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://peterwm.com/complete-wordpress-seo-overhaul/
And then move onto the ongoing campaign:
https://peterwm.com/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 Warwick-Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert