I increased traffic on my personal site by 30% when I walked away from search engine optimisation

Six months ago I gave up on search engine optimisation.

As I wrote at the time, I suspected tweaking text to make my stories appear higher in Google search results was unlikely to increase traffic to this site.

And because SEO is time consuming, I would be able to focus my energy on more creative activities.

Dropping SEO worked for me

Giving up on SEO was a success.

In the last six months I’ve had more than 21,000 site visits and almost 38,000 page views. For the six months before dropping SEO the numbers were 16,000 visits and 26,000 page views.

It’s not quite that simple. December and January are typically slow months – that’s when most of my readers are on holiday. If I adjust the numbers to take this seasonal variation into account, the increase in site visits is lower – around 25%, but the page view increase is still over 30%.

Traffic is up 30% because I ignore search engine optimisation.

This won’t work for everyone, but it is food for thought.

My site is Bill Bennett