How I got SEO compounding on a side project
Having achieved a new SEO milestone, I want to share some simple tactics that helped.
The milestone was on starrt.co, where Google informed me I’d reached 800 clicks via Google Search in the last 28 days.
I’m quite leased with that, even though it’s still fairly junior in SEO terms. Bearing in mind, it started 2024 at 150, and it took the last six months of 2023 to get to 150.
This is a project (a Carrd resources blog and directory) that’s been going for four years now, but most of the SEO progress has been in the last year.
Now, given that I only started consistently adding blog posts around the end of 2022, that roughly correlates to the Google impact kicking in around 6 month later. Now, in 2024, it seems to be compounding.
Overall Visitors and Views are growing quite fast too — these have largely doubled in the last 6 months.
What do I put this down to?
Before I talk about how I’m achieving this, I have to point out that overall searches may, in part, be a factor here. Interest in Carrd as a platform is growing, so that can’t be ignored in my own growth.
Other than that, this is what I’ve been focussed on as a strategy:
Build a library of useful content
This is the main job really isn’t it, as a blog? Keep publishing useful content. And do it with the aim not just of publishing, but of building a library of useful content.
You’re answering the need from Google searches here, so every tiny thing you publish should count towards a bigger, permanent whole.
Pay attention to what people are searching for
So many side hustlers don’t do this, but my simple advice is to follow the data. Analytics is an obvious one, but there are two more important tactics:
1. Connect your site to Search Console to build some great search Queries data. This is a lust of the search terms you’re appearing for.
2. Do research with keyword idea tools, like Ahrefs. Even just using the free versions will give you some idea what kind of volume search terms related to your keyword are getting.
Adjust the site and content to match
Now that you have some data, you can do two things.
- Publish more/new content based on the keyword terms your data is showing.
- Update your site and content to feature more of the common keyword terms. Make adjustments to your your landing pages and your site meta text. Tweak older blog posts to match the terminology from actual searches. Use the keywords in blog post titles. Just make sure to do it in a natural way, not forced.
Add value, use data, keep going. It’s not that complicated is it? Well clearly it is harder than that, or we’d all be achieving amazing success all the time.
What we can do though is keep trying to get the overall balance right, between creating and observing.
I‘m starting to write more about side project experiments and SEO. If you enjoyed this, please consider following, subscribing, or joining my newsletter.
