Thanks for your work.
With regard to the xml file, I would like to manage this via google console. I understand that you have submitted the sitemap, is there any issue with me uploading this directly? I made a few changes to the permalinks this morning as they were still related to the pages that were in the original theme that I didn’t notice before.
Were all of the H-Tags updated as part of the service and are they currently optimised?
Do you have any general feedback on our content? Is there anything we could do to improve the ranking of the site?
Finally, I plan to create area specific area pages for our site. Sometimes, people doing these have a lot of duplicate content. Would that lead to penalties due to the duplication of text?
Thanks for your advice.
Thanks for coming back to me!
Questions are, of course, always welcome.
So…
1)
sitemap.xml
This gets submitted to Search Console but you can’t manage the contents of the file there if that’s what you mean. (Sorry if I’ve misunderstood!)
The current flow for this is that when you add a page, remove a change, edit permalinks etc the sitemap is updated automatically. It also sends a ‘ping’ to Google and Bing letting them know it’s been changed. They then rescan the XML file and update their records accordingly.
So, unless you really need to do something bespoke with the sitemap.xml file you can leave it to do it’s thing. (In all my years I’ve only come across one instance where it needed to be coded manually 0 but perhaps you do have good reason!)
2)
Ah! I didn’t include those in the write-up. Apologies! I did quite a bit of work on your heading tags in the background. The heading tags you had were already appropriate with good keywords to match content, so that was great.
But behind the scenes they were all H2 or H3s. No page had a single H1, which they should. So I worked to change the main heading tag on each page to H1, while also keeping the previous text size and styles.
It’s all as it should be now!
3)
The main thing you could do yourselves would be some kind of blog or news type section. Regular, topical content makes SUCH a difference.
4)
Regarding the area pages technique, you do want to make sure the content is unique enough. If you’re just swapping out area names it’s not going to work. But as long as each page is substantially different it’s a great thing.
My usual recommendation for writing areas pages is this…
Do one day. And write it without looking back at what you wrote on the other ones. You’ll find you’ll naturally include the same information, but in different words.
I hope that helps!
Peter Warwick-Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert