This has been the second time my site has accidentally been caught by SEO hype. First it was the “famous” “go/any HTMX templ” stack and now it is “local-first apps.” Both of these bring in lots of traffic from readers who will show up once and never again. These readers only show up for the solution for their problem and if they don’t find it, they move on. Not only that but the search traffic from Google inevitably will die out too.
It really is unfortunate how much of modern blogging is tailored for Google Search. How little is actually just a writer publishing just because they want to publish for the joy of it.
Let’s do a bit of inside baseball, in the last year (according to goat counter) I had 316 visitors from Google, most of whom came for HTMX, aerc, and local-first. Because of GDPR reasons (and goat counter) I don’t know how many were repeat visitors but based on traffic to the rest of my blog posts I’d say none were repeat readers. (Okay I have no way to actually know how many people actually subscribe because I don’t track the number of people who read/follow via RSS) The rest of the search engines have similar stories just with fewer numbers.
Honestly, I’ve considered removing analytics from my site because of how bad it looks at times… bounce rate, time on page etc. It felt really demoralizing to see week after week my numbers going up, then down, then down again. I recently saw a great talk which really summarized my feelings about this. It was by Jack Conte at SXSW titled “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web” which had a quote that really resonated with me.
Don’t let somebody else tell you what you want. Because then you’ll end up with what they want instead of what you want.
A good example of that, as creators, [is that] we open up our dashboards and we see these on what success is. This is a dashboard that someone else built for us and it tells us what we want. And the weird thing is that after a couple of years we begin to believe that. … This is success and we chase THAT.
– Jack Conte “Death of the Follower” @ 38:00
Jack goes on to say how the metric that most of us creatives chase is not a statistic but a feeling of emotional resonance. That we had an idea that connected with someone, that our idea felt valued by someone else. That was one of the reasons of why I started writing for the internet, to resonate with people and to share ideas. Sadly it is a reason I had forgotten in a sea of chasing SEO.
This post is as much about how following these SEO hype trains is unsustainable as it is a reminder for myself not to get caught up in following trends. How easy it is to get wrapped up by numbers. Instead I should focus on finding the next post that sparks joy in writing. Maybe the readers will come maybe not. That is what makes the internet so beautiful. It lets you put things out there, it lets you have virtually infinite tries.
So my future self, go enjoy and publish!