Wordpress SEO Expert

Rank higher in Google organic search with 24 year experienced SEO professional Peter WM.

Don’t just search for yourself!

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This is actually a stock answer I send people pretty often. I’m regularly asked about the difference between where a client sees themselves in rankings, or their friend, kid’s football coach, etc.

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 “seo expert peter” see my site on the first page. But I see myself on the fourth. Essentially because I’ve searched for myself so often, but 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 Search Console system., 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.

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

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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?

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for SEO & Speed

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Right, this is an interesting one. It’s technical, but has a very simple main recommendation (in large text, below).

Google has started to include something they’re calling CLS in their ranking metrics.

Essentially it means ‘how long before elements loading on the site stop moving around’, and their target is just 0.25 seconds.

If things move around as your page loads for longer than that it’ll get a warning in their system. (This isn’t general loading time, just a very specific part of how a site loads.)

Think about when a website loads, the first thing it does is load the layout – where the menu is, where images will go, text, etc. That’s the elements they’re talking about.

It’s fine for a image to take longer to load, as long as the space it will take is already reserved for it when it DOES load. To be honest most of this happens so quickly you can’t even see it.

But there is one very common thing lots of sites have turned on that means layout changes happen long after a page is loaded – and that’s “lazy load” for images.

Lazy Load was a great technique when it became popular a decade ago. It meant images didn’t load on a page until the browser needed to se them. If an image was at the bottom of a page, and the user wouldn’t see it in the browser until they scrolled down, it waited until it needed to load it to do so.

But when that happens, it moves elements on the page around accordingly to make space for the image – and therefore will always fail the CLS test Google does for all sites and pages.

So ironically something that used to be recommended to help a page load faster is now a problem for passing loading time tests!

Personally I’ve not used Lazy load for years (in most cases it was unclear if the speed enhancement it brought was actually better than the extra Javascript it needed to work) – but now my recommendation to all website owners is clear:

If you use Lazy Load, turn it off.

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. 🙂

Case Study: Turning SEO work off

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I had a client recently who (for reasons exclusively to do with the inexperience of their website’s designer) turned off one of the SEO plugins I had installed and configured for them.

It happened shortly after I carried out an initial SEO overhaul on their site, so gives us a valuable insight into the effect of getting SEO done, and the removing it again.

It’s a very small (and brand new company), but you can see the effects in this graph – taken directly from Google Search Console.

Initially after my work their SEO stats began to shoot up, gaining traction and upward momentum. Immediately after deactivating just one plugin it plummeted back to its original position.

This didn’t use to happen so quickly. If you took SEO work off a site, or just fell behind with updates and changes to best practice, things would trail off over time. It now appears not having the very best SEO at all times leads to an immediate decrease in SEO authority. Because so many website owners (your competitors!) invest in SEO these days it means any time you don’t have it working, they can rise above you in the rankings.

But other SEO professionals have tried the same thing (turning off a single SEO plugin on their own testing sites) and see the same result. The drop is nearly immediate.

BERT is Google’s latest update

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There’s been a number of news stories about the BERT update from Google.

These were followed by a slew of other stories about how the previous ones were misleading.

Let’s explain.

If we go back several years to what was a very big announcement from Google – they turned on something they called RankBrain. At the time it was a new system and approach to search engine optimisation. They were using artificial intelligence to try to read webpages more like a human (actual visitors) would.

It was such a big deal because context suddenly became very important. The days of simply matching how many times you used certain keywords in your content against searches were over – it was crucial to write informative, useful content.

(That seems like a non-brainer anyway – content should always be useful and informative.)

But it was the beginning of the end for the concept of ‘how many keywords you can rank for’, or ‘just say this three times and you’ll rank really highly’.

In the years following Google has made all kinds of similar small updates to improve that system. They’re committed to returning useful well-written, informative results; and they’ve regularly made changes to their algorithm to further that aim.

The BERT SEO update

The BERT update really just pushes that to the next level. ‘Pattern matching’ for specific phrases isn’t enough anymore, not by a long shot.

Fortunately this is all in line with what I’ve been saying for years – don’t just write to specific words (whether they’re ‘long tail’ or something else, the concept of expecting a certain amount of repetition to rock your SEO isn’t valid) – rather write well thought out content that explains what you’re trying to say.

(This is why some of the recent news stories about BERT backtracked about how important it was – because while it is important – it’s just a continuation of the same direction Google’s been going for a long time.)

To give you an example. You’d think the key with my own site is to mention SEO a lot. That’s easy to do – but harder to do in a way that makes it clear to the reader that I’m an authority on the subject, and even harder to impart useful information that might entice people back to my blog.

Simply repeating keywords is essentially keyword stuffing and Google knows it.

My recommendation for writing content hasn’t changed. Write to your audience, not to search engines. If you’re writing an about page then write about what you do and how you help people. Useful, natural words and phrases will come out of that anyway.

Your visitors – and increasingly your search engine ranking – will thank you for it.

Why context matters so much for SEO

As search engines continue to prepare for voice search being used more often (voice searches are usually quite conversational in their wording) context becomes more important.

To give a really basically example, let’s think about a site that may have been a review for a florist. Even if the content said something negative, for example “What a rubbish florist”, previously it would have helped rank for the search query ‘florist’. Increasingly Google can understand the negativity there and is less likely to present that site to someone who clearly wants to find a reputable local florist.

That really is a very basic example, but context is so important.

What needs changing for your WordPress SEO

As a WordPress SEO expert every change and update to SEO algorithms always comes back to the same question, “How does this impact WordPress SEO?” The answer in this case is very little. Unlike structured data or other updates that necessitate coding changes to your site, this really is all about content.

Fortunately WordPress itself is all about content and the ease of editing or creating it – so that’s a real boon. It’s easy to edit your site’s content to make it as contextual, human readable and useful as possible.

But there is no immediate need to jump in add or remove any plugins or systems.

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Peter WM, WordPress SEO expert blog