SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

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

Large Google Algorithm Update

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We’ve seen another core update from Google to their algorithm. They usually make updates of this size a few times a year – not usually over the New Year period but this hasn’t exactly been a normal year by any measure.

Bulk analysis of tens of thousands of sites has revealed which industries were affected for the better, and which for the worse.

This is how Google tends to treat these larger core updates – rather than just looking for smaller changes to SEO settings, punctuation, word use, etc. – they’re actively trying to impact entire industries and sectors.

Industries that saw a strong, positive effect:

  • Accounting & Taxes
  • Arts & Entertainment
  • Business Services
  • Finance
  • Food & Drink
  • Health
  • Health Conditions
  • Insurance
  • Law & Government
  • Nutrition & Fitness
  • Religion
  • Relocation & Moving
  • Science & Education

While industries they’ve slightly downgraded include:

  • Addictions
  • Dating
  • Natural & Alternative Medicine
  • News & Media
  • Performing Arts
  • Senior Care
  • Sports

Of course, downgrading an entire industry doesn’t always have the effect you’d initially expect. So yes, addiction services might have been downgraded, but that impacts everyone in that sector. So anyone searching for ‘addiction recovery hotline’ for example will still be competing with other sites in the same situation.

The main takeaways for SEO professionals here is that there are more industries in the positive list, and that this is the widest reaching change they’ve made for some time.

One industry to watch in particular is Natural & Alternative Medicine, which Google has been after for a while. The last few large-scale algorithm updates from Google have really targeted this sector. And fair enough, scientific information has never been more important than it is in the Covid-19 pandemic.

But having said that I personally have had a lot of success with the couple of clients I have who fall into this sector, over the past six months their organic SEO stats have more than doubled. 🙂

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

My SEO person has let me down

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Need some help with my website. I have had someone working on it for over 15mths now and she hasn’t managed to get my site on page one locally or in the region she was looking to optimise me for (without speaking to me about it). In the last 3 weeks we have got on page 1 for a key term, but I checked today and we have dropped off the first page. Any other first page ranking are because of the work I personally did using the Yoast plugin.

I recently did a check on my website using a free SEO report tool and it came up with a host of issues. When I shared this with my current SEO person she told me that there is nothing she can do about it. I have a lot of keywords stuck on page 2/3/4/5 and they haven’t moved for several months. Could you fix all this? How long would it take you and what would be the costs?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.

I guess there’s a few different things to look at there.

I should add I don’t love automatic reports. They’re not without use entirely–but they tend to look at pages individually rather than the site holistically – and frankly are no match for a 20+ year professional having a manual look at everything. 🙂

But, it does sound like your current person’s excuse that she can’t effect anything in there just isn’t true.

You mention you’ve done work in Yoast yourself which is great (I’m always pleased to hear site owners are happy to roll up their sleeves and delve into SEO!) but I’ve had a look at the source code for your site and there’s a LOT of scope for improvement.

Some of it’s to do with the more obvious stuff, meta tags etc., but also little things add up to make a big SEO difference – you’re obviously based in the UK but the code gives the US as your locale.

Do you know what your SEO person has supposedly been doing for you?

In terms of where you’re currently ranked, I’d love to see the Google Search Console property for the site if that’s been setup. Hopefully that’s also where you’re getting your own ranking data?

So yes, I can definitely help.

In the first instance I’d recommend my initial full WordPress overhaul:
https://petermahoney.net/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/

And then move onto the ongoing campaign:
https://petermahoney.net/ongoing-wordpress-seo-campaign/

I do offer discounts on the latter if people pay six months up front too – in fact I offer a 33% discount on that currently.

As a professional obviously I can’t make promises about where you’ll be ranked after my work, because ultimately that’s up to the search engines. Also without seeing the Dashboard for the site, or proper stats from Search Console (and carrying out other functions of my SEO work, like competitor analysis) it’s really hard to say. I can tell you if you’ve been on page one for a key query, and have slipped to page two, page one should be achieve-able again within about three-four months.

I hope that all helps!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

New Coverage issue detected for site 5xx

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I’ve had the below email from Google.
Is this something you need to fix in Search console or my devs?

I have recently moved our sites to WPEngine, hopefully that hasn’t caused any problems 🙂

A server error (most like ‘500’) simply means the server isn’t working properly. Not that it’s down, but rather it’s got issues processing the site or page.

For example if PHP isn’t working, or there’s some code in the site that’s not functioning. Normally it means some kind of code on the site breaking things.

More often than not if you see it it’s going to apply to the whole site, so because the site is working I suspect it was a temporary hosting issue.

Actually strike that!

I had a look further, and it was only one page that returned the 5xx error, and it’s not actually a page! It’s your WordPress theme files directory; we don’t want that indexed anyway. Google shouldn’t be trying to scan it anyhow, so I’m marked the issue as ‘fixed’ in Search Console.

(In short, it’s not a problem they can’t load it, but I’ve asked it to be cleared from Search Console just to stop you getting any other messages about it.)

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

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