Wordpress SEO Expert

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

How much would you charge to SEO lots of sites?

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Thank you for your detailed explanation about the danger of buying links, I really appreciate it. I thought to myself that buying links doesn’t sound like a great idea, but I’m no expert!

So, what would you suggest? Is there a package we can offer my client instead, where we focus on gaining them real, quality backlinks? They’re a big company, so budget is very flexible.

Also, I’ve got a client with 14 websites so far, we’ve worked with them for years and they’ve asked about SEO and the following:

  • Full SEO Audit and SEO Overhaul
  • Keyword Research
  • Google Search Console and SEO Tool Setup
  • Local SEO
  • 20 Keywords
  • Content Optimisation
  • Technical SEO (Robots, XML, Sitemap)
  • Monthly Report

I think they have just got that from an SEO package on Google, but roughly how much would you charge to do this for 14 sites? They’re a restaurant group, so adding new locations and websites every couple of months.

I definitely do the overhauls, local SEO, search console, keyword research, usually up to 12 keywords that I report on (but could do as many as 20*), technical SEO and monthly reports.

I make recommendations for content but don’t make those changes directly.

* = if when they say 20 keywords they mean “we want to be optimised for 20” then I recommend reading this article – because that’s not really how things work anymore:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/how-many-keywords-do-you-include-in-seo-reports/

And in terms of pricing for multiple ongoing sites, how’s this sound (this is the absolutely the lowest I can go, it’s my top tier agency rate). Usually this rate is reserved for people who come to me through my website too, because PPH charges me 20% on all sales which makes it hard to offer this rate here.

But here it is:

SEO overhaul is always £100+VAT
Monthly SEO campaign is usually £100+VAT per site

So essentially, we have a series of units of work that cost £100+VAT each.

With this rate I’d charge the first ongoing unit per month at £100+VAT, then each subsequent one at 25% off: £75+VAT.

So if you have me do two initial overhauls and we’ve got three ongoing clients on the books in a given month, you’d pay:
100 x 2 (for the initial overhauls)
100 x 1 (for the first ongoing client)
75 x2 (for the other two ongoing clients)

= £450+VAT

basically, the first ongoing job in a month is full price, then the rest have the 25% discount.

I’ve probably over-explained that. Let me know what you think!

 

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Do you provide a list of what you’ve done?

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Thanks for that. So the AMP you mention, which I know nothing about, do you install plugins?

And regarding any amendments you make, do you provide a list so I know what has happened?

And do you write targeted descriptions etc? Do you research and ensure they are valid for my brand/content and good for the visitors and ranking?

also I noticed the extra add on for site to load faster, are you able to improve mobile loading speed?

the site is now on a fast server on site ground and I use divi as the theme builder. auto optimise is installed and divi features are on for speed.

btw: yoast is installed

Thanks for coming back to me!

” And regarding any amendments you make, do you provide a list so I know what has happened?”
Mostly. I explain what I did and why, but in general terms. By that I mean I don’t provide a list of every single change to the SEO configurations (I typically make more than 400 in the course of my work) but I will say things like:

Your homepage’s title and other tags were re-written, both to pick up more key terms, but also to conform to the maximum size restrictions to make sure search engines read them ok.

In fact I rewrote these for all your pages.

That sort of thing.

“And do you write targeted descriptions etc? Do you research and ensure they are valid for my brand/content and good for the visitors and ranking?”
Yes, very much so.

“also I noticed the extra add on for site to load faster, are you able to improve mobile loading speed?”
Mobile speed, as in loading time, yes. I don’t worry much about % scores on 3rd party testing sites though – they’re results often aren’t possible/applicable to WordPress anyway. But importantly when Google measures your site for speed, to see if it should get an SEO boost for being fast – they look at the actual loading time in seconds anyway. NOT the % page speed list of possible suggestions.

I hope that all helps!

 

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Fairly common after work questions

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HI Peter

Thanks for doing all that work and I have noticed that when checking the website on a mobile there is no favicon and can you add our logo to be the favicon in the mobile version.

I installed a metor plugin I think a month ago and it seemed to speed up the site but the homepage seems to take a while before it loads fully and is there anything you can do for that?

I have a webmasters account with google where I verified the website and submitted a sitemap and will I download the sitemap and submit to my google account?

How long will the change you have made take to show in google rankings?

Do you think any of the changes could harm any of the current rankings such as, “Roofers”?

Let me know what your price would be for this extra work?

Also noticed the site is down the ranking from where it used to be and for example we were on page 6 for roofer Glasgow search and now we are on page 9?

Thanks Ian – hopefully you saw my write-up of the work completed which answers a few of your queries. 🙂

To the rest of them:

NO FAVICON
 There wasn’t one when I first visited the site – let alone worked on it. So this pre-dates my work. If you’re interested in bespoke work to the site I do have packages available for that – let me know.

SITEMAP
That’s not how those work with Search Console. (Which used to be called Webmaster Tools). I not only submitted the sitemap to be re-scanned, but set up a ‘ping’, so whenever you add a new post or page Google,Bing etc. will be notified.

HOW LONG
Typically 3-7 days, as per my write-up.

CAN CHANGES HURT
No. The existing SEO setup you had was actually very poor, so it was great to be able to improve all that for you.

WHAT’S THE PRICE FOR EXTRA WORK
Ah! Sorry, I’m replying as I go through each thing. So yes, I do offer WordPress support packages, and you can read about those here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-support/

IS THE SITE RANKING BADLY NOW
“Also noticed the site is down the ranking from where it used to be and for example we were on page 6 for roofer search and now we are on page 9?”

Google hasn’t even scanned the site since my work – so any changes you’re seeing aren’t related to it at all. Obviously things will improve once they do.

Out of interest, how do you check your ranking on Google? Do you use a proper system like Google Search Console? Or do you just search for yourself?

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

SEO after changing website content

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My colleague and I have a wish list of changes/updates we want to make to the content on the website. My technical SEO knowledge is limited, but I would like to know when I make changes to the website I am doing it correctly and maximising our SEO potential. With this in mind, I was wondering if you offered perhaps a tutorial session with clients where you can walk me through the key points and answer any question I may have.

I can and do offer that – but as a ‘consultant’ I’m afraid my fees are much higher. ‘Teaching a person to fish’ is awesome, but you’ll never sell them another fish. 🙂

An hour session would cost you £300+VAT for SEO tuition. I do offer discounts for agencies that bring me in for a few days to upskill their SEO teams, but that’s definitely not something you’d need.

Or of course when you’re done I can overhaul the SEO for you for a set £150+VAT.

Personally I recommend the latter. 🙂

Cheers,

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Spam emails to create links to directories

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Hi Peter – whats your view of this from an seo standpoint? It obviously a mass mailshot, but just revisiting this kind of thing:

My name is Anna, I represent a website in the US – one of the world’s leaders in job category websites. Our job search engine gathers vacancies from more than 71 countries and has a number of visitors that is more than 75M monthly.

We would like to provide your company with a non-commercial partnership to promote your site for our users. We will show a banner of your company on our search result pages and make sure to target the right audience. Only the most relevant visitors will see your banner thanks to keywords set up according to your theme. This partnership will help you increase the visibility of your business without paying for advertisements.

In return for our offer, we would kindly ask you to place the link to our site on your website.

So, how does a complimentary non-commercial partnership with us sound? Let me know if you are interested and I will send you some more details.

Cheers – generally speaking I assume those things are spam. Link sharing like that is actually a really old technique, although one that’s becoming popular again as people become desperate to make their directory sites rank well again (Google really started hammering directory sites in 2015).

In this case though I did a little extra research – this one is maximum spam.

While I can’t see their exact stats I can see general trends for them. Most of their visitors come from Russia, and the figures are no where NEAR 75M a monthly.

In fact most of the sites I manage beat them in monthly stats! 🙂

Cheers,

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

WordPress speed & CLS for SEO. Oh yeah, and can you use this audit I paid for?

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We have been looking at your WordPress SEO gig and just wanted to ask some more questions.

We have set up our site and the google console, everything was running smoothly but in the last few days we now have some errors showing in the console.

The current errors showing are:

Mobile – LCP issues longer than 4s
CLS issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)

CLS issue: more than 0.25 (desktop)

If we were to go for any of your packages is this something that you would be able to sort for us? if so can you let us know how many errors you can do as well.

We recently had a site audit performed by someone from Fiverr which had some errors on – if we were to send that to you would you be able to help with that as well?

Thanks for contacting me. I’ll go through each of your SEO questions in turn.

1) SPEED
I wouldn’t be helping in the way you seem to want, no. I do have a speed add-on available with the SEO, but it’s 100% based around making your site load faster, in seconds. I explain why that’s important in more detail here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/problems-with-google-pagespeed-insights/

But the key thing is they’re just giving recommendations – they’re not always possible to resolve (especially on WordPress!).

Also they don’t use those % scores when ranking your site, they look at the real loading time in seconds.

2) CLS
You should get this fixed, but a lot of the time it requires a re-write of your theme. Hopefully it’s something simple though – in about 70% of cases this can be fixed by just turning Lazy Load Images off on your site.

3) WEBSITE SEO AUDIT
Chances are that site audit you paid for was actually just automated generated in about 10 seconds using one of the major software packages that claim to do that. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it! I see people doing this all the time.

Those automatic audits aren’t very good to be honest. They’re riddled with problems, which makes sense when you think about it. All they’re doing is looking at each page and checking for matching strings of code they want to see – totally ignoring site wide SEO, the fact there are usually several ways to approach the same SEO task (they usually just look for one), etc.

They’re certainly no match for a professional with 23 years experience looking at it all manually for you!

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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