Not Writing For Search Engines [An Update]
Ayup! Last year, I reintroduced my personal site, making a conscious decision to stop writing for search engines. Instead, I'd just ramble on about whatever takes my fancy. No rules, no focus keywords and most importantly, no SEO checklists. A welcome return to pure, natural writing.
As you can probably imagine, this initially resulted in zero traffic from Google. It was to be expected. Despite search engines promoting the need for people-first content, it’s still easier to rank articles that are optimised AF.
I share my posts on Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn, which, until recently, were the main sources of traffic to the site.
Then, true to their word, everything fell into place. It wasn’t slow or gradual. In fact, it happened pretty much overnight. But Google now provides around 90% of all clicks through to this site.
We recommend that you focus on creating people-first content to be successful with Google Search, rather than search engine-first content made primarily to gain search engine rankings.
Natural writing
So it is indeed possible to rank naturally written blog posts. That said, expect way less traffic than optimised content. Yesterday, I was rewarded with a little badge from Google. 200 clicks in the last 28 days with 11 pages ranking at the top spot. Teeny tiny numbers, but considering it was zero clicks two months ago, not too shabby.
My posts started off short-form, but have gradually got longer and longer. This depends on how much I’ve got to waffle on about, but could possibly be advantageous for rankings.
Additionally, there are background SEO elements creeping in. For example, when I wrote my Affinity review, I knew that plonking the relevant phrase in the right places would help. Does this still count as natural? I guess there’s a fine line.
Personally, when writing blog posts, I don’t write with keywords in the back of my mind, as I feel this would get in the way of the organic flow of writing. Once you’ve written something that has been authentically expressed, you can make some basic changes to the formatting and in the content management system (CMS) you’re using that can massively help with SEO, without feeling like you’re distorting your writing for the sake of rankings.
Internal and external links
Most of my posts include quotes from other articles, bloggers or websites. No idea how much of a difference this really makes, but it’s touted as a beneficial factor. However, they’re primarily included to back up the angle I’m discussing.
Additionally, I nearly always link to previous blog posts. Over time, I think this will help demonstrate your E-E-A-T to Google and other search engines.
The quality and quantity of the external links that you use matters. Adding trustworthy and informative website links of high quality to your pages will help improve the credibility of your website, whereas adding poor-quality, spam links will hurt your site.
Google relevance
I recently wrote about Google’s ongoing relevance for local businesses. They currently provide me with nearly all of my website traffic and clients (for free).
With a personal blog, the traffic relevance remains the same. Once you’ve built a level of consistency, you’ll eventually be rewarded with clicks. All the clicks. Way more than you’ll normally manage to get from social media or any other search engines.
This, of course, might be welcome, it might not. If you’re purposely not writing for search engines, you may have zero interest in their traffic. For most writers, authors and bloggers, though, more views are always welcome.
Search Console
Nothing to do with how you write, but I noticed Google hadn’t been indexing all of my posts. Some that I manually added are now ranking at the top spot, too.
Just to be on the safe side, after publishing each article, I request priority indexing via Google Search Console.
Domain authority score
Meanwhile, over on Semrush, my domain authority score for mikehindle.uk is 2 (out of 100). Yup, a measly, almost non-existent number two. I imagine my blog posts are all zero. This is primarily down to low levels of organic traffic. It actually views the site as not having any.
No biggie. Articles are still ranking, but it’s still a little awkward and embarrassing. Something to slowly try and improve over the next year or two.
Authority Score is Semrush’s compound metric that measures your website's (or webpage’s) overall quality and SEO strength on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher your score, the better your chances of ranking well in search results.
Next steps in natural writing
All future blog posts will remain unoptimised and natural. I’ll continue to try and write in a way that sounds most like me. My site has also moved back to Squarespace, which has a much better link structure for blog posts:
domainname/blog/post-title
Rather than:
domainname/post-title
The basic SEO setting in Squarespace are sufficient yet minimal. It sorts the title from the blog post title, and I include the first paragraph of the article to the meta description. Add a social image, job done.
Other than that, it’s business as usual. I’m looking forward to seeing how the clicks develop (or not) in the coming months. All being well, they should increase as more and more posts bring in trickles of traffic. Either way, as mentioned in my previous article, The joy of writing a personal blog, I’m just here for the Zen. Ommmm.
