For a little over a year now, I’ve been writing blog posts on digital marketing topics with varying levels of activity. Alongside the content creation, I’ve been practicing search engine optimization (SEO) and learning how to build search visibility from scratch. I didn’t have any major plan in place for improving the search visibility of this page (which is something there should always be), I mostly wanted to write about the topics that were on my mind and come up with more on the fly. During the writing process, I’ve also applied some optimization techniques to the articles and the website itself.

Initially, writing here felt like a struggle against windmills, especially from the perspective of search engine visibility. All the topics and keywords I chose to write around were already quite competitive in Google, both in terms of optimization and paid advertising. For these keywords, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of Finnish articles, and getting clicks among them has proven to be challenging with this limited effort.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to allocate as much time to blog writing as I might have wanted. I only bring out my laptop when I feel like I have a few things to share. If I roughly estimate the hours I’ve spent updating the blog over the past six months, it’s definitely under 30 hours. Now, since I officially launched the blog back in the fall of 2020 (around October/November), I thought it would be interesting to take a small review of where I’ve gotten to, about half a year later.

When looking at the results, the first thing to note is that the curves are clearly trending upwards, indicating that the direction is right and each metric seems to be growing slowly but in the desired manner. The number of impressions in search results has shown a significant and steady increase. On October 28th, the website received just under 10 impressions in Google search results, and now in April 2021, it’s receiving 70-90 impressions daily, which is an almost tenfold increase. The number of visitors coming to the site through search engines is still relatively modest, with 82 visitors at the time of the screenshot, which is not a great result but is a positive sign.

The average search engine ranking is still quite modest. Currently, my website is found on the fourth or fifth page of search results, which is simply because I have used commonly used keywords. I’m relatively satisfied with the click-through rate (CTR) of the site. In summary, the overall picture suggests that search engine visibility has experienced some growth, but more is needed!

Results summarized from 6 months of search engine optimization:

• 5.6k impressions on Google search results for pages and articles
• Approximately 80 organic visitors
• Daily search engine visibility in search results nearly increased tenfold
• Average ranking in search results increased from around 60th place to 49th place

What’s Next?

When looking at the results and wanting to develop the site based on the data, a few things come to mind that I could start with. Continuing active content creation with new, and perhaps less competitive, keywords would be a good way to start increasing both search ranking and organic traffic. By less competitive keywords, I mean longer keyword combinations (long-tail keywords), which have started to appear in the Search Console.

Investing in content will also be important for the future of the blog. The current texts might have been hastily written on a whim and then edited later. Here, enthusiasm has sometimes won over planning. I intend to make the texts more user-friendly, potentially lightening them and adding more illustrative images. Additionally, now that there are quite a few articles, some categorization or organization of them is necessary to prevent a confusing user experience and make it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for. Furthermore, I’ll review the meta titles and descriptions of the pages to aim for a higher click-through rate from search results.

Summary

This article mainly covered search engine visibility and the traffic I’ve obtained from unpaid search results. I intentionally left out the Google Analytics side, which would have provided valuable data on user engagement with the content. At this stage, as the traffic is still modest and my personal goal for the site is to increase organic traffic and visibility, user engagement becomes a secondary metric, although it also affects search engine visibility.

Now that I see that the snowball is starting to roll, I’m considering setting a goal for the next six months to have over 100 visitors to the site monthly through organic search results. There’s still a way to go, but it’s not an impossible goal! Let’s continue with the optimizations.