Now I've finished with my second part time job I've spent some time over the last couple days figuring out how to 'fix' my main blog....
When I say 'fix' I mean it really needs some love.
I can only really justly compare the same month in different years, as it's very seasonal, monthly views going up and down a lot with the exam cycle.
But to give you some idea of the magnitude of the decline:
- May 2022 I had 1.1 Million views.
- May 2025 I had 250 000 views.
That's mirrored across most months.
I can't quite figure out WHY I've had such a decline in views it could be...
- My competitors getting better, this I think is most likely.
- The ads I've had placed on my site since mid 2022 increasing the bounce rate (they are pretty offensive).
- Most of the core material I'd written by 2020, so pretty much ALL the new material i've written since then is not as relevant to the core themes of the blog.
- I've updated about 70% of the core material since 20220, maybe Google doesn't like the updates?
- Obviously changes to Google's algo - does it like videos more, for example.
I think it's global, not down to particular posts...
I've run experiments with different updates, that is selectively updated some stuff on a post and then not on a similar post and I can't see any patterns affecting performance.
The best hitting posts are still the all singing all dancing ones, and/ or the difficult fringe topics not covered anywhere else in any depth.
What to do next.....
Obviously I need to do some in-depth analysis and figure out why my rankings are down, now ideally I'd like to contract this out to someone else, but I just DON'T TRUST SEO COMPANIES.... I'm not convinced any of them know how to boost SEO.
So I think I'm stuck with maybe subscribing to some sort of SEO tool and working from there.
A comprehensive key word review I think should be high up the agenda too.
And clearing up the low-hanging mistakes - I know there's a few broken links and dodgy pages Google doesn't like so I will get rid of those!
And I think I need to sort out a comprehensive social media strategy too, can't hurt, right?!?