Wordpress SEO Expert

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

I have an SEO client with several websites

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I do have an SEO client that is keen to start but I need your advice on it first. It’s a restaurant business with a few locations. So they have separate 1 page websites for each location and also a group website – so 4 sites in total!

What is the most effective and efficient way to boost their SEO??! They’ve obviously been hit hard financially over the past 6 months and have asked me to help them build their online presence.

Your challenge, should you wish to accept, is… what is the best SEO strategy for them? Should we focus on one site and push out from there? Do all sites need separate focus?

I’d like your services on this account on an ongoing monthly basis, but as mentioned, for now I need to find the most cost effective solution for them.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yes, so there’s a few options here. In a perfect world I’d SEO all four of them, and do campaigns on them all too. But obviously the budgetary constraints and the pandemic make this unlikely.

The lower end of things would be to have me just SEO and work in an ongoing capacity on one site.

I would propose a middle ground. That I do an initial SEO overhaul on them all (I’ll do 4 for the price of 3) and then choose one for an ongoing campaign. The one I would choose wouldn’t be the group site actually (simply because there’s not a lot on it, and also doing one of the locations might help prove to them the value of having other locations engage in a campaign too.)

Perhaps the main location one would be a good site to start an ongoing SEO campaign on.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

SEO experts are expert at SEO

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Hope you are well.

We have just had one of our tech guys do something on the backend of the GRV site and they mentioned the following:

It looks like the site was running Yoast SEO and this has been removed and replaced with All In One SEO plugin. I would advise that this is changed back, as Yoast SEO is a much better plugin for SEO. The site also seems to be running a lot of unused plugins, so needs a proper tidy up. Plus a number of other SEO issues in regards to indexibility, etc.

Is this something that you are able to do or is there a reason that this is like it is?

This is a classic case of it’s best to leave the specialist function to the specialist. 🙂

Different WordPress SEO plugins are best in different circumstances — the way the site uses pages, products, posts etc. is important in choosing. I don’t have a personal affinity to any of them; I look at a website and decide which SEO plugin would be better on a case-by-case basis.

We discussed this back when I first worked on the site actually. Also the proof is in the pudding, the SEO setup I’ve provided and have been working on is very successful, as demonstrated in the stats.

The idea that ‘one plugin is always best’ really just shows someone’s read a couple of (often sponsored) blog posts but doesn’t deal with the actual intricacies of SEO.

As you know, my work is considered, data driven and each site is given it’s own strategy.

He did mention there’s a lot of plugins generally on the site that aren’t being used – I do agree that should be looked at. It’s not SEO related of course…but also as they tech person it would be his job to be managing unneeded plugins for you I imagine.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

My SEO person has let me down

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Need some help with my website. I have had someone working on it for over 15mths now and she hasn’t managed to get my site on page one locally or in the region she was looking to optimise me for (without speaking to me about it). In the last 3 weeks we have got on page 1 for a key term, but I checked today and we have dropped off the first page. Any other first page ranking are because of the work I personally did using the Yoast plugin.

I recently did a check on my website using a free SEO report tool and it came up with a host of issues. When I shared this with my current SEO person she told me that there is nothing she can do about it. I have a lot of keywords stuck on page 2/3/4/5 and they haven’t moved for several months. Could you fix all this? How long would it take you and what would be the costs?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.

I guess there’s a few different things to look at there.

I should add I don’t love automatic reports. They’re not without use entirely–but they tend to look at pages individually rather than the site holistically – and frankly are no match for a 20+ year professional having a manual look at everything. 🙂

But, it does sound like your current person’s excuse that she can’t effect anything in there just isn’t true.

You mention you’ve done work in Yoast yourself which is great (I’m always pleased to hear site owners are happy to roll up their sleeves and delve into SEO!) but I’ve had a look at the source code for your site and there’s a LOT of scope for improvement.

Some of it’s to do with the more obvious stuff, meta tags etc., but also little things add up to make a big SEO difference – you’re obviously based in the UK but the code gives the US as your locale.

Do you know what your SEO person has supposedly been doing for you?

In terms of where you’re currently ranked, I’d love to see the Google Search Console property for the site if that’s been setup. Hopefully that’s also where you’re getting your own ranking data?

So yes, I can definitely help.

In the first instance I’d recommend my initial full WordPress overhaul:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

And then move onto the ongoing campaign:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

I do offer discounts on the latter if people pay six months up front too – in fact I offer a 33% discount on that currently.

As a professional obviously I can’t make promises about where you’ll be ranked after my work, because ultimately that’s up to the search engines. Also without seeing the Dashboard for the site, or proper stats from Search Console (and carrying out other functions of my SEO work, like competitor analysis) it’s really hard to say. I can tell you if you’ve been on page one for a key query, and have slipped to page two, page one should be achieve-able again within about three-four months.

I hope that all helps!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

New Coverage issue detected for site 5xx

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I’ve had the below email from Google.
Is this something you need to fix in Search console or my devs?

I have recently moved our sites to WPEngine, hopefully that hasn’t caused any problems 🙂

A server error (most like ‘500’) simply means the server isn’t working properly. Not that it’s down, but rather it’s got issues processing the site or page.

For example if PHP isn’t working, or there’s some code in the site that’s not functioning. Normally it means some kind of code on the site breaking things.

More often than not if you see it it’s going to apply to the whole site, so because the site is working I suspect it was a temporary hosting issue.

Actually strike that!

I had a look further, and it was only one page that returned the 5xx error, and it’s not actually a page! It’s your WordPress theme files directory; we don’t want that indexed anyway. Google shouldn’t be trying to scan it anyhow, so I’m marked the issue as ‘fixed’ in Search Console.

(In short, it’s not a problem they can’t load it, but I’ve asked it to be cleared from Search Console just to stop you getting any other messages about it.)

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

I am a small electrical company with poor SEO

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I am a small electrical company with a poor online presence.

I have a WordPress website which I am looking to renovate along side some SEO and PPC. Additionally I need to look at social media as a platform to show case information and projects.

I am looking for long term business relationships with continues growth. We want a proactive partner who can explain when and how to scale these campaigns to offer similar returns of investment.

You look credible and i wanted to reach out.

I’ve had a look at the current SEO setup and there’s definitely room for improvement. 🙂

Currently (for example) the homepage description code says:
“Looking for an honest, reliable, professional Electrician in the London or Surrey area? Visit our website for more information.”

There are a few rules that doesn’t conform to. You have two commas which is okay, albeit the maximum. There’s a question in there which is considered a no-no.

But most importantly, the only three words in there that actually get searched for are:

  • Electrician
  • London
  • Surrey

and only one of those relates to your actual service!

So I can absolutely help with your SEO.

You talked about renovating the site – if you mean you want a new design made that is something I can help with – but it would involve making a new site from scratch. (Obviously I do extensive SEO work, but I don’t make bespoke layout or design changes to existing sites I’m afraid.)

I also don’t work with PPC or social media. I used to, but year’s ago decided to hone my offering to the service that overwhelmingly delivers clients the best return on their investment – search engine optimisation.

Just a bit more on my SEO campaign offering. You can read more about it here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

I do usually recommend clients buy and work with me on the initial full expert WordPress SEO overhaul first though:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

So they can be sure they enjoy working with me.

I hope that’s all helpful!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

AMP & Speed for WordPress SEO

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Hi Peter

Could I ask for a bit of advice…is there anything you know we can do to improve mobile speed fairly easily? A client of ours has noted a few reports which seem to flag up the site being slow (or poor) on mobile?

I think you may have installed the AMP plugin on other sites, is that the sort of thing I should be doing?
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/amp/

I will also be switching this site over to be hosted on WPEngine which I hope will help.

WPEngine is better than most for speed.

The ultimate hosting solution for speed though is to use SpinupWP on a UK-based Digital Ocean droplet. That’s where I host my clients and it flies.

AMP is definitely a good idea – but does require some testing. You want to have it turned on for as many types of posts (pages, posts, portfolio, etc.) as possible – but very often that will cause display issues on those data types. So it takes a bit of testing and finessing.

Speed wise I recommend (and can deploy for you) the WP Rocket plugin.

Bear in mind though those speed tests can be a test problematic where they give % scores. Here’s some more information on that:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/problems-with-google-pagespeed-insights/

Cheers!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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