Wordpress SEO Expert

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

What SEO gig should I buy?

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Can you let me know what gig I should buy? Keep in mind we haven’t set up GA, GSC, my business or anything so would be good if you can do the end to end setup and onsite.

Do you also do PPC a setup. Eg if I wanted a campaign to run just for one product category?

The best gig to buy would be the £120 one:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

I set up GSC as aprt of my work as standard – but not GA to be honest. Because I focus on organic search, well the best data Google reports on for organic SEO is in Google Search Console. And setting up ‘My Business’ is also a different kettle of fish – and usually includes having to verify your address which really does need to be done by you.

I could set up GA easily enough if you’d like – but not My Business.

I would just need you to send me an email address you use to access Google services (just the address, not the password) and I can happily do that as part of the work, adding you to the accounts.

As for PPC I’m afraid don’t offer it at all. Google Ads usually have a very low ROI, so low in fact that I stopped offering Adwords services myself years ago.

I used to offer it back when Adwords first launched, but the ROI on it is so low every single one of my clients wanted to drop it in favour of more SEO work; so I stopped offering it altogether.

I hope that all helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Our rankings really seems to have fallen

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Hi Peter

Our rankings really seems to have fallen, is this normal?

Also since changing to All in one SEO our homepage title is loading correctly. Could you advise?

Can I ask how you’re testing your ranking please? And also, things are worse than that – all my settings have been removed from the site?! All the meta tags, titles, and general SEO settings too. Was that intentional?

I’d very much like to put them back in if I may. (I keep backups.)

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

We use a system called Rankinty.

Strange, we haven’t changed anything. I did ask our web developers why and they said that maybe Yoast and all in one are conflicting. I did check and I’m pretty sure you deactivated Yoast (from what I can see).

No one our end would have changed anything.

That wouldn’t cause the issue anyway. Both can be activated and have settings in the backend (although that’s awful for the actual SEO settings that get output – but it’s technically possible.)

It looks like a completely ‘fresh’ install of All in One SEO Pack. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say it looks like someone accidentally deleted All In One, realised their error and reinstalled it (not realising that as of about 16 months ago, WordPress doesn’t keep settings for plugins if they’re deleted anymore).

That’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense of it.

Anyway – I just want to double check – you’re happy for me to put all the work back in place?

Peter Mahoney

That is really odd. Could that be why the rankings took a bit of a dive?

Yes if you could please reinstate the work that would be much appreciated.

Another thing I wanted to ask you. How do companies have the below?

Well, there’s a couple of things with the issue of the rankings drop.

The first is I don’t love those third-party systems for reporting on organic search stats. I get all my stats directly from Google and Bing webmaster systems, which are the only official ‘from the horses mouth’ places to get that data.

BUT, having said that – yes, it’s entirely possible the rankings dropped when the SEO work was removed.

I actually blogged about this recently, you can read the post here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/case-study-turning-seo-work-off/

but the short version if removing search engine optimisation rank has a nearly immediate, massively damaging effect on rankings and SEO stats!

I’ll put the work back on for you right away.

As to your query about the ‘sub links’ in search results, those are called ‘site links’, and Google chooses which pages to use itself.

Now, that’s not 100% true – we’re able to say in our sitemap.xml file that certain pages have a greater ‘weighting’ than others, which we have done. (For the top level navigation.)

But we can’t then do anything more than that to influence Google’s choice of site links. They only show them for something like 10% of sites that have all the right setup for them anyway – it’s all down to your overall website SEO and domain authority.

(They actually did use to have an option in their Search Console system to nominate pages they SHOULDN’T include as sitelinks. But that was removed some time ago.)

All we can do to influence them with site links is already done I’m afraid.

Thanks for the above, Peter. Much appreciated.

I run a small design agency

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I run a small design agency and looking for someone to help integrate good SEO practice into the new website for my client.

Someone is working on the messaging and content for the client and I will be working on the front end design and branding. We will probably be going for a WordPress based theme.

I had a few questions:

  • Are there any ongoing monthly fees?
  • Do you integrate Google Search Console?
  • Do you use Yoast or Rankmath?

Would you need more detail about the client/website before getting started?

Look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks.

Thanks for contacting me!

I have a few answers for you…

1)
I do offer an ongoing SEO campaign option – many people are perfectly happy with the one-time overhaul and the fee for that – but clients that really want to commit to SEO (which is hands down the best, cheapest marketing you can do) will usually carry on.

I actually throw in a free month of that service too, so people can see the value first-hand.

2)
Yes, absolutely. Google Search Console is the authoritative place for Google’s organic search statistics. It’s a vital tool for anyone working in SEO.

3)
Actually, I choose the plugin based on several factors with the site itself. Different plugins are best for different websites–the way you’re using pages, posts etc is important in deciding. I don’t have a favourite, I like to look at a site and decide which plugin would be best for it on a case by case basis.

Something I can say though is in about 80% of cases All In One SEO pack ends up being selected.

Additionally)
The best time to engage me is immediately after the site has gone live. That way I can do all the various submission processes alongside the search engine optimisation.

I’m a big believer that all information is good information – so if you wanted to send through more info on the client that would be welcome. But it’s also true the current content I can see I believe gives me more than enough information about her to base the work on.

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Case Study: Turning SEO work off

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I had a client recently who (for reasons exclusively to do with the inexperience of their website’s designer) turned off one of the SEO plugins I had installed and configured for them.

It happened shortly after I carried out an initial SEO overhaul on their site, so gives us a valuable insight into the effect of getting SEO done, and the removing it again.

It’s a very small (and brand new company), but you can see the effects in this graph – taken directly from Google Search Console.

Initially after my work their SEO stats began to shoot up, gaining traction and upward momentum. Immediately after deactivating just one plugin it plummeted back to its original position.

This didn’t use to happen so quickly. If you took SEO work off a site, or just fell behind with updates and changes to best practice, things would trail off over time. It now appears not having the very best SEO at all times leads to an immediate decrease in SEO authority. Because so many website owners (your competitors!) invest in SEO these days it means any time you don’t have it working, they can rise above you in the rankings.

But other SEO professionals have tried the same thing (turning off a single SEO plugin on their own testing sites) and see the same result. The drop is nearly immediate.

Crawled – currently not indexed

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This is a creative use of Google Search Console I’ve come up with for some easy SEO wins

And it’s been working really well on all my testing sites.

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s official stats system for organic search, and has the most useful data about your site’s ranking, visits, clicks, etc.

They changed the interface for it some time ago and keep adding more data in it. One new page will show you all the pages in your site they’ve crawled, but chosen not to include in search results.

So they know about these pages, but don’t think they’re worth including in their results pages. The effect of that is these pages are not actually helping with your SEO at all. From an SEO viewpoint they may as well not be there.

There are two main reasons I’ve found why otherwise useful content is being ignored by Google:

  • It’s just too short
  • It’s not on-topic enough

Your content might just be too short

This is fairly self-explanatory. Unless you’ve got 300+ words of text on a page it will often be ignored.

Your content might not be on-topic enough

The best way to explain this is with an example, let’s think about a digital marketing firm. Perhaps when they started they offered a variety of services from social media content to web development and SEO.

Well now they just focus on the latter. Their homepage is about it, all their services pages are too – but they have old blog posts about their older services.

Google knows what a site’s core service offering is. And things that might fall outside that – either because they’re just off topic or simply old and reflect what a business *used* to be about – they’re likely to get ignored as well.

Re-purpose old content to get it indexed and working for your SEO!

Here’s my recommendation. Have a look through the list of crawled but not indexed pages and see if there are any you can fix.

Doing this myself I found any short pages I fleshed out, or outdated ones I re-tooled to reflect what I’m doing now – every single one got picked up again by Google.

In some cases it was just a matter of adding an extra paragraph to an existing post. That’s not nearly as cumbersome as writing an entirely new one but essentially gets a whole extra page indexed.

Search Engine OptimiSation or Search Engine OptimiZation

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SEO is SEO, but when you’re advertising the different forms of English can get in the way.

I work with people all around the world, but there’s quite a bit more to achieving that than you might think.

Being able to sell services around the world from the comfort of your own office is fantastic. But for those of us with geographically ambiguous spellings it raises a few issues.

I speak (and write) British English – or as we like to call it, just English. So naturally I list my services using that spelling; in this case Search Engine Optimisation. But a large proportion of people around the world will be spelling that last word with a Z rather than an S.

Google’s John Mueller has tried to say it doesn’t make a difference but I rather think he’s over-simplifying the issue.

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1100684747565686784

We can see in Google Search Console variants based on language are reported as different stats. I simply don’t believe Google’s system is allowing different spellings of words interchangeably. Searching for “Search Engine Optimisation” is much more likely to find my site than the American spelling precisely because I use it more often in my text.

There are ways I try to work around this. When I sell my services on specific service marketplaces (like PeoplePerHour) they have the option to include ‘tags’ behind the scenes – users don’t see those but they help support the sites’ fairly rudimentary search functions. So that’s a nice way of making sure I’m found for both spellings there.

But the second part of John Mueller’s reply is the most interesting. Let’s imagine Google did have some magic way of knowing everything all language variations were referring to and would show results regardless of those differences. The meta information displayed isn’t going to change. I could be found for Optimization but the information in front of the user will still say Optimisation.

That slight language difference could put a potential client off.

The better approach would be to allow different meta settings for different languages. But even that is fraught with technical and other issues – really there is just no simple fix for this.

I’ll continue to sell my SEO services around the world, but predominantly to the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Purely for technical reasons – because when it comes to delivering awesome SEO I can do that for anyone, anywhere.

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