Wordpress SEO Expert

Peter Warwick-Mahoney

A few ‘key words’ about keywords

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A lot of SEO professionals are still selling their services based on a very outdated idea of how SEO works.

Anyone telling you they target a set number of keywords really isn’t doing SEO right.

Firstly, an important terminology definition. The term keywords has meant a few different things over the past 20+ years in the Search Engine Optimisation industry. As such I prefer not to use it and try to use other words that do a better job of explaining what I mean. So when it comes to describing the concept of ‘phrases you want to rank highly with in search results’ I use the term search queries. That does a much better job of conveying what we mean – the words people search for that your website gets found for.

Years ago SEO services would be sold based around (in part) a concept of how many search queries your site would be optimised for. But search doesn’t work like that anymore (and hasn’t for a number of years). It’s not as simple as having a list of a few terms we target – since Google brought their Rankbrain (artificial intelligence system) online for website indexing, everything is far more nuanced.

Technically a site can rank and be found for ANY of the words and terms on it.

I’ve blogged about a few of these issues before, so these articles might help give useful background:
https://peterwm.com/googles-rankbrain-and-seo/
https://peterwm.com/does-google-use-meta-keyword-tags/

SEO work is all about reinforcing your key content so it stand out for search engines. But anything within the content can (and often is) indexed by them. As an example if you ever get a chance to see the Google Search Console performance report you’ll often see hundreds of things a site is found for.

For example my site is clearly about being a WordPress SEO expert, and services around that. But in search results it comes up for over 1000 different searches, and a lot of those aren’t related to my core offerings. But they’re all related to words, brands or nouns I’ve used in the past. Googles does a great job of working out the context of your site, but with good SEO you can be found for just about anything.

A few 'key words' about keywords - Wordpress SEO Expert

Mobile speed is very important for SEO

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We’ve known for a long time that how fast your site loads is important for SEO.

Google have increased the importance of your website’s mobile speed when working out where to rank it.

It’s been true for a while that there’s been some small impact on your ranking based on mobile speed (desktop speed has been important for years) but now that’s been ramped up.

The most important metrics they use remain the sort of SEO work I do in the code and the quality of your content – but when those things are being looked after mobile speed is where you should turn your attention.

Unfortunately the automated tests out there tend to be a bit alarmist (I blogged about that recently) but they can still serve as a reminder that there’s nearly always room for improvement.

WordPress certainly has its issues with speed. And most themes are still being built for desktop-first (meaning how it looks on a desktop computer is the primary concern, and then it’s cut down and limited for mobile) when in fact current standards are clear that mobile-first should be the designers focus.

Be aware that although the testing systems are imperfect, and WordPress is very hard to score upwards of 80% with on most systems – the faster your site is the better.

In fact, mobile speed is now more important than desktop speed as a ranking metric for Google.

As a general piece of advice, my favourite tool for testing a site’s overall speed (not mobile specific) is Pingdom.

They give you a list of different servers to choose from; so it’s easier to get a real-world figure for your loading time in seconds – just like your target market will see it. Choose the nearest server to your primary audience, et voila.

Mobile speed is very important for SEO - Wordpress SEO Expert

(Although none of the online speed testing tools are perfect, Pingdom has a lot of useful features.)

Google Search Console & average position explained

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There are times your SEO results will look like the opposite of what you’re after.

Average Position is a bit of a weird metric. Here’s why.

Google Search Console & average position explained - Wordpress SEO Expert

Consider that graph for a moment. Taken directly from Google Search Console (Google’s official stats package for organic search – and my recommendation for the tool you should use to get your ranking and other organic search results) they show two highlighted metrics;

  • Total impressions (in teal) and
  • Average position (in purple).

Impressions is the number of times a site was seen in search results. Average position is the average rank it was seen in.

(Google averages your rank across all impressions as a useful workaround to their personalisation they do when people are searching. Location, how often a user has searched for something before – there are myriad ways Google skews results. Averaging them out is the best approach to find the most useful ranking to report.)

If you look at the lines on the graph though you’ll see a number of places where the position appears to get worse right when the impressions become more successful. You’d think stats should improve hand-in-hand, not get worse as one improves. Right?

In reality, when impressions spikes it’s normal for the average position to drop. If a site suddenly has a lot more visibility, it usually means it’s being found for a bunch of terms and searches it wasn’t previously. A lot of those new terms are likely to be things sort of around the periphery of what the site is about, not just it’s core purpose. So it’s being found for a bunch of extra search terms.

The result of that is those new terms probably aren’t ranking terribly highly. They’re not the site’s main purpose, so won’t be ranking as highly as the normal terms the site has been successful for.

Which drags the average rank DOWN.

Not only is this good to know when interpreting your own results, but it serves as a reminder that stats aren’t simply the end of the story, it’s important to understand how they come about, and what their effect on each other is.

 

Using WordPress as a static site generator

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My WordPress site is so fast, I’m not even sure I can call it WordPress anymore.

Static site generators are awesome.

They create blindingly fast sites, with very few drawbacks (more on those later).

But I’ve been using WordPress since it was a small blogging platform call b2. I’m used to it, I like it, and already have a swag of sites built on it for myself; not just my clients.

Because I work in SEO speed is really crucial to what I do. I do a lot of caching and optimisation work for people, but wanted to see what would happen if I really pushed the envelope out.

Initially I was keen to make a front-end that pulled data out of a basic WordPress install using JSON. I set up a proof-of-concept successfully, but wasn’t so keen on remaking all my layouts and front-end design from scratch for it. Besides, basic things like the WordPress menu editor, text widgets etc. are something I very much enjoy using.

I did some research, and came across a plugin called WP2Static. It’s a slick plugin that basically does just what I wanted – it packages up WordPress sites as static sites you can deploy anywhere. With a bit of configuring you can actually use it to output to a folder on the same server, and use some basic .htaccess rules so that becomes the public facing side of things.

Which is cool, but I wanted to go for MAXIMUM SPEED. My end goal was to get the site hosted on GitHub Pages, and then use Cloudflare to CDN it around the world.

(WP2Static does actually have a system to deploy to GitHub Pages built-in, but I found the deployment process just too slow.)

So when I considered everything I was trying to achieve, which included keeping the live site on the same URL it was already on, I opted to do the following:

  • move the WordPress install of my site off its current server, onto my localhost machine (it’s fast and I back it up regularly)
  • use WP2Static to output the site to a local folder
  • use git via the terminal to publish the site

In theory, for a nerd, it seems fairly straightforward. And on the whole it worked much more easily than I anticipated. The main glitches to overcome were that a number of font files weren’t being picked up by the plugin for inclusion in the static site. But it has a configuration option to force it to include certain file paths, so that was easily overcome.

I did need to create a manual 404.html page (GitHub Pages looks for that in the top directory of a site) but that’s neither here nor there.

There were a few other tiny things that were really specific to my own WordPress setup – like realising my sitemap.xml file needed to be a flat XML file rather than an index linking to other XML files – because they weren’t going to be wrapped up by the plugin.

The thing you really lose with any static site system though is (logically) user interaction. In my case that was just forms, but I was happy to replace my contact form with a simple email address – anything else I might need in the future I can do by embedding forms directly from another system like Google Forms.

I used to sell a couple of SEO packages directly through my site, but Woocommerce was always overkill for that anyway. In the future I’ll just use a combination of Paypal buttons to replicate the same functionality – and in fact it’ll be simpler for the end user because I don’t need to know all their billing address information to start an SEO job with them.

The really big day-to-day drawback is that clicking ‘Publish’ in WordPress doesn’t publish anything anymore. The process to run a new export with WP2Static and then send it to GitHub Pages takes about two minutes. But considering how often I blog or change anything on the site that’s not a major issue. Like with anything, you need to weigh up the processes, pros and cons against how you actually use something to determine if it’s right for you.

The site I did all this too, fyi, is the one you’re on right now. This is a static site, hosted for free on GitHub Pages and replicated on servers around the world using Cloudflare.

Google PageSpeed Insights gives a 99% speed rating for Desktop. And the missing 1% is simply because I include an external file that I can’t set an expiration header for – ironically that file is the script for Google Analytics.

Pingdom (my preferred speed testing system, because you can choose a server location for the real-world load-time to be tested against – so if your clients are predominantly in London then choose that server to get an idea of the speed as they’ll see it) gives the homepage a 0.212 second loading time. For something ultimately based on WordPress as a content management system, that’s impressive.

Using Wordpress as a static site generator - Wordpress SEO Expert

How best to tag your images for SEO on WordPress

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How best to tag your images for SEO on Wordpress - Wordpress SEO Expert

The correct approach to image tags may surprise you.

Here’s a reminder about why they are best optimised using a plugin.

Because of the way WordPress evolved over time from a simple blogging tool to an advanced content management system, traditionally people have set alt & title tags per image, using the media manager.

But that’s not best for SEO. Images should reinforce what the page is about, not just what the image is of.

To give an example, if you have one image that’s used on two pages, you might not want them to both have the same alt tags. So the systems I set up does an excellent job of setting those tags in the live code whenever a page is visited. It mixes the page title with the name of your site to make sure both your branding and (most importantly) what the page is actually about is being reinforced.

It’s the best approach for image tags and search engines.

(My favourite plugin for this is PB SEO Friendly Images.)

Preparing for Voice Search SEO

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Preparing for Voice Search SEO - Wordpress SEO Expert

41% of adults search for something using voice at least once a day, and for young adults it’s over half!

This applies to Google voice search, Alexa home devices, Siri…anything you can ask a question and expect a result.

The good news is the way we approach SEO for voice search hasn’t drastically differed.

Yes, voice searches tend to be longer and more conversational. And direct too.

Here’s an example, let’s say I want to know what the highest mountain is in the UK. Previously I might have entered highest mountain uk into a search engine.

But when asking a voice assistant, I’m more likely to say something along the lines of tell me what is the highest mountain in the uk. So it’s longer and more conversational. But despite its length it is more direct; I’m being clearer about what I want to know, which is what the highest one is.

That text search could bring up a page of results that list several high mountains, or articles that talk about a recent event or news story that took place on the highest mountain.

At this point in time search engines are taking these voice questions and dumbing them down for their own purposes. So when a voice search tool is actually working out what results to return, the example above could well be turned into that simpler 3-word version behind the scenes.

What’s really going to have an impact is when that directness starts to be factored in a lot more intuitively. Because at that point in time search will become less like looking up relevant information based on a subject (like an old encyclopedia) and more to do with answering really specific questions.

It’s very early days to think about how the approach we take to SEO might change when that happens. But the key will be in line with the major engines’ existing ethos – your website should have a clear purpose, and be written in a natural human readable way so that visitors can easily find the information they’re looking for.

And in that regard voice search is really just a continuation of the direction the search engines have been heading toward for well over a decade.

Fill in your social media profiles

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Fill in your social media profiles - Wordpress SEO Expert

Far too many WordPress sites end up with empty social links

I see this all the time; in the header or footer of WordPress sites, a series of little social media icons that links to – nothing.

A lot of WordPress themes have sections for you to fill out your social profiles, so those little buttons can link to them correctly. But a lot of those themes will show them regardless of whether or not you’ve entered proper URLs. Some go a step further, and by default will have a link entered as #. That just means it links back to the page you’re on, but it’s enough to get the buttons showing and essentially linking to nothing.

It’s an easy enough oversight to make. But it means you have dead links which isn’t great for your SEO, and if visitors notice then it just seems wildly unprofessional.

If you have social buttons, they really need to link to social sites. It’s not hard to do – these sorts of WordPress themes are intended to make everything as simple as possible – but at the very least have a quick check of your own site and make sure your social button links, well, link.

In all honesty I see this in perhaps a third of WordPress sites overall, so there’s a good chance it affects your’s.

How to find your Google rank

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How to find your Google rank - Wordpress SEO Expert

Searching for yourself is a terrible idea

I still get asked a lot about discrepancies between what a client sees when they search for themselves, and either the official stats, or what their friend might see, etc.

So this is a refresher about why you shouldn’t search for yourself as a way to measure your ranking.

Google does all kinds of personalisation on your search results (based on your network’s IP address, if you’re logged into any Google accounts, even your location) and the more often you look for your own site, the more skewed those results will be.

To give an example, most people searching for “peter mahoney” see my site on the first page. But I see myself on the fourth. Essentially because I’ve searched for myself so often – and then not spent much time on my site or even bothered to click it – Google has “learnt” that I don’t like it and therefore ranks it down for me, uniquely.

The right place to get Google’s official rank for your site is their own monitoring systems, which is where I get my stats.

Their stats are actually an ‘average’ of your rank which is the statistically most useful approach. Because of personalisation, not everyone sees your site in the same position. Where someone is searching from geographically for example has an impact. So the average rank is the best indicator of where you rank.

There’s a commonly held belief that if you use a private browsing window somehow you’ll see the proper rankings in the search results. But all that does is prevent Google from knowing your account – they still know where you live, your IP address, in some cases the unique code for your network card – there’s *plenty* for them to skew your results with.

Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights

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Google PageSpeed Insights has become a tad problematic of late.

Firstly, Google PageSpeed is just a list of code changes that might improve your website’s speed. In most cases trying to do everything they list would simple break a WordPress website – it’s usually a matter of having to try lots or permutations of speed settings to see which scores best. So for example with a lot of themes if you minify javascript and defer scripts it it’ll break things, so we have to choose between those.

It’s also true that when Google actually uses speed as a metric for your SEO ranking, they’re looking at the actual load time for the site as opposed to how it measures on the PageSpeed metric.

To give you an idea of why the % scores aren’t a great measure, let’s consider browser caching. We can’t change whether other domains have it or not. So if you reference any other scripts in your site, for example Facebook, we can’t affect that. And you’ll still fail for the ‘browser caching’ section – even though it might already be applied to all your own scripts.

It’s a great irony of PageSpeed that having Google Analytics installed on a site always costs it a few % points, for the same reason. You’d think Google could do better with their own systems.

Google also changed the way they display results recently and it’s made their reports far less useful for the majority of sites out there. They recommend you ‘Serve images in next-gen formats’, even though there’s a lack of cross-browser compatibility for them. (Yes, you can set things up with a fall back so if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support JPG 2000 it will show another image instead – but as yet this isn’t something you’ll find commonly in WordPress themes. In fact I’m not sure it’s in any.)

So suddenly this testing tool is giving biased advice – guess which browser has full compatibility with next generation image formats? Google Chrome.

Like most Google reporting, PageSpeed does give a good idea of possible things to investigate but it’s not worth getting so hung up on you stop focusing on your content creation.

Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights - Wordpress SEO Expert

Back in…purple?

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Back in...purple? - Wordpress SEO Expert

There’s a new force in Digital Marketing in New Zealand – which I may have more than a little to do with.

As an ex-New Zealander I still like to keep myself appraised of what’s going on down there, and have decided to throw my hat in their digital marketing ring. People who have worked with me before will know I work a little differently:

No nonsense, up front pricing, and everything delivered on time and on budget.

And every market needs a company like that!

🙂

Purple Web Marketing in NZ is a new company I’ll be overseeing, but it’s a team effort rather than just myself. I’ve been using contractors to help out as the business has grown, but it’s time to call a spade a spade and say it’s a proper agency.

The UK business will be brought up to speed as well in the next few weeks, becoming the UK headquarters for Purple Web Marketing. So make the most of this black website while you can – it’s all going very purple very soon.

I remember at high school a guidance counselor once promised that “one day, we’ll all be working remotely from anywhere in the world!” and I’m pleased to say she was right. You’ll find me all over the place, working hard and delivering great results.

 

Back in...purple? - Wordpress SEO Expert

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