Wordpress SEO Expert

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

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.

SEO for plumbing & heating business

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Hi Peter,

Thanks for your prompt professional service, appreciated and will wait to see how the changes impact the site. I would also like to take you up on the one month free SEO campaign and can you also let me know how much it would be monthly after that.

I also have the AdWords campaign but looking to pause this for a couple of months or so, to see what enquires are coming from where as. It to bothered if it doesn’t generate much revenue for a few months.

Also is there any stats showing current ranking for keywords i.e like a report that I could compare to next month etc?

I also have a plumbing & heating business, would you be able to look at that website and see if it’s worth running some additional SEO or OK to leave like it is with some Google AdWords like we are doing at the moment?

Thanks!

I’ll carry on with that free month for you.

If you want to carry on afterwards the price here via PPH is just £100+VAT a month. You can read more about the service here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/ongoing-wordpress-support/

I’ll send through a thorough SEO report at the end of the month for you.

I can certainly SEO the plumbing site too – it looks like most of the SEO setup relies on the outdated ‘keyword meta tag’, which hasn’t really done anything for nearly 20 years. (Google never used it, nor Bing, and Yahoo stopped 12 years ago. In fact there’s evidence to suggest Bing might even penalise sites for using it!)

I do recommend SEO over Adwords if you have to choose between the two. SEO obviously can take a wee while to build but the ROI always ends up beating out an expensive PPC campaign.

I hope that helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

One category has no SEO meta information typed in?

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Hi Peter

Since you did your work on this page the writing at the side of the picture has disappeared? And I notice on one category of pages there’s no SEO meta information typed in?

Thanks for coming back to me – questions are of course always welcome!

I’ll reply to each in turn.

1. I notice on one category of pages there’s no SEO meta information typed in?

Correct! Those 4x pages are ones I left to load the tags from the content on page-load. They fit the criteria for that well, the content is strong from the outset. Plus it means those pages give is a 100% relevancy rating, which is one of Google’s top metrics. By having several pages with the 100% relevancy it gives us extra leeway on the other pages to make them keyword rich in the tags without triggering any relevancy-warnings from Google.

2. Since you did your work on this page the writing at the side of the picture has disappeared?

I had noted that too, and made a note of it when I first looked at the site. It pre-dates me (it’s not uncommon for people to bring me sites with the odd problem, usually they already know about it so I don’t often bring it up.)

As a test to demonstrate that I quickly just removed all my work, by turning off the plugins:

  • All In One SEO pack
  • AMP
  • PB SEO Friendly Images

and the problem persisted. Feel free to give it ago yourself!

I can see that page uses a specific WordPress theme template – I wonder if that’s been changed? Or perhaps the theme or WordPress was updated recently, and it means some part of the custom template no longer works?

I do note that template file tries to bring in the WordPress page content with the function:
the_content

while other custom templates you have bring it in with the slightly different:
get_the_content

I’m not sure if that might help steer your investigations?

But yes, that issue isn’t related to the work I did at all.

Have you made any other updates over the past few days? To the theme, or WordPress itself?

Actually, I had a good look through the template file and fixed it.

I can’t say why or when it happened (I don’t touch templates as part of my SEO of course!) but that template file didn’t have the WordPress code to relate it to the post, so it couldn’t grab the content.

I added that in, et voila!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

I would like my WordPress site to rank more organically

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Hope you’re well.

I have an adult product site that has been running for a few months and we are using a Google AdWords campaign to get traffic to it, but even though you do get some sales, I would ideally like it to rank more organically. Could you possibly have a quick look and send me some recommendations and cost so that i can start a campaign to get it more popular?

Thanks for your time!

Thanks for contacting me.

I would recommend having me overhaul your SEO ASAP actually. I don’t often say that, but the combination of your theme and the current SEO plugin means it’s outputting SEO not about your site, but them theme!

For example the homepage description is:
“Shoptimizer is a fast and light-weight new WooCommerce theme from CommerceGurus. Built to best practices and focused on both speed and conversions.”

In fact if you look at the below image you’ll see Google is picking that up and showing it in search results!

I’d love to sort all this out and take care of it for you.

Proper, Google-friendly SEO will eventually have a much higher ROI than AdWords anyway.

Longer term SEO is absolutely the best, most cost-effective digital marketing (or to my mind any form of marketing) you can do.

But putting that to one side, right now your settings are going to be seriously hurting your SEO.

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Should I get you involved now or after launch?

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I am about to launch a landing page on my website for a new online business. I have a hair salon and will be selling haircolour kits off of website and social media. I have just written the copy. Would now be the time to get you involved or would it be after I launch?

Thanks for contacting me!

And congratulations for getting the new landing page up.

The best time to get me involved with your SEO is actually right after the site goes live. That way when I do the work I can do it all:

  • Keyword research
  • Devise the best strategy
  • Deploy all the SEO and related settings on the site
  • Do all the search engine submissions work (including sending the sitemap to them, pages, etc.)

I do from time to time get involved earlier though if a client really wants. The way I manage that is I do everything except that final step, and we wrap the job up when I’ve done all I can at that stage.

But when they do put the site live they just let me know and I jump back in to do the Google, Bing and other search engines work – obviously without any further charge.

I hope that helps!

So the short version would be – after it’s live is best. But I can work on your site’s SEO earlier if you’d really like.

I hope that helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

I’m starting a small business and checking out SEO options

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I’m thinking of starting a small business and I’m in the process of checking out SEO options.

As you are so highly recommended I thought I would try here first.

My question is if I created a Wix website could you help me in anyway on the SEO front?

Thanks

Thanks for contacting me!

I can do Wix SEO, absolutely. But there’s some important notes to consider if you’ve not already chosen the content management system you’ll be using.

Quite simply (and despite what they might say) Wix doesn’t offer anything like the range of SEO configurations that WordPress does.

Their SEO options are very limited.

As such, while I can technically SEO your site, a Wix site simply isn’t going to be able to compete in search results with a well SEO’d WordPress based competitor’s site.

It would still be better to have all the SEO you can get on it, but really I always recommend WordPress for anyone seriously looking to make the most of organic search ranking.

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

 

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