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

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

Hi Peter,

Just to let you know that I will be making payment later, and I have been asked by the website guy to let you know to pause the SEO as they are making changes to the content etc.

I am looking forward to seeing how my rankings have increased, way back before I got you on board as my WordPress SEO expert the guy had me down as 49?? So be lovely to see if I am moving up the ladder please.

Can I see how the keywords are ranking and performing in a report?

I guess there’s a few things here.

1)
Pausing the SEO work so often isn’t conducive to getting good results to be honest. Just because content is being changed isn’t usually a reason to pause, in fact it’s best to carry on so I can reprocess the work and strategy as and when it changes.

So for now I’ve paused, but all the stop/starting isn’t the best.

2)
So I did send the end of month report (along with the invoice). That’s for a full month of SEO work I carried out for you. I haven’t shared search rankings specifically yet for statistical reasons. So, I don’t know where you web guy gets his stats from (or why you’d ever just tell someone, ‘you’re in #49’ – what for? Every search query has a different rank.)

I get all my rankings from the horses’ mouth – Google’s official system.

The trouble is they’ve only just started reporting on that for you, and as such the impressions they’re basing it on are quite low – which means some of their rankings they provide for you could be statistically anomalous.

Bear in mind, for a search for something like ‘life coach’ you don’t have a set ranking. Google personalises results – so you and I will see different results when searching for the same thing based on our search histories and location. If I lived near you and did that search I’d see you much higher than if I lived in, say, the USA.

That’s one example. They personalise for 100s of reasons.

So for example right now they report you in #4 overall for that search. And actually that’s based on 89 searched performed which is pretty statistically sound.

But for, say, ‘life coaches near me’ they have you in #1, but based on just 4 searches. 4 isn’t a very large sample to use, so I don’t like to report on it in case when they start including a higher volume it’s shown to have been wildly different.

Below is a screenshot of some of your current search queries they do have data on. The position is your average rank (because it’s an average, some have a single decimal place. But you should round that, so a ranking here of 12.2 is actually just 12 – at the top of the second page.)

Impressions functions as the sample size.

So that’s the data we have to date, but as I say, I’d prefer more figures from Google before I can confidently say “You’re in this ranking for these search keywords.”

I hope that all makes sense!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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 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