Relocation & Moving
  • Science & Education

While industries they’ve slightly downgraded include:

  • Addictions
  • Dating
  • Natural & Alternative Medicine
  • News & Media
  • Performing Arts
  • Senior Care
  • Sports

Of course, downgrading an entire industry doesn’t always have the effect you’d initially expect. So yes, addiction services might have been downgraded, but that impacts everyone in that sector. So anyone searching for ‘addiction recovery hotline’ for example will still be competing with other sites in the same situation.

The main takeaways for SEO professionals here is that there are more industries in the positive list, and that this is the widest reaching change they’ve made for some time.

One industry to watch in particular is Natural & Alternative Medicine, which Google has been after for a while. The last few large-scale algorithm updates from Google have really targeted this sector. And fair enough, scientific information has never been more important than it is in the Covid-19 pandemic.

But having said that I personally have had a lot of success with the couple of clients I have who fall into this sector, over the past six months their organic SEO stats have more than doubled. 🙂

Is there the option for meta titles to be adjusted for some pages?

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I was going to ask further to you setting the meta title to default to the page name, is there the option for meta titles to be adjusted for some pages. Currently there is no editor function to do this. Being able to add a sales message helps the page to stand out and get more clicks. What is your view on this?

You can actually type anything in the All In One title box for a page or post and it will use that instead.

It will still append ” | Your Business Name” to the end though.

Do bear in mind that there’s a trade-off here in some regards. Google definitely prefers to see the title tag match the title of the article/page. There is some wiggle room, but as much as possible it should match, or at least have lots of the same words as the page title (ideally in the same order, you get the idea – they prefer it match).

Now that might not always be best to entice users to click on a search result. Absolutely.

So sometimes it might be best that they are different. But if they’re TOO different the page might not rank as well, losing potential visitors in the first place.

My question would be this – is there a reason the page’s title isn’t the same as the text you believe will entice clicks in the first place? If they’re changed to that then the page’s title and the title meta tag match, you get the clicks and Google is happy too.

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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