My new SEO plan for my blog

Note: I originally wrote this in May 2021, when I was going through a big SEO overhaul. The fundamentals still hold up — broken links, image optimisation, keyword research, link building — but some of the tools and context have changed. I’ve added updates below where things are different now.

Blogging and SEO go hand in hand if you want to make something of your blog. I’ve written lots of posts about blogging and SEO in the past. My very first SEO blog tips post was in January 2014! But I must declare as I do in all of my SEO/marketing posts, that I am not an expert or trained in SEO. I’m just a blogger that has read things on the Internet and gathered them together for you to read. My old SEO plan for my blog was pretty much the type of things I talk about in a typical SEO tips blog post.

I mostly focused on SEO within my content. I use the Yoast plugin and wait for the little light to go green. Though if I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t do that ALL the time. Especially when I was blogging daily! Even though I knew better, I just didn’t do better.

Recently I’ve been working really hard on my traffic and I’ve been taking things seriously. I’ve managed to go from 4000 monthly pageviews to 13000 monthly pageviews in a couple of months by putting some real effort into my blog and I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been working on lately!

Blogging and SEO: my current SEO plan!

Fix Broken Links.

As my blog is 14 years old, I have a lot of broken links in my comments section. These are from when bloggers left their link when commenting and then deleted their blog. I easily had over 2000! That’s embarrassing. I always knew I had a problem with broken links but it was too overwhelming to think about.

In March I just started to deal with it.

My broken link checker plugin wasn’t capturing all my broken links. I managed to start it scanning my links again from scratch (I recommend doing this!) and it picked up about 700 that I was able to delete INSTANTLY! It was a huge relief, but there were still links that showed up when ran a scan.

I use Broken Link Checker to scan my site for free. When I first scanned, I got about 700 broken links. It was stressful but I just set myself the target of doing 50 a day. When you get into the swing of it and use the ‘find’ tool to find the anchor text, it’s pretty easy to get through 50!

Sometimes I would do more than 50 a day while sitting watching TV in the evening. Eventually, my broken links got less and less each time I scanned it.

I still scan my site every day and it finds between 5-20 links that I just deal with instantly. The tool isn’t perfect and doesn’t capture all broken links. I look forward to the day I search and get NONE.

It’s taken time but has been worth it!

Why should you fix broken links?

If you have broken links within your content, it can be a huge turn off to your readers and drive them away from your blog. I’m not so worried about that as in my case, I’m sure people aren’t checking the links in my blog comments from 2014. But this can signal to Google that your website is low quality and you may not rank as well as you could.

Optimise my images.

This is something I’ve spoken about before in previous posts.  I am guilty of being lazy and just uploading any image straight from my phone or camera.

Now I use Pixlr (it’s just a free website to edit photos – nothing special!) and I use this to reduce the size of my images, I reduce the quality (as long as it doesn’t ruin the photo if the photos are really important in that post!) and I change any PNG files to JPG. JPGs are smaller.

When I download the image back to my computer, save it as a keyword.

I’ve also been inserting alt text into my images properly. Rather than just putting the keyword, I’ve been taking time to describe the image and only put the keyword or keyphrase in the alt text if it’s relevant.

Prepare for the next Google Update.

I’ve written a whole post about getting ready for the page experience update, so I’m not going to go into huge detail here.

But the main things I’ve been doing are ensuring my images aren’t too big, trying to get rid of anything that’s slowing down my website and using some plugins to help speed up my load time.

There is a lot more I COULD do but I simply don’t have the skills and knowledge at the moment!

Disavow links.

This is something else I have been putting off. There are a few spammy links that point to my website. I believe it’s from when I got hacked. They point to pages on my blog that don’t exist, so I can only assume when I got hacked and my content was all replaced, these pages DID once exist on my domain.

I’ve been using a tool called Monitor Backlinks and I’m currently using their free trial. What I love about this tool is that you can see the site stats of the websites linking to you, such as their Trust Flow and Spam Score. This makes it really easy to see which links are ‘spammy’ and need disavowing. I love SEO tools that give a free trial! (Update 2026: I don’t use Monitor Backlinks anymore — I check backlinks via Ahrefs and Google Search Console now, which gives me a clearer picture.)

It was quite easy for me to spot as they were pharmacy style links that had anchor texts set to drug and medicine names. You can select each link, click ‘disavow’ and it builds the text file that you can download and upload into Google Search Console (the tool which tells Google to IGNORE these links).

Disavowing isn’t as important as it once was, as Google’s algorithm is good at ignoring spammy links already. I just wanted to get these links disavowed as it was really bothered me.

Keyword Research. 

How to get traffic to my blog is something I’ve struggled with over the past few years. Keyword research is something new that I’ve been doing lately. I’ve tried to do this in the past with Google Keyword Planner but just didn’t really get it. So I decided to take the plunge and subscribe to Keysearch.

It makes keyword research so easy! You simply put your keyword or key phrase into the keyword research tool and it gives you lots of information!

You can see how many searches it has a month, similar keywords, check how competitive it is and see the sites that currently rank for it. I also love the content tool which gives you some related words that you should put in your post to get your page to rank well, as well as ideal word length.

You can also track your keywords. This lets you see where you are ranking for your keywords and any changes. It’s quite interesting to see your rankings! I’m still working this tool out, but it’s basically stopped me using Yoast to just chase any keyword that I don’t know anything about or that my website will never rank for!

I’m able to now write posts that use keywords and key phrases that I am able to rank for. It’s better to rank high for a keyword that gets 100 searches a month than go for a keyword that gets 10k searches but you’re not in the top 100!

You can sign up to Keysearch here and use the discount code KSDISC to get a 20% discount.

I’d really recommend just signing up for a month and see how you find it. It’s changed the way I write my blog posts now and my posts usually stop ranking within a few days of my post being published! For example, my Little Fawn Box review that I published on Saturday ranked 7th in Google search after just three days! It really has changed my whole SEO strategy. I was using keywords blindly before now I’m able to optimise posts accurately so they will rank!

Link building.

I’ve been actively working on building links to my blog. Something I’ve never really bothered with! I’ve been replying to tweets and posts in blogging Facebook groups about contributing quotes to a post. This is a quick way to get links and get my name out there a bit.

I’ve also been advertising on other people’s blog. I’m just trying to advertise on 3 blogs a month at the moment to keep things consistent. These usually include a dedicated post directing their readers to your blog, a sidebar ad, social shoutouts and more.

Things I was already doing.

Just a quick section on SEO things I was already doing and continue to do so:

• Internal linking
• Update meta description
• Enter Alt text in images
• Submit my blog post to social media (Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook)

How I’m measuring my success.

So they are the things I’m currently working on with my SEO plan! The metrics I’m using to measure the success are:

Traffic: Obviously, an increase in organic traffic is the best to measure how well my SEO plan is working for me is by measuring my traffic! If I’m seeing more traffic, then I’m doing the right things!

DA: I know there’s a lot of talk in the SEO twitter community about DA and how it’s not important. I’m aware that DA is a third-party metric and can be manipulated. But I believe that it’s a good indication of if my plan is going well. DA is important for bloggers as it’s what brands often look at when approaching a blogger to work work with. In an ideal world, they would look at other metrics such as traffic. But I guess DA is something they can check before approaching you.

Trust Flow: This is another third-party metric, but another one often required by brands. My current Trust Flow isn’t good. I’m hoping how I’ve disavowed those spammy links and am working on building some new links it will get better.

Implementing these things does mean that every new blog post takes more time. I spend more time working on the SEO than actually writing the post it seems! But to see my posts show up in search engine results is worth it!

Do you have an SEO plan for your plan? Let me know what it is and good luck with both your blogging and SEO journey!

Check out this post: SEO Tools With A Free Trial

What’s Changed Since 2021

Looking back at this plan five years on, most of it still holds. Keyword research with Keysearch, fixing broken links, optimising images, building internal links — none of that has stopped mattering.

But a few things are different now.

The GSC impressions drop of September 2025. Google removed a URL parameter that was inflating impression counts, and overnight a lot of bloggers’ impression numbers fell dramatically. Traffic was fine; the data was just cleaner. I wrote a separate post about that if you want the full explanation.

AI search is now a real consideration. Google’s AI Overviews appear at the top of results for a lot of informational searches now. That’s eaten into clicks for some types of content, particularly quick factual answers. Posts with genuine personal experience, specific opinions, and depth have held up better than thin how-to content.

The site audit changed my priorities. I went through a “Discovered — Currently Not Indexed” audit of my whole blog in 2026 and found over 300 posts that Google had found but never crawled. That led to a big process of deleting outdated posts, updating the good ones, and being much more deliberate about what I publish. Less is more, honestly.

Keysearch is still my go-to for keyword research. I’ve tried other tools and I keep coming back to it. It does what I need without being overwhelming.

Frequently Asked Questions: Blogging and SEODoes SEO still work for bloggers in 2025 and 2026?

Yes — but it’s more competitive than it was in 2021 when I wrote the original version of this post. The basics still work: target longtail keywords you can actually rank for, write genuinely useful content, fix technical issues, build some links. What’s changed is that thin or generic content that used to scrape by now really struggles. The bar for quality is higher.

How long does it take for a blog post to rank on Google?

It varies enormously. A new post on a low-competition longtail keyword can rank within days or weeks. Competitive terms can take months or never happen if the competition is too strong. I’ve found that posts get their best traffic 3-6 months after publishing, once Google has had time to assess them properly. Consistency matters more than any single post.

Is keyword research necessary if you’re a small blogger?

It’s one of the most impactful things you can do as a small blogger, precisely because you’re small. Without keyword research you’re writing for keywords you have no chance of ranking for. With it, you can find the gaps where a smaller site can genuinely get to page one. Keysearch is what I use — affordable and designed for bloggers rather than big SEO agencies.

How important are backlinks for a blog?

They matter, but you don’t need loads of them to see results from longtail keywords. A blog with a decent domain authority and well-targeted longtail content can rank for specific searches without a huge backlink profile. Where backlinks help most is building your domain authority over time, which makes new posts rank faster and easier. Guest posts, quotes for other bloggers’ roundups, and PR coverage are all worth pursuing.

What’s the difference between on-page SEO and technical SEO?

On-page SEO is what you do within your content — the keyword in your title, headings, first paragraph, meta description, image alt text. Technical SEO is the health of your site: page speed, broken links, crawlability, mobile-friendliness, proper redirects. Both matter. Most bloggers focus on on-page SEO and neglect the technical side, which is why fixing broken links and improving site speed often has an outsized impact when you finally get round to it.