if you're doing “longtail keyword research” with the sole purpose of ranking your articles in Google, then you are WRITING FOR SEARCH ENGINES.
I think this is a difficult one to accept. But we must accept it.
Like many others, my motivation to work on my site plummeted after the September HCU but I wanted to keep the site active with the little time I have to devote to this.
So I've completely embraced 'writing for humans' since January and committed to one post a week where I collate a selection of the week's news in my niche and also write a short opinion piece as the 'top story'. It's literally just to keep my site active with some fresh content.
It's a bit more work than I was counting on so I have now decided to use AI for some of the content - the opinion piece is still all my own work but I'm using Copilot to write the little 150 word summaries of the various news items I select.
To be honest, the quality of the AI content is pretty bloody good in my opinion. I'm not sure how Google would know the difference! I see a lot of 'journalistic' content which is really poor - looks like a 6 year old wrote it!
So no more keyword research and purely writing for humans. I'm pretty sure Google has no idea how to classify my posts now, as far as the overall topic goes (because there isn't one!). Maybe G will just consider it a news page.
My hope is that over time, as the percentage of human content begins to outweigh the 'WSE' content (Writing for Search Engines) then maybe Google will start to send me some love again.
But I guess until the classifier is dropped, it's a vain hope.
I've decided I want to keep my little site, long term because I can see it being a really nice hobby to spend time on. If it can generate an income as well then great.
In the meantime, diversification is the name of the game.
So my question is ... of all the possible avenues to follow (Medium, Pinterest, Reddit etc), as far as getting eyeballs on my site goes, which do we think is the best return on time invested?
Realistically, I get 2 hours a day to devote to my online activities. Some of that is time spent on my site.
I'm leaning towards Pinterest because the traffic does seem to be there and I think my niche would be a good fit for Pinterest but I'm interested in what others have done to successfully diversify and the return on time invested you think you've achieved (as far as traffic goes)?
I need to really focus my scarce time wisely ...
So, is LinkedIn a post or an article? I am confused about which is which. Long-form or short-form, forgive me for being clueless about all this. I'm starting to think about doing this rather than using Pinterest. I haven't done a thing, but PP has convinced me otherwise. Medium, I still don't understand it, I was poking around there today. I could not figure out where to post my article on both platforms. LinkedIn has two, right?
I need to watch some tutorials, perhaps on YouTube. I am a visual learner.
@Partha The way that Google has been behaving recently, I think the writing has been on the wall for a while. I haven't done much on my MMO site this past month, partly because I'm not sure of the best course of action. I am leaning heavily toward keeping the site going but ignoring Google.
This is what I do with Bing and Yahoo. However, after further consideration, I feel a sense of freedom in not writing for SERP keywords and starting to write what I want! My gut tells me that if I build a following in this manner, my followers are more likely to buy from me.
Writing this feels quite liberating, as I have always wanted to write freely on my non-MMO site.
As always, Partha, your posts are on point! To think about, much there is!
I feel a sense of freedom in not writing for SERP keywords and starting to write what I want!
100% with you on that one Paul. It really is liberating not worrying about SEO and just writing 🙂 My blog titles are always way over the 160 characters now.
I know Partha has always said don't worry about what AIOSEO and the other SEO plugins tell you but it was always there in the back of my mind ... after HCU I really don't care about traditional SEO now, with a big fat ZERO clicks from Google in 5 days straight 🤣
Lizzy and I were reading an interesting post from one of my favorite authors on WA.
He was testing everything and focused especially on one website that Google crushed. As is clear, thanks to Partha, we try to add traffic from social media and other places like Bing.
But what made interest for me, and that was well known from Lizz, was that he had success with 2 new sites after the crush. I was reading that this was not the time for new sites so...
And then I started to think because I was not sure I understood him correctly. Let's say you have had a website about Austin Mini (bad idea, by the way 
), and it was crushed. Can you add 1-2 new websites with very similar/same articles and you used on the first website that was crushed?
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