Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with 24-year experienced SEO professional Peter Mahoney

Don’t just search for yourself!

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This is actually a stock answer I send people pretty often. I’m regularly asked about the difference between where a client sees themselves in rankings, or their friend, kid’s football coach, etc.

You shouldn’t search for yourself as a way to measure your ranking

Google does all kinds of personalisation on your search results (based on your network’s IP address, if you’re logged into any Google accounts, even your location) and the more often you look for your own site, the more skewed those results will be.

To give an example, most people searching for “seo expert peter” see my site on the first page. But I see myself on the fourth. Essentially because I’ve searched for myself so often, but then not spent much time on my site or even bothered to click it, Google has “learnt” that I don’t like it and therefore ranks it down for me, uniquely.

The right place to get Google’s official rank for your site is their Search Console system., which is where I get my stats.

Their stats are actually an ‘average’ of your rank which is the statistically most useful approach. Because of personalisation, not everyone sees your site in the same position. Where someone is searching from geographically for example has an impact. So the average rank is the best indicator of where you rank.

There’s a commonly held belief that if you use a private browsing window somehow you’ll see the proper rankings in the search results. But all that does is prevent Google from knowing your account – they still know where you live, your IP address, in some cases the unique code for your network card – there’s plenty for them to skew your results with.

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. 🙂

BERT is Google’s latest update

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There’s been a number of news stories about the BERT update from Google.

These were followed by a slew of other stories about how the previous ones were misleading.

Let’s explain.

If we go back several years to what was a very big announcement from Google – they turned on something they called RankBrain. At the time it was a new system and approach to search engine optimisation. They were using artificial intelligence to try to read webpages more like a human (actual visitors) would.

It was such a big deal because context suddenly became very important. The days of simply matching how many times you used certain keywords in your content against searches were over – it was crucial to write informative, useful content.

(That seems like a non-brainer anyway – content should always be useful and informative.)

But it was the beginning of the end for the concept of ‘how many keywords you can rank for’, or ‘just say this three times and you’ll rank really highly’.

In the years following Google has made all kinds of similar small updates to improve that system. They’re committed to returning useful well-written, informative results; and they’ve regularly made changes to their algorithm to further that aim.

The BERT SEO update

The BERT update really just pushes that to the next level. ‘Pattern matching’ for specific phrases isn’t enough anymore, not by a long shot.

Fortunately this is all in line with what I’ve been saying for years – don’t just write to specific words (whether they’re ‘long tail’ or something else, the concept of expecting a certain amount of repetition to rock your SEO isn’t valid) – rather write well thought out content that explains what you’re trying to say.

(This is why some of the recent news stories about BERT backtracked about how important it was – because while it is important – it’s just a continuation of the same direction Google’s been going for a long time.)

To give you an example. You’d think the key with my own site is to mention SEO a lot. That’s easy to do – but harder to do in a way that makes it clear to the reader that I’m an authority on the subject, and even harder to impart useful information that might entice people back to my blog.

Simply repeating keywords is essentially keyword stuffing and Google knows it.

My recommendation for writing content hasn’t changed. Write to your audience, not to search engines. If you’re writing an about page then write about what you do and how you help people. Useful, natural words and phrases will come out of that anyway.

Your visitors – and increasingly your search engine ranking – will thank you for it.

Why context matters so much for SEO

As search engines continue to prepare for voice search being used more often (voice searches are usually quite conversational in their wording) context becomes more important.

To give a really basically example, let’s think about a site that may have been a review for a florist. Even if the content said something negative, for example “What a rubbish florist”, previously it would have helped rank for the search query ‘florist’. Increasingly Google can understand the negativity there and is less likely to present that site to someone who clearly wants to find a reputable local florist.

That really is a very basic example, but context is so important.

What needs changing for your WordPress SEO

As a WordPress SEO expert every change and update to SEO algorithms always comes back to the same question, “How does this impact WordPress SEO?” The answer in this case is very little. Unlike structured data or other updates that necessitate coding changes to your site, this really is all about content.

Fortunately WordPress itself is all about content and the ease of editing or creating it – so that’s a real boon. It’s easy to edit your site’s content to make it as contextual, human readable and useful as possible.

But there is no immediate need to jump in add or remove any plugins or systems.

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.

Homepage FAQ structured data to improve your SEO rank

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Using FAQs on your site to get extra traffic from search results

Google loves a good Q&A, and they’re great for your search engine optimisation.

This is an excellent technique that Google has been responding to very positively recently. It involves a fairly interesting type of structured data.

Structured data is a series of tags and what’s known as microdata that Google, Bing and Yahoo all use to work out what content on your site matches specific, common types of information like phone numbers. It primarily sits in your pages’ code – it’s not something the user sees directly. Although in the case of FAQs you do want them to be able to see them as well – that way your front-end information matches what’s happening behind the scenes. Google definitely wants to see that the information you’re supplying them is also what you’re giving to your users.

You may have noticed little ‘People also ask’ click-to-open sections like this on Google results pages before:

Those questions and answers are being pulled from web pages with ‘FAQ’ structured data on their homepages.

This technique involves adding an FAQ section to your own homepage, and then having the appropriate code added to those so Google can pick them up correctly.

I’ve tried this with a handful of clients and most have seen a 3-4 ranking place increase as a result! Even if Google doesn’t end up using your FAQs on their results page, the effect is the same; they just like to see the code in place.

So this is well worth implementing as part of your SEO strategy.

When writing FAQs for this purpose though it’s best to make them somewhat generic – they should be about your industry generally rather than about your specific offering. (If you take a look at the ones I wrote on my own homepage, you’ll see they’re predominantly about SEO and it’s advantages rather than being about the services I offer myself.)

If you’d like me to implement this for you please just get in touch – and of course I can do it all for you as part of an ongoing SEO campaign too.

There are still plenty of SEO cowboys out there

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I’m regularly amazed at the poor quality of SEO work I come across daily.

And the attitude of the cowboys that do it is just shocking.

I recently had an exchange with a potential SEO client. At least they thought they were a potential client.

Before I begin I should point out about 70% of my work is for digital marketing agencies who on-sell my work to their clients. I’m more than happy to do that – but it’s incredible how many people try to take the piss.

Perhaps every other week I have an order come through for a marketing agency that sells SEO work – who want me to SEO their own site but not their clients’! They don’t have enough knowledge, experience or confidence to SEO their own site – but they’ll happily charge people to do shoddy work for them.

This recent exchange I had wasn’t even that honest about the intent though – it was from someone who said they were just an ordinary client, but betrayed themselves with a few key phrases I’ve become very au fait with:
I don’t have time for this one = “I charge people for SEO myself but for one reason or another can’t do this one. Probably because I don’t know how to deliver quality search engine optimisation.”
If I order now, can you do it this afternoon (asked at 3pm) = “Not only do I have no idea how long decent WordPress SEO takes, but I’m kinda of pushy and rude too.”

Towards the end of the exchange I had the question that guarantees I’m talking to a cowboy:
I need 500+ backlinks too.

Also, presumably, by 5pm that day. 🙂

It’s no secret I strongly dislike the industry that’s cropped up around the automatic creation of backlinks. I blog about it a lot – but the short version is Google says it’s against their rules and they actively try to find and penalise sites that do it.

I replied with a link to one of my posts on the subject, thinking there was still a chance I was talking with someone genuinely interested in proper white-hat SEO. Then I got this reply.

All SEOs use techniques that google ideally would not want you to use because they work, right? At the end of the day, google’s ranking process is just an algorithm. The recent planned Google updates for Links coming in march 2020 may help clean up link building but SEOs will still find holes in the algorithm.

The clients you work with surly (sic) care more about results than a multi-billionaire business algorithm and how well you follow these guidelines?

That’s just a small part of it. There were 20+ other questions demanding I prove all manner of things about SEO and the correct approach to it. In and of itself that’s not a problem (I like to respond to questions to help people wherever I can) but it was all just so aggressively defensive.

I replied as honestly and directly as I could.

I don’t think we’re going to be a good fit together.

The whole idea that
All SEOs use techniques that google ideally would not want you to use because they work, right?

isn’t in line with my or Google’s ethos. Or what’s considered best practice in the industry.

Grey and blackhat techniques might work for a while, but never in the long term. And my clients are interested in long term success, not quick wins that end up hurting them when Google adjusts their systems accordingly. When you do SEO properly you’ll find Google algorithm updates actually IMPROVE ranking.

To be really honest you seem to be defending what could best be described as a cowboy approach. And that sort of SEO tends to lead to algorithm changes harming ranking rather than helping.

So while I do genuinely wish you all the best for the future, I hope you’ll understand that I’m not interested in working with you. We clearly have very different ideas of what good SEO is.

It’s certainly not the most diplomatic response I’ve ever sent. But if someone is going to suggest my clients want short-lived gains that come at the cost of massive penalties later I feel like they’re being insulted. Good SEO (like good business) looks for long-term solutions.

The bit where I did try to be diplomatic was that last line.

We clearly have very different ideas of what good SEO is.

Because search engine optimisation is not about a personal belief or idea about what you want it to be. It is based on an algorithm – a predictable one. There’s evidence to show what works and what doesn’t. Why would you ever do anything except the very best approach?

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