Hi Peter. I hope all is well with you?

These are the updates I have had so far on my WordPress search engine optimisation – from my limited input on the errors. Please see attached.

Is there anything else I need to do or do you have any further planned input for the site?

Best regards

Thanks! That first page of the SEO issues you’re raising looks to be a basic automatic SEO scan type thing – I don’t tend to love those – for good reason. 🙂

Most free reports are based on similar software packages (they’re just rebranded).

They’re notoriously out-of-date and behind on SEO best practice. One of the popular ones hasn’t been updated in nearly two years! And the other only recognises one of the three types of H1 tag (for example) that Google recommends.

In your case, every page has an H1. If you view the source code and search for:
<h1

you’ll see it.

Similar situation with the alt tags – the image’s code is highlighted in blue. You’ll see both alt tags and titles tags in there!

The relevant issue in that doc is the ‘Content Wider Than Screen’ issue for mobile usability. There’s actually two, not just one that’s showing as problematic. However, that mobile friendly test is notoriously buggy – Google often won’t load all your scripts when they run it. I’ve run manual tests on both those pages and they actually pass just fine.

So I’ve marked both of those pages as ‘fixed’ in Google Search Console, and they should clear soon.

Thanks as ever!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Thanks for your work.

With regard to the xml file, I would like to manage this via google console. I understand that you have submitted the sitemap, is there any issue with me uploading this directly? I made a few changes to the permalinks this morning as they were still related to the pages that were in the original theme that I didn’t notice before.

Were all of the H-Tags updated as part of the service and are they currently optimised?

Do you have any general feedback on our content? Is there anything we could do to improve the ranking of the site?

Finally, I plan to create area specific area pages for our site. Sometimes, people doing these have a lot of duplicate content. Would that lead to penalties due to the duplication of text?

Thanks for your advice.

Thanks for coming back to me!

Questions are, of course, always welcome.

So…

1)
sitemap.xml

This gets submitted to Search Console but you can’t manage the contents of the file there if that’s what you mean. (Sorry if I’ve misunderstood!)

The current flow for this is that when you add a page, remove a change, edit permalinks etc the sitemap is updated automatically. It also sends a ‘ping’ to Google and Bing letting them know it’s been changed. They then rescan the XML file and update their records accordingly.

So, unless you really need to do something bespoke with the sitemap.xml file you can leave it to do it’s thing. (In all my years I’ve only come across one instance where it needed to be coded manually 0 but perhaps you do have good reason!)

2)
Ah! I didn’t include those in the write-up. Apologies! I did quite a bit of work on your heading tags in the background. The heading tags you had were already appropriate with good keywords to match content, so that was great.

But behind the scenes they were all H2 or H3s. No page had a single H1, which they should. So I worked to change the main heading tag on each page to H1, while also keeping the previous text size and styles.

It’s all as it should be now!

3)
The main thing you could do yourselves would be some kind of blog or news type section. Regular, topical content makes SUCH a difference.

4)
Regarding the area pages technique, you do want to make sure the content is unique enough. If you’re just swapping out area names it’s not going to work. But as long as each page is substantially different it’s a great thing.

My usual recommendation for writing areas pages is this…

Do one day. And write it without looking back at what you wrote on the other ones. You’ll find you’ll naturally include the same information, but in different words.

I hope that helps!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Can you let me know what gig I should buy? Keep in mind we haven’t set up GA, GSC, my business or anything so would be good if you can do the end to end setup and onsite.

Do you also do PPC a setup. Eg if I wanted a campaign to run just for one product category?

The best gig to buy would be the £120 one:
https://petermahoney.net/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

I set up GSC as aprt of my work as standard – but not GA to be honest. Because I focus on organic search, well the best data Google reports on for organic SEO is in Google Search Console. And setting up ‘My Business’ is also a different kettle of fish – and usually includes having to verify your address which really does need to be done by you.

I could set up GA easily enough if you’d like – but not My Business.

I would just need you to send me an email address you use to access Google services (just the address, not the password) and I can happily do that as part of the work, adding you to the accounts.

As for PPC I’m afraid don’t offer it at all. Google Ads usually have a very low ROI, so low in fact that I stopped offering Adwords services myself years ago.

I used to offer it back when Adwords first launched, but the ROI on it is so low every single one of my clients wanted to drop it in favour of more SEO work; so I stopped offering it altogether.

I hope that all helps!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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://petermahoney.net/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.