Shutting Down My SEO Blog

After 11 years, I have decided to shut down my personal SEO blog. This is why. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ Hey {NAME}, After 11 years I have decided to shut down my personal SEO blog. But don't worry: Because we have spent the last 9 months working hard to [transform it into something much better](. We decided to: - Move from a DR77 UK based domain to a DR33 .com domain - Delete 44% of our content (we deleted 241 pages) - Change our entire URL structure - Rebuild every page on the site from the ground up - Redesign thousands of images [Image]( But why would we take such a huge risk from an SEO standpoint? Well: At this point I feel like the personal "Matthew Woodward" brand and the UK based domain was limiting our growth. Don't forget: My personal SEO blog was started as a simple experiment 11 years ago - I never planned for it to grow and help thousands of people like you {NAME}. [So please check out the new site here](. Here is a run down of the major changes: Complete Redesign & Rebrand We redesigned the entire site from the ground up from the [homepage]( to content templates: [Image]( At the same time we did a complete rebrand to step away from the personal Matthew Woodward brand, and more towards my Search Logistics agency brand. Searchable Content Library Previously we had separate SEO, Blogging & Work portals to house our content.  Ultimately, this was just a categorised list of exact match anchor text links which weren't that appealing and it was hard to find what you need: [Image] Now though: We have combined all of those portals [into a single page]( that allows you to search, filter and sort content easily: [Image]( As you can see: The pages content changes rapidly when [first land on the page]( versus when you do a search or use the filters. Category Pages Improvements Despite knowing how important category pages are to a sites overall search performance, our category pages were just a list of text links: [Image] Now we have moved back from Wordpress Pages to Posts and redesigned our category page templates to include: - At least 700 words of unique content - Custom excerpts for every piece of content - An FAQ section - CollectionPage and FAQPage schema Take a look at the [new link building category page]( for example: [Image]( We have done the same thing for 12 different categories across the site. Schema Updates We also took this opportunity to do a complete schema review and there was a huge amount of room for improvement. [Image] As of now the site is using Speakable, HowTo, Dataset, FAQ, Article, Video, Product, Review, Person, WebPage and Organization schema. You should check if you can add those to your own site - we use RankMath. New Menu The old menu was a very simple list of text links that looked like this: [Image] But: The new menu expands out with proper categorisation that allows you to get where you need to go quickly: [Image] We are still tweaking the layout to make this work well on mobile - for example we added the full screen search feature yesterday. What Is Next? At the moment we are waiting to see how Google responds to the changes - especially given the drop in DR from 77 to 33. We did a test migration of some content in January that resulted in a 30% drop in traffic for those pages, but so far so good on the full merge which went live April 5th 2023: [Image] The main problem though, is that we launched the site knowing it wasn't 100% ready. There are still a lot of bugs and although we have done a basic SEO review of the site, there are still a lot of outstanding basic tasks like updating URL's in the content. So while we are working through those fixes, I would love to know... What do you think of [the new site](? Please reply to this email and let me know {NAME}! - Matthew Woodward P.S. Next week I'm going to publish a very controversial indexing case study.  I built 15 case study sites with lorem ipsum text to figure out which is the best indexing method once and for all. Stay tuned! Your subscription details are- Email: {EMAIL} Subscribed on: 2021-10-12 14:32:31 UTC If you do not want to receive any more emails can unsubscribe by [clicking here](. Thanks!! MatthewWoodward.co.uk, 44 The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells TN2 5TN, United Kingdom