Wordpress SEO Expert

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

SEO doesn’t shouldn’t your site’s front-end

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On my SEO Emails section (where I share helpful responses to commonly asked queries) I recently shared a not uncommon occurrence, where a site owner gets the SEO work delivered and then blames the work for causing problems with the front-end of the site.

It’s actually very rare for that to happen. On-site SEO has two main components:

  1. site wide SEO work. For example, default settings for social sharing, sitemaps, robots.txt files, all manner of things.
  2. page specific work. This includes title and description tags, social sharing meta tags, image alt and title tags, things like that.

When clients do suggest that SEO has somehow changed their site’s layout or display, it’s usually related (to their mind) related to that second part, that certain pages don’t show like they should, or used to, etc.

But the information output there is all very standard. Title tags are ubiquitous, descriptions, social tags and the like are all just meta content. They live in the head of the page’s code – meta head tags of this nature are there to be read by search engines and browsers – they don’t impact the display or front-end of the site at all.

And image tags like alt and title tags are added to the code that makes an image display – it was showing anyway, so again there’s no change to how the page looks.

So what’s going on? Why do clients occasionally worry search engine optimisation work has impacted how visitors will see their site?

Quite simply – and when you think about it this makes perfect sense – the problem were already there. A lot of website owners don’t check their site thoroughly regularly. They might just preview new blog posts, or see the homepage fairly often. So they’re not always going to notice errors.

But after paying an SEO professional for a service as vital as organic search marketing, or indeed paying any web developer for a service, they’re much more likely to flick through their site to see if anything has happened to it.

And that’s when they notice the historical problems.

Fortunately from my perspective as an SEO expert who works in this field full-time there are ways to illustrate that. Google has a recent cache of the last time they scanned a page (so as long as that’s not been updated in the meantime, it can be used to show the problem existed before any SEO work was done) and the Wayback Machine (from the Internet Archive) can fulfill the same role.

So it’s usually fairly easy to prove.

When I complete an SEO task for a new client I usually get a great big thank you in my inbox. But when something like this happens the email will usually be quite accusatory and aggressive, not allowing for the the possibility something else could have caused the problem – even quite a long time ago.

I suppose the moral of the story is quite simple. Website owners, keep an eye on your websites and make sure they work. This is important for a whole host of reasons; I really recommend checking your contact forms work too. My SEO work brings extra visitors (consistently) but if they can’t get in touch with you because something isn’t working it’s a tragedy. And if you do notice a problem be open to a variety of causes and reasons before placing blame. (Quite often problems with sites are caused by updating your theme, plugins, the WordPress core – those things can even auto-update which means you might not even know there’s been a change).

From my end of things I’ll keep doing my best to explain things to anyone with a question, matter-of-factly and politely, knowing full well when someone else is wrong it’s simply because they didn’t know something.

And who could blame someone for that?

Website display problems after SEO work?

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Thanks for doing the SEO work. However, I noticed several unwanted changes throughout the site as follows:

  • There solid wide green line that runs through the top of the site, horizontally, and usually contains the page heading or some introductory text. There used to be a one line space underneath it before the main text begins – this has disappeared on nearly all pages. Please can you replace the one line space throughout the site – thanks.

Three other errors I have noticed so far:

  • On the meet the team page the order of people has changed.
  • On the services page – the order of services has changed.
  • On the front page the click through on the 4 orange buttons now leads to a 404 notice.

Peter, these mistakes are obviously a bit disappointing as I’ve just had to spend an hour going through the site checking on it. However, I realise mistakes can slip through so I’d be grateful if you could sort them as soon as you can.

Many thanks.

This is all a bit awkward – but actually my work didn’t affect this at all. In fact it can’t – it’s impossible for this work to impact the display of the site (the overwhelming changes it makes is in to ‘head’ section of a pages code which doesn’t impact layout. The only other things on a page are to add ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags to the images on the site – which again doesn’t affect the display.

I do get asked this sort of thing maybe once a year. Typically it’s because people don’t always check their own websites very often – it’s only when they pay for work they look through it and find issues that in fact pre-date the work they’ve just had done. 🙂

Now, I’m not saying 100% that’s the issue, maybe something else in your theme, WordPress core, or a plugin coincidentally was updated (which can be an automatic process) recently.

I’m very au fait with WordPress, having been developing for it even before it was called WordPress. So no doubt I can help, but this is all unrelated to my work.

To help demonstrate that I’ve temporarily turned OFF everything I did. You’ll see the lack of white space is still on all your pages. I can probably fix that with a bit of CSS code for you – but again I can’t say this enough…it’s not related to my SEO work.

On the services page – the order of services has changed.
Looking at that for you, it seems the order has been reversed. Which suggests some programmatic error (in the code somehow).

It took a while to find the problem here. But ultimately in your theme is a file called:
template-parts/content-page-services.php

That’s what places those 6x services on the site. I had to edit that code to tell it to flip the order of the sections. Obviously this is not something I had any cause to touch during my work.

Now this doesn’t mean someone necessarily changed something in this template file – more likely a recent theme update caused the way it works to change and this code needed changing nto br brought in line with that.

One thing I can’t replicate though is the issue with the homepage orange buttons not working. They always worked for me, and still do? (Both when logged in, and not logged in using a private browsing window.)

Please do get back to me asap – as I say I’ve turned my work off currently so you can see it’s not changed the lack of white space at all.

But I was fortunately able to (over about 45 minutes) find and fix those issues with the ordering.

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO & Speed

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Right, this is an interesting one. It’s technical, but has a very simple main recommendation (in large text, below).

Google has started to include something they’re calling CLS in their ranking metrics.

Essentially it means ‘how long before elements loading on the site stop moving around’, and their target is just 0.25 seconds.

If things move around as your page loads for longer than that it’ll get a warning in their system. (This isn’t general loading time, just a very specific part of how a site loads.)

Think about when a website loads, the first thing it does is load the layout – where the menu is, where images will go, text, etc. That’s the elements they’re talking about.

It’s fine for a image to take longer to load, as long as the space it will take is already reserved for it when it DOES load. To be honest most of this happens so quickly you can’t even see it.

But there is one very common thing lots of sites have turned on that means layout changes happen long after a page is loaded – and that’s “lazy load” for images.

Lazy Load was a great technique when it became popular a decade ago. It meant images didn’t load on a page until the browser needed to se them. If an image was at the bottom of a page, and the user wouldn’t see it in the browser until they scrolled down, it waited until it needed to load it to do so.

But when that happens, it moves elements on the page around accordingly to make space for the image – and therefore will always fail the CLS test Google does for all sites and pages.

So ironically something that used to be recommended to help a page load faster is now a problem for passing loading time tests!

Personally I’ve not used Lazy load for years (in most cases it was unclear if the speed enhancement it brought was actually better than the extra Javascript it needed to work) – but now my recommendation to all website owners is clear:

If you use Lazy Load, turn it off.

Is there the option for meta titles to be adjusted for some pages?

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I was going to ask further to you setting the meta title to default to the page name, is there the option for meta titles to be adjusted for some pages. Currently there is no editor function to do this. Being able to add a sales message helps the page to stand out and get more clicks. What is your view on this?

You can actually type anything in the All In One title box for a page or post and it will use that instead.

It will still append ” | Your Business Name” to the end though.

Do bear in mind that there’s a trade-off here in some regards. Google definitely prefers to see the title tag match the title of the article/page. There is some wiggle room, but as much as possible it should match, or at least have lots of the same words as the page title (ideally in the same order, you get the idea – they prefer it match).

Now that might not always be best to entice users to click on a search result. Absolutely.

So sometimes it might be best that they are different. But if they’re TOO different the page might not rank as well, losing potential visitors in the first place.

My question would be this – is there a reason the page’s title isn’t the same as the text you believe will entice clicks in the first place? If they’re changed to that then the page’s title and the title meta tag match, you get the clicks and Google is happy too.

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

I have an SEO client with several websites

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I do have an SEO client that is keen to start but I need your advice on it first. It’s a restaurant business with a few locations. So they have separate 1 page websites for each location and also a group website – so 4 sites in total!

What is the most effective and efficient way to boost their SEO??! They’ve obviously been hit hard financially over the past 6 months and have asked me to help them build their online presence.

Your challenge, should you wish to accept, is… what is the best SEO strategy for them? Should we focus on one site and push out from there? Do all sites need separate focus?

I’d like your services on this account on an ongoing monthly basis, but as mentioned, for now I need to find the most cost effective solution for them.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yes, so there’s a few options here. In a perfect world I’d SEO all four of them, and do campaigns on them all too. But obviously the budgetary constraints and the pandemic make this unlikely.

The lower end of things would be to have me just SEO and work in an ongoing capacity on one site.

I would propose a middle ground. That I do an initial SEO overhaul on them all (I’ll do 4 for the price of 3) and then choose one for an ongoing campaign. The one I would choose wouldn’t be the group site actually (simply because there’s not a lot on it, and also doing one of the locations might help prove to them the value of having other locations engage in a campaign too.)

Perhaps the main location one would be a good site to start an ongoing SEO campaign on.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

SEO experts are expert at SEO

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Hope you are well.

We have just had one of our tech guys do something on the backend of the GRV site and they mentioned the following:

It looks like the site was running Yoast SEO and this has been removed and replaced with All In One SEO plugin. I would advise that this is changed back, as Yoast SEO is a much better plugin for SEO. The site also seems to be running a lot of unused plugins, so needs a proper tidy up. Plus a number of other SEO issues in regards to indexibility, etc.

Is this something that you are able to do or is there a reason that this is like it is?

This is a classic case of it’s best to leave the specialist function to the specialist. 🙂

Different WordPress SEO plugins are best in different circumstances — the way the site uses pages, products, posts etc. is important in choosing. I don’t have a personal affinity to any of them; I look at a website and decide which SEO plugin would be better on a case-by-case basis.

We discussed this back when I first worked on the site actually. Also the proof is in the pudding, the SEO setup I’ve provided and have been working on is very successful, as demonstrated in the stats.

The idea that ‘one plugin is always best’ really just shows someone’s read a couple of (often sponsored) blog posts but doesn’t deal with the actual intricacies of SEO.

As you know, my work is considered, data driven and each site is given it’s own strategy.

He did mention there’s a lot of plugins generally on the site that aren’t being used – I do agree that should be looked at. It’s not SEO related of course…but also as they tech person it would be his job to be managing unneeded plugins for you I imagine.

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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