Wordpress SEO Expert

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

Ongoing WordPress SEO monthly & product review stars

by

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

Just got a couple of WordPress SEO questions

by

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

We have to recruit within 2-4 weeks, can SEO help?

by

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

Results of an SEO scan

by

Hi Peter. I hope all is well with you?

These are the updates I have had so far on my WordPress search engine optimisation – from my limited input on the errors. Please see attached.

Is there anything else I need to do or do you have any further planned input for the site?

Best regards

Thanks! That first page of the SEO issues you’re raising looks to be a basic automatic SEO scan type thing – I don’t tend to love those – for good reason. 🙂

Most free reports are based on similar software packages (they’re just rebranded).

They’re notoriously out-of-date and behind on SEO best practice. One of the popular ones hasn’t been updated in nearly two years! And the other only recognises one of the three types of H1 tag (for example) that Google recommends.

In your case, every page has an H1. If you view the source code and search for:
<h1

you’ll see it.

Similar situation with the alt tags – the image’s code is highlighted in blue. You’ll see both alt tags and titles tags in there!

The relevant issue in that doc is the ‘Content Wider Than Screen’ issue for mobile usability. There’s actually two, not just one that’s showing as problematic. However, that mobile friendly test is notoriously buggy – Google often won’t load all your scripts when they run it. I’ve run manual tests on both those pages and they actually pass just fine.

So I’ve marked both of those pages as ‘fixed’ in Google Search Console, and they should clear soon.

Thanks as ever!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Thanks for your WordPress SEO work

by

Thanks for your work.

With regard to the xml file, I would like to manage this via google console. I understand that you have submitted the sitemap, is there any issue with me uploading this directly? I made a few changes to the permalinks this morning as they were still related to the pages that were in the original theme that I didn’t notice before.

Were all of the H-Tags updated as part of the service and are they currently optimised?

Do you have any general feedback on our content? Is there anything we could do to improve the ranking of the site?

Finally, I plan to create area specific area pages for our site. Sometimes, people doing these have a lot of duplicate content. Would that lead to penalties due to the duplication of text?

Thanks for your advice.

Thanks for coming back to me!

Questions are, of course, always welcome.

So…

1)
sitemap.xml

This gets submitted to Search Console but you can’t manage the contents of the file there if that’s what you mean. (Sorry if I’ve misunderstood!)

The current flow for this is that when you add a page, remove a change, edit permalinks etc the sitemap is updated automatically. It also sends a ‘ping’ to Google and Bing letting them know it’s been changed. They then rescan the XML file and update their records accordingly.

So, unless you really need to do something bespoke with the sitemap.xml file you can leave it to do it’s thing. (In all my years I’ve only come across one instance where it needed to be coded manually 0 but perhaps you do have good reason!)

2)
Ah! I didn’t include those in the write-up. Apologies! I did quite a bit of work on your heading tags in the background. The heading tags you had were already appropriate with good keywords to match content, so that was great.

But behind the scenes they were all H2 or H3s. No page had a single H1, which they should. So I worked to change the main heading tag on each page to H1, while also keeping the previous text size and styles.

It’s all as it should be now!

3)
The main thing you could do yourselves would be some kind of blog or news type section. Regular, topical content makes SUCH a difference.

4)
Regarding the area pages technique, you do want to make sure the content is unique enough. If you’re just swapping out area names it’s not going to work. But as long as each page is substantially different it’s a great thing.

My usual recommendation for writing areas pages is this…

Do one day. And write it without looking back at what you wrote on the other ones. You’ll find you’ll naturally include the same information, but in different words.

I hope that helps!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Following the SEO report I do have some questions

by

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

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog