Wordpress SEO Expert

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

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?

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.

Mobile speed is very important for SEO

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We’ve known for a long time that how fast your site loads is important for SEO.

Google have increased the importance of your website’s mobile speed when working out where to rank it.

It’s been true for a while that there’s been some small impact on your ranking based on mobile speed (desktop speed has been important for years) but now that’s been ramped up.

The most important metrics they use remain the sort of SEO work I do in the code and the quality of your content – but when those things are being looked after mobile speed is where you should turn your attention.

Unfortunately the automated tests out there tend to be a bit alarmist (I blogged about that recently) but they can still serve as a reminder that there’s nearly always room for improvement.

WordPress certainly has its issues with speed. And most themes are still being built for desktop-first (meaning how it looks on a desktop computer is the primary concern, and then it’s cut down and limited for mobile) when in fact current standards are clear that mobile-first should be the designers focus.

Be aware that although the testing systems are imperfect, and WordPress is very hard to score upwards of 80% with on most systems – the faster your site is the better.

In fact, mobile speed is now more important than desktop speed as a ranking metric for Google.

As a general piece of advice, my favourite tool for testing a site’s overall speed (not mobile specific) is Pingdom.

They give you a list of different servers to choose from; so it’s easier to get a real-world figure for your loading time in seconds – just like your target market will see it. Choose the nearest server to your primary audience, et voila.

(Although none of the online speed testing tools are perfect, Pingdom has a lot of useful features.)

Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights

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Google PageSpeed Insights has become a tad problematic of late.

Firstly, Google PageSpeed is just a list of code changes that might improve your website’s speed. In most cases trying to do everything they list would simple break a WordPress website – it’s usually a matter of having to try lots or permutations of speed settings to see which scores best. So for example with a lot of themes if you minify javascript and defer scripts it it’ll break things, so we have to choose between those.

It’s also true that when Google actually uses speed as a metric for your SEO ranking, they’re looking at the actual load time for the site as opposed to how it measures on the PageSpeed metric.

To give you an idea of why the % scores aren’t a great measure, let’s consider browser caching. We can’t change whether other domains have it or not. So if you reference any other scripts in your site, for example Facebook, we can’t affect that. And you’ll still fail for the ‘browser caching’ section – even though it might already be applied to all your own scripts.

It’s a great irony of PageSpeed that having Google Analytics installed on a site always costs it a few % points, for the same reason. You’d think Google could do better with their own systems.

Google also changed the way they display results recently and it’s made their reports far less useful for the majority of sites out there. They recommend you ‘Serve images in next-gen formats’, even though there’s a lack of cross-browser compatibility for them. (Yes, you can set things up with a fall back so if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support JPG 2000 it will show another image instead – but as yet this isn’t something you’ll find commonly in WordPress themes. In fact I’m not sure it’s in any.)

So suddenly this testing tool is giving biased advice – guess which browser has full compatibility with next generation image formats? Google Chrome.

Like most Google reporting, PageSpeed does give a good idea of possible things to investigate but it’s not worth getting so hung up on you stop focusing on your content creation.

I love a good new year

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Welcome to 2018!

I don’t usually do resolutions or anything like that, but as this site is now a few years old it makes sense to resolve to make myself a new one.

It might take a bit longer than usual because I’ll be doing it all with a “static site generator”, which is simply a useful way to generate sites that don’t have really advanced features, like e-commerce. But it allows for blindingly fast sites (in fact they load about 4x faster than a WordPress site!) so is a good direction to head in.

Of course if you want a new website for 2018, or just to make sure your existing one gets as many visitors as possible, let me know.

I’ll be here all year.

 

Google Apps is now called G Suite

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Google Apps (used for business email, file sharing, calendaring etc.) is now rebranded as G Suite.

Which sounds like a bad mid-90s R&B group. (Try as I might, I can’t forget “Rappin’ 4-Tay”.)*

In their official blog post, Google said this is more in keeping more with their mission to provide a series of tools businesses use to further their own purposes. Basically rather than a series of individual applications coming together they see it as a stock set of tools within one Google system.

Fair enough.

Google Apps proved to be an invaluable tools for companies, schools and universities, and I do hope G Suite continues to build on and improve those systems.

But I do have one niggling concern in the back of my mind. Google Apps used to be free for small firms, then overnight all new accounts were subject to a subscription fee. Existing free accounts continued to run with charge – but any change to Apps brings a fear they might start to charge for those grandfathered accounts.

And with a change this big, well – Google Apps keep free accounts, but will G Suite?

Read the original Google blog post
*Although I thought of making this joke myself, I wasn’t the first, so credit goes here

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