Wordpress SEO Expert

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

Can the description show the Product Short Description

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Hi Peter SEO Expert :),

Hope you’re doing well and having a good summer.

Had this message from a client – is that something you’ve set up? Is it something you control? And is it an okay idea to change as they’ve said?

“We have just noticed that the SEO plugin for our website is using the Additional time and date information for the description. Please can this be changed to pick up the Product Short Description instead.”

Didn’t want to screw up what’s your area of expertise!

Thanks

Thanks!

Having checked it all out I can confirm what I already knew – the SEO work is not sending additional date information.

In fact it’s sending this as the description:
“Working through this material will enable you to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between our organisation and our inspiration.”

That can be seen on line 15 of the page’s code (which you can see in most browsers by going to ‘add source’).

Ideally they’d send a screenshot of what they’re seeing and where that contradicts that.

My suspicion is they’re seeing it in Google. Which would likely be caused by the following:-

If Google thinks a description a website gives them doesn’t match the content of the page sufficiently they will often ignore that and pick their own description from the content of the page. And they suck at that – doing things like picking up date information rather than anything useful.

In this case the content in the description 100% matches text from the ‘Show more detail’ section. However by default that’s behind a click to expand the section (we developers know this as an accordion) which means it doesn’t really count towards SEO nearly as much.

My simplest recommendation would be to have that section expanded by default, so Google sees all that content on page load. It also means those product pages would be getting up to the 300 word mark more often and indexed much better than they are currently.

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

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