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 WM
WordPress SEO Expert

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 WM
WordPress SEO Expert

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://peterwm.com/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 WM
WordPress SEO Expert

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 WM
WordPress SEO Expert

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 WM
WordPress SEO Expert

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 WM
WordPress SEO Expert