Wordpress SEO Expert

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

I am a small electrical company with poor SEO

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I am a small electrical company with a poor online presence.

I have a WordPress website which I am looking to renovate along side some SEO and PPC. Additionally I need to look at social media as a platform to show case information and projects.

I am looking for long term business relationships with continues growth. We want a proactive partner who can explain when and how to scale these campaigns to offer similar returns of investment.

You look credible and i wanted to reach out.

I’ve had a look at the current SEO setup and there’s definitely room for improvement. 🙂

Currently (for example) the homepage description code says:
“Looking for an honest, reliable, professional Electrician in the London or Surrey area? Visit our website for more information.”

There are a few rules that doesn’t conform to. You have two commas which is okay, albeit the maximum. There’s a question in there which is considered a no-no.

But most importantly, the only three words in there that actually get searched for are:

  • Electrician
  • London
  • Surrey

and only one of those relates to your actual service!

So I can absolutely help with your SEO.

You talked about renovating the site – if you mean you want a new design made that is something I can help with – but it would involve making a new site from scratch. (Obviously I do extensive SEO work, but I don’t make bespoke layout or design changes to existing sites I’m afraid.)

I also don’t work with PPC or social media. I used to, but year’s ago decided to hone my offering to the service that overwhelmingly delivers clients the best return on their investment – search engine optimisation.

Just a bit more on my SEO campaign offering. You can read more about it here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

I do usually recommend clients buy and work with me on the initial full expert WordPress SEO overhaul first though:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

So they can be sure they enjoy working with me.

I hope that’s all helpful!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

AMP & Speed for WordPress SEO

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Hi Peter

Could I ask for a bit of advice…is there anything you know we can do to improve mobile speed fairly easily? A client of ours has noted a few reports which seem to flag up the site being slow (or poor) on mobile?

I think you may have installed the AMP plugin on other sites, is that the sort of thing I should be doing?
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/amp/

I will also be switching this site over to be hosted on WPEngine which I hope will help.

WPEngine is better than most for speed.

The ultimate hosting solution for speed though is to use SpinupWP on a UK-based Digital Ocean droplet. That’s where I host my clients and it flies.

AMP is definitely a good idea – but does require some testing. You want to have it turned on for as many types of posts (pages, posts, portfolio, etc.) as possible – but very often that will cause display issues on those data types. So it takes a bit of testing and finessing.

Speed wise I recommend (and can deploy for you) the WP Rocket plugin.

Bear in mind though those speed tests can be a test problematic where they give % scores. Here’s some more information on that:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/problems-with-google-pagespeed-insights/

Cheers!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

What are my search rankings please?

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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

How many keywords do you include in SEO reports?

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I know in your monthly WordPress SEO reports you include statistics for clicks from search engines, the number times my site was seen in search engines – and of course search rankings. I note you include up to 12 rankings for different search queries – do you have different packages and options for that?

Do you only track 12 regardless of what package someone is on?

Ah! I thought we discussed this before, but perhaps not.

Have a read here about keywords:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

The key thing there is ANY words in your site can (and are!) picked up for ranking.

So my work doesn’t just ‘target’ 12 queries. And it never has. I’m targeting every area, every service, and more things besides.

I simply TRACK just 12. I settled on that for a variety of reasons, from the amount of time it takes to track and report on them to requests from my clients – when I’ve experimented with say, the top 50 I found people stopped engaging with the reports (and therefore their own SEO) as much.

So my recommendation is to pick a spread of terms you want to rank for, so that we can see the general site-wide trend over time. Not just to focus on the core things you want to rank for.

If you’d like me to come up with a bespoke reporting package for you though which does track every permutation you might like I can – I’ll just need to adjust the price accordingly.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Ongoing WordPress SEO monthly & product review stars

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Just thinking about the next stage for my WordPress SEO and how your expertise can help with that to get more visitors to the site. I know you’re something of a WordPress SEO expert. 🙂

I’m about to start adding/writing copy to each product I’m adding to the site.

I know you’ve set everything up for me already, but I’m wondering what I would need to do when writing to ensure results from my site move up to the top of the results when people search for particular products? Would it just be ensuring I reference key search terms in each short description?

And how might I integrate star ratings into my results in SERPs?

Happy to pay for additional work, I just need to understand what is achievable – so I ask for your patience as I try and cement my learning/reading

Rightio… so from my perspective the next stage really would be to engage in an regular SEO campaign with me.

Short, free advice to your queries though would be…

Would it just be ensuring I reference key search terms in each short description?
Yes, that’s important. Also try to make sure the name of the cheese appears on the page itself 3x.

How might I integrate star ratings into my results in SERPs?
Reviews are based on a couple of different possibilities.

They’re supplied from structured data (special code) which can be generated either:

  • Manually, with manual code places in each page. This though is time consuming.
  • Sites that use an ecommerce product plugin, like Woocommerce, can turn it on relatively easily. It would pull them from the reviews people leave on your site – because you do have Woocommerce.

So that latter one seems the best option. Also, including this structured data usually gives a bit of an improvement to your SEO generally. But bear in mind that just because you have the code doesn’t mean Google will definitely show star ratings in your search results.

Ultimately that’s up to them.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Just got a couple of WordPress SEO questions

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Hi Peter, that was fast work. Just got a couple of questions.

  1. How do i set keywords for each post using all in one SEO?
  2. I noticed that since moving to all in one SEO a lot of my posts are missing the meta description.
  3. Can you make it to target the US audience?

I believe that is it at the moment having a quick look around.

Yes, I’m trying to get SEO jobs as quickly as possible at the moment. Particular in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lock-downs – digital marketing has never been more important.

Questions are, of course, always welcome.

1)
‘Keywords’ is a bit of a loaded term to be honest.
I wrote a basic primer on the subject which became a very popular post:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

But the specific answer is I presume you’re talking about meta keyword tags? They haven’t been used in well over a decade – heck, we’re talking nearly two in some cases at this point! Back in 2009 Google blogged about how they didn’t (and never had) used those tags:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Bing actually never used keyword tags, and Yahoo stopped reading them at all about ten years ago.

In fact the plugin you used to use, Yoast, does have an option to turn on meta keyword tags, but it comes with a message: “I can’t think of any reason you’d want to do this.” 🙂

There’s actually evidence that suggests using them can harm your ranking, on Bing at least. Because it looks a lot like you’re relying on outdated techniques which of course isn’t ideal.

2)
Can you please double check that? I’ve just checked and it appears they’re all there…hopefully this was just a caching or some other issue with your host and what you were able to see in the SEO settings?

One thing I noticed is a lot of them (if not more!) were just copy and pastes of the first line or two from the blog post anyway. There’s no need to manually set that anymore – All In One SEO pack is set up to do that automatically. You won’t see it in the editor, but if if you look at the live code for a page all the meta tags will be in there, based on that schema.

3)
Done! I’ve set the country target to the USA.

As to the monthly SEO, you can see the details of that here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

Thanks again!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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