The Results Are What You’d Expect
The site needs a clean up, reorganisation and probably a lot of content removed for the sake of maintaining a high quality web presence that aligns with the journey I want to send you all on.
One of the first articles I wrote on this site was titled, “SEO Doesn’t Matter For Writers” and it still stands true. Having spend a couple of hours reading about SEO best practices in 2024, I’d actually argue it’s more true for the following reasons:
- A lot of SEO content now is formless, voiceless AI rubbish. That practice is encouraged
- I’d be willing to bet few writers gain significant readerships through traditional SEO (So Google Search)
- Outside of website set up and a few best practices, you’re better off working on a million other things
- You don’t actually need SEO anymore; when I started it was the only game in town
Now, with that said, there’s a case to be made for doing some things, and that’s why I ran the SEO Audit. Here are some thoughts on what I found out, but before I do that, let’s talk about why I’m thinking of this at all.
It’s A Case Of Energy
If you’re into the idea of hacking, and particularly what I’d like to call Black Hat Life Hacks, then the general gist is that you want to expend a small amount of energy and receive an outsized return on your energy investment.
At the moment, this blog is a net negative in those terms. I post every day, I get a few readers and visitors, and while ultimately it’s a good hobby and I’m pretty happy with the massive returns I’ve gotten from it historically as well as it forcing me to different things, I’m not getting the outsized return on energy investment.
A lot of that is in the fact there’s no Vault or offers at all. So there’s no energy return in the form of gold coins in the treasure chest to spend on other bits. But also, it’s the fact that I’ll sink 500-1000 words every day into writing a blog post and the follow-up on all of that is lacking.
Again, this is all my fault for just blogging every day and not fixing any of this, but that’s where the net negative can become a net positive.
If a well-oiled SEO process nets me an extra thousand readers a month, that’s a big investment. Especially when I use the principle discussed yesterday to deliver constant, new material to each viewer.
With that said, let’s talk about some principles.
Navigation Is Everything
This concept is about SEO, but it’s about more than SEO.
Namely, if a crawler can navigate through a website, then so can a human.
You ultimately want humans – or, as we might better think of them, readers – to navigate through your site, read the bits, engage with the bits, and stay until you’ve solved their problems and converted them into one of the faithful.
It’s up to you, (or me, in this case,) to make that easy.
Just on this site, there are over a thousand articles. (There are also probably hundreds more in Word files, but we’ll get to that momentarily.) The average person who comes to this site reads maybe five articles a day. That’s good, but that means 995 articles don’t get read.
We – and by we, I mean I – can do better on that. If I can’t find stuff, then I can’t expect anyone else to. A search bar doesn’t cut it.
Your Voice Is Your Opportunity
All of the “recommended SEO resources” I read today were bland, uninspired and possibly written by AI. Now, that’s something you could complain about in an “I can’t compete with a robot” fashion.
However, it’s also an opportunity.
Because while AI can spit out some nonsense about how the best way to write a blog post is to target your audience, look at keywords and remember a call to action, remember that we’re ultimately in the business of writing for humans, and a ChatGPT word salad post might be very accurate but it’s as incapable of relating to you as a reader as the average Red Pill Incel is at relating to the TikTok cleavage girl he seethes about online.
That analogy, brought to you by a human being.
As writers, we’re now in competition with countless robots and the edge we have is in carving out authorial voice. Tech evangelists will whine, but this is something that AI is completely incapable of doing to this point. (Trust me, I own a lucrative AI LLM business. If anyone would know about it, it’s me.)
With SEO, you’re competing against the hordes; but you’re not an SEO, you’re a writer. You only need to use SEO as the free sample the drug dealer gives to the addict on the corner that first time. Once they’re hooked, you use all the other tools to keep them here and to keep them coming back.
(Once again, analogy necessarily presented to you as an example of something the AI cannot compete with.)
See you in the next one.