SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

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

  • SEO Overhaul
  • SEO Campaign
  • WP Support
  • Blog
    • SEO Emails
  • Praise

Fairly common after work questions

May 22, 2022 by Peter Mahoney

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://petermahoney.net/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 & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Filed Under: Google Search Console, SEO Emails, Website Speed, Wordpress

SEO after changing website content

January 17, 2022 by Peter Mahoney

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 & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Wordpress

Spam emails to create links to directories

October 19, 2021 by Peter Mahoney

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 & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Wordpress

WordPress speed & CLS for SEO. Oh yeah, and can you use this audit I paid for?

February 24, 2021 by Peter Mahoney

We have been looking at your WordPress SEO gig and just wanted to ask some more questions.

We have set up our site and the google console, everything was running smoothly but in the last few days we now have some errors showing in the console.

The current errors showing are:

Mobile – LCP issues longer than 4s
CLS issue: more than 0.25 (mobile)

CLS issue: more than 0.25 (desktop)

If we were to go for any of your packages is this something that you would be able to sort for us? if so can you let us know how many errors you can do as well.

We recently had a site audit performed by someone from Fiverr which had some errors on – if we were to send that to you would you be able to help with that as well?

Thanks for contacting me. I’ll go through each of your SEO questions in turn.

1) SPEED
I wouldn’t be helping in the way you seem to want, no. I do have a speed add-on available with the SEO, but it’s 100% based around making your site load faster, in seconds. I explain why that’s important in more detail here:
https://petermahoney.net/problems-with-google-pagespeed-insights/

But the key thing is they’re just giving recommendations – they’re not always possible to resolve (especially on WordPress!).

Also they don’t use those % scores when ranking your site, they look at the real loading time in seconds.

2) CLS
You should get this fixed, but a lot of the time it requires a re-write of your theme. Hopefully it’s something simple though – in about 70% of cases this can be fixed by just turning Lazy Load Images off on your site.

3) WEBSITE SEO AUDIT
Chances are that site audit you paid for was actually just automated generated in about 10 seconds using one of the major software packages that claim to do that. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it! I see people doing this all the time.

Those automatic audits aren’t very good to be honest. They’re riddled with problems, which makes sense when you think about it. All they’re doing is looking at each page and checking for matching strings of code they want to see – totally ignoring site wide SEO, the fact there are usually several ways to approach the same SEO task (they usually just look for one), etc.

They’re certainly no match for a professional with 23 years experience looking at it all manually for you!

 

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Website Speed, Wordpress

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

February 23, 2021 by Peter Mahoney

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?

Filed Under: Featured, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social networking, Wordpress Tagged With: clients, front-end, issues, search engine optimisation, seo, website display

Website display problems after SEO work?

February 23, 2021 by Peter Mahoney

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 & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Filed Under: SEO Emails, Wordpress

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • …
  • 63
  • Next Page »

Get FREE Wordpress SEO tips!

I send regular newsletters with WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert-level tips. Sign up to get them, along with my FREE e-book “Ongoing SEO Success”.

Did I mention they’re free!

Subscribe for free

Praise

I have over 2,500 5-star feedback reviews (and I’ve never received less than the full five.)

Here’s just one example, from Mike who runs Costello Entertainments:

Migration, Hosting, SEO and Speed Work on our new website all completed quickly and efficiently and Peter was most helpful in fixing an issue with a Popover on the site as well. If you’re thinking about asking Peter to do a job for you or hesitating, JUST DO IT! – He knows programming and the internet inside out, he’ll get the job done for you professionally, with a smile. I wish I could call a plumber or a tradesman to do the jobs I can’t do myself with the same level of confidence.
Read a lot more.

Recent Blogs

  • Is it worth doing SEO and GEO work monthly?
    Hi Peter, just want to check, is it still worth doing SEO and GEO – AI search and ChatGPT – ...
  • Why search volume matters in your keyword strategy
    When planning an SEO strategy, one of the most important questions is not simply which words describe your ...
  • How do I make the most of AI search optimisation?
    Thank you for sharing the recent update. I’m in the early stages of planning for the upcoming year, and with ...
  • AI Search (also known as GEO) – the biggest change in SEO & search since Google launched
    Keeping ahead of the AI component of search is essential – and I am actively managing this for my clients. I ...

Legal

  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Disclaimer

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

Also read

  • Payment information

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert blog

Recent Posts

  • Is it worth doing SEO and GEO work monthly?
  • Why search volume matters in your keyword strategy
  • How do I make the most of AI search optimisation?
  • AI Search (also known as GEO) – the biggest change in SEO & search since Google launched
  • Outreach for backlinks – how to get quality links that Google will love

© Copyright 2025 SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert · All Rights Reserved · Site by Peter Mahoney