Originally posted in r/SEO on reddit.
Question
I have a blog in the homesteading niche. I cover from-scratch recipes, gardening, raising livestock. I have tons of original photography and every day I look to replace any generic stock with my own photos. I’m literally buying different breeds of animals to have real experience and photos of them.
The domain was bought in 2019 but the blog was only “serious” for the last two years.
I published over a 100 original posts in the past year alone for a grand total of 215 as of today.
I feel like my content is original, well-written, matches search intent, and offers real value to the reader.
I’ve used Semrush, Keysearch, and RankIQ to research keywords. I’m targeting a mix of easy to moderately difficult terms. I’m building topic clusters and interlinking. I’m trying to understand semantics.
After some struggles, I’m now putting out 15 articles per month and have done that for the past 3 months. I will continue to do that.
I’m building high quality niche-relevant backlinks. I know DA doesn’t matter, but mine shot up from 26 to 38 in the past month from gaining some great links.
I’ve watched the recommended YouTube tutorials and I’ve taken recommended courses.
I’ve had an audit with a respected source.
I feel like I’m implementing best practices, but I’m very obviously not. I’m clearly too close to it or something and can’t see what’s wrong.
I’m stuck at 15K pageviews on average per month. Some of my recipes spike during Q4 holidays. 80% on average is from Google.
At this point I’m wondering if I should take a step back and try and leverage my Instagram following instead as I’ve made deals and money that way at least. People seem to like me enough although I kinda hate being on camera.
Or what is the next step? What do you do when you plateau and feel like you’re on a hamster wheel? At what point do you call it quits?
Answer
In terms of SEO:
- Slow down on the content production, work on what’s not performing today – out of your 215 posts, there’s probably 10-15 of them bringing a good 70% of the traffic, and another 200 that are basically sitting ducks.
- You need to see where you can improve the top 10-15 (if anything), and find potential in the remaining 200 posts to improve.
- Look at what the competition is doing better than you, structure, keyword, internal linking.
- Work A LOT on your internal linking structure, if you think you’re doing enough, do more.
- Don’t give too much importance to backlinks.
- It’s good to work on it, it shouldn’t be what you focus on the most.
- Implement Schema if you haven’t done so already.
You’ll get there eventually.
Outside of SEO tasks:
Grow your existing audience. Newsletter, Instagram — whatever, as long as you keep them engaged and find a way to make money with them (affiliation, ads, etc.).
Deliver content catered for this audience instead of giving full focus to SEO.
And about you hating being on camera…
I was told really recently in a business you’re bound to step out of your comfort zone… I’m not in a position to tell you to do it because I can’t do it for myself, but the answer’s probably here, unfortunately.
There are times where you need to review the direction you’re taking. You might be doing things the right way, but are you doing the right things?
Take some time to focus on what matters more for your business – that can involve breaking away from your routine; in this example above, dropping some SEO for more social, since it delivers better results.