Spigot has been designing websites in Park City since 2007, and for most of that time we’d come up first or towards the very top when searching for ‘Park City Web Design‘. Well, we’re no longer at/near the top:

Duck Duck Go:

Google:

Seventh?

After a couple of ads, we’re showing up in 7th position on Duck Duck Go. Second on Google isn’t too bad but I search on DDG pretty much exclusively. No offense to any of the sites above us, but three of them aren’t even local, and one is a directory. I’d like to say we don’t pay too much attention to these search results, but the truth is we’ve really let the ball hit the floor on this.

What happened to our rankings?

Over the last 10 years our daily traffic has slowly been dropping from thousands of hits per day, down to hundreds. This is likely due largely to users moving reading preferences from single blogs to social sites. RIP RSS, right? But I’ve also slowed way down in blogging on this website. The limited posting I’ve done has been split between Spigot and cinchws.com where there is quite a bit of overlap and I generally defer to posting there.

The Long Game Takeaway

The bottom line is this: Organic SEO is a long game and takes dedication and perseverance. Not every article posted will get a ton of traffic but some will. And some won’t be discovered for a while. So keep writing, then write some more.

Keep writing

Most of the posts that have gotten real traction are tutorials and quick fixes. The current top post by traffic is a post about CSS and smooth scrolling anchor links. It was written in early 2020. The current second highest traffic post was written in 2019. Neither had much traction right away and only recently has traffic ticked up. So keep on writing.

Write about interesting things

Tutorials and quick fixes are what I write best about. These posts do not appeal to people I’d consider customers or potential clients. These posts contribute to a higher bounce rate as users find the one answer they were searching for and then leave. And that’s all okay to me. If I can help someone with a problem and they don’t buy my stuff that is not a negative. I can’t say all traffic is good traffic, but the more visits to the blog the better. So keep on writing.

Formulate a plan

Historically posts have come at a haphazard but regular cadence. Writing weekly or twice a month was natural and easy. Over time that natural cadence has flattened to months and maybe even a year between posts. And I don’t expect it to ever be as easy as it was. Interests change over time and other responsibilities can take precedence. So creating a plan to post is the only way to actually ensure articles get written. An editorial calendar can provide a good solid roadmap to set topics and deadlines, but I don’t find it a panacea. Thinking of topics to write about six months out is difficult and often feels forced.

A flexible editorial calendar

Another technique is to create a weekly/bi-monthly task to write and keep a running list of topics as they come up. I try to keep Fridays open to limit client work for things like blogging, but without a list of things to write about it’s not natural. So I keep a list in Asana of topics that pop up at random times. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes it’s a wonder what I was thinking.

If you take a look at either Spigot or Cinch’s blog pages, you’ll see I clearly have not been following any of this advice. And our search engine rankings have suffered for it. There’s no guarantee I’ll suddenly start blogging regularly again, but it’s clear – If our rankings are to improve, I’ll need to keep on start writing again.