Last week I tried to backfill the major international trips from the past few years. I didn’t write as many posts as expected, so this week I continued the backfill. Progress was still slow, but I did start learning about SEO. Here’s a summary of what I accomplished this week:
Content
- Updated existing posts with more selfies and personal touches based on feedback from friends.
- Wrote about my 2022 Vietnam trip and recent US trips (San Francisco, Seattle, Arizona).
UI
- Added a Featured and Trending Posts section to the home page and updated the overall layout.
SEO
- Took the free Yoast SEO for WordPress course.
- Added focus keyphrase to posts for Yoast SEO suggestions. Since my content is mostly about things to do and tips, I used the format “things to do in <place>” and “<place> tips” for my keyphrases.
- According to Yoast, most of my tips posts have only OK SEO scores. I fixed this by adding introductions.
- Started tracking 5 keyphrases with Wincher and found out I’m at position >30 for all of them 😳. At least I appear on the first page when I search for “explore with Alice” (4th position though).
- Renamed photos to be more descriptive.
- Added more internal links to posts.
Stats
| Cost | $67 (Hosting $60 + Domain $7) |
| Posts Published | 32 (+8) |
| Views | ~450 (+100) |
| Revenue | $0 |
| Profit | -$67 |
High / Lowlights
- ✅ Shared my blog on LinkedIn and received my first comment on a post!
- ✅ A friend who’s vacationing in Hawaii visited Waipiʻo Valley after reading my Hawaii post 😮!
- ❌ Noticed my Bluehost disk storage had hit 58% of 10 GB. I deleted some images which only reduced the disk storage by 5%, so I also deleted the staging site which brought me down to 30%. I’ll need to come back to this problem later.
- ❌ Renaming photos and adding internal links was tedious. I wish I had started learning about SEO earlier and implemented best practices from the start.
Final Thoughts
I’ve got a long way to go on SEO, but I’m glad that my friends are finding value in my travel blog! Next week I plan to:
- Draft more guides
- Add Instagram integration
Stay tuned for week 4’s update!
Comments
4 responses
To your SEO point, when i was typing your website today, i first went to a wrong but similar website. exploringwithalice dot come, instead of explorewithalice.com. It may be a risk for your seo. I am sure there are ways to get around it.
Btw, you may want to decide whether youre planning to show up in google / ai search results more, or if you want to build a recurring following audience, at first. I think it matters, because for example if I am the audience, i will not travel every day to find “5 things to do in xx” useful to read every week. But i can find reading your diary useful (which is what i was looking forward to reading today). I think from what i can tell, you are focused more on organic search and if that’s the case, add metrics that allow you to measure that kind of progress as well.
Good luck, alice. Rooting for you.
ya I probably should’ve checked what already exists before I picked the name. I didn’t have that foresight and was only looking at what domain was available lol Hopefully I can start ranking higher as I get more traffic!
Interesting, would a newsletter be useful for the diary content? Yoast SEO / Wincher does give me some basic metrics, so I can include those in stats in the future. I’ll need to pay for the premium version to get more insights though, not sure if I should make that investment yet…
Thanks!!
Yeah newsletter is a cool idea for creating an active audience, just be thoughtful about the content.
In my mind, the weekly newsletter maps well to your weekly status updates but not your “5 things to do” posts, it can nicely link to them though. The weekly newsletter is your personal journal, diaries, or some interesting insight. Some examples:
– You walk us thru your last week journey and share that you dropped two new posts about waikiki (say the 5 restaurants you went to and something else)
– it is your anniversary and you share something sweet about the trip you went last year or you are doing right now, and then link to the top things for that place
ya it seems like I might need to come up with additional content for the newsletter to be more interesting. I can look into what it’d be like to set it up and decide whether it’s something I want to invest in right now