How to Keep Blogging When You Miss Your Space

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Since we are temporarily living in a furnished apartment, this home blogger is without a home to decorate! Here is how I am tackling the time away and tips to help optimize the time when you have to update your blog behind the scenes!   

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How does being a home blogger work when you don’t have a home to decorate or improve?

To all my cherished readers, skip this if you aren’t into blogging!

I’m sharing today because I wanted my fellow bloggers to know how there is always enough to do blogging, even when you feel out of sorts.

As we all know by now, we recently announced that we were moving, and just a few weeks later, we moved to Scottsdale, Arizona!

Since we moved, we purchased a new home, but due to waiting until the school year lets out, we aren’t closing or moving into the new place until early June.

It’s a super logical reason to wait for the close, but the 60+ days spent with our only suitcases worth of things are leaving us feeling a little strained. This apartment is fantastic, but it feels a little smaller every day.

And it’s even more uncomfortable when you talk about home projects. Moving out of our home in early April, living in a furnished apartment, and moving back into a new (to us) home, 2+ months later, it makes things awkward for those who write about their homes.

And that’s left me feeling a little aimless too.

Thankfully, my business coach helped me with focusing on what I could do even without a home.

SEO

Sigh.  [I’m groaning on the inside]

If you aren’t familiar with SEO, it’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, when you ask Google a question, I want to be on the first page of the search results, ready to answer you with one of my blog posts. 

SEO traffic is awesome for finding new traffic and it stays relatively consistent, unlike social media or Pinterest.

And it makes sense. OHME has been around for more than 3 years now! That’s more than 320 blog posts that are (mostly) full of information. But for the first 2 years, I wasn’t doing SEO best practices and I really need to update those old posts! Until now, it’s been easy to say that I didn’t have the time to do so.

Some of the posts are interesting, some are not and you guys deserve for everything to be better!

 

Related posts you may enjoy:

 

 

What’s the plan for this home blogger without a home?

Over the next month or so, I plan on regularly updating old posts to optimize for SEO. To make sure that I am doing this as efficiently as possible, I purchased an annual subscription for a keyword tool called KWfinder.

 

Tools I am using for optimizing my posts

If you are ever in a position where you cannot keep up with the normal blog posts, I wanted to share my plans with you.

First, I exported all my posts using a WP plugin into Excel. This gave me a great report of all my URLs, blog post titles, publish dates, etc…

Next to each row, I added column headers for “SEO?,” “New Pins?”, “New Keyword?”

Then I went to Neil Patel’s UberSuggest and found which posts of mine were already ranking well. I exported those results.

For every post that had a score of 1-10, I went into the export worksheet and wrote ‘NO‘ under the SEO column. I’m not touching those posts as they are already on the first page for Google!

Then, I went to Google Analytics and looked at Behavior > Site Content > All Pages for the past 15 months. I exported that list to look for blog posts that are getting less than 25 page views for 15 months. I need to No-Index these. As I No-Index them in the Yoast plugin, I’m adding ‘No-Index’ in the SEO column of the export spreadsheet.

 

Why did I choose no-index posts?

Google considers your entire site collectively. I didn’t want to harm my ranking potential with posts that just aren’t useful. The blog post links are still active, however, as I’m telling Google to NOT show the posts in its search results. By eliminating the bottom ranking items, I’m hoping to bring up the entire site’s authority.

Again, not an SEO expert, just trying to make reasonable changes in the limited time I have.

Now that I’ve filtered out the really great ranking posts and have the posts that aren’t doing much, it’s time to start optimizing the rest!

How did I choose which posts to start?

I started with posts that have great potential for supporting the OHME mission, were still relevant to readers, and had a great email funnel behind them!

I felt like those were the biggest impact for growing my business and therefore best use of time.

For each post, I did my keyword research in KWfinder, updated the text on the post, included relevant post links as needed, added an appropriate ConvertKit email sign up form at the bottom of the post, and updated graphics. Then I scheduled the new pins to go out into Pinterest using Tailwind. Right now, each post is taking about 2 hours to update!

As I was updating the posts, I wrote ‘YES’ in the columns so that I could keep track of the posts that I updated and where I left off in the update process.

For optimizing on-page SEO, I am following some of the tricks in Debbie Gartner’s book. It’s very helpful for things to consider and maintain SEO quality as I write more & more.

This process is taking way longer than I anticipated and I expect it has a lot to do with the really poor internet connection I have in the apartment. (At night it’s about zilch)

Once I have my one category of posts optimized, I plan on moving towards food & DIY posts for Summer. Then I’ll start incorporating Fall & Christmas themed posts!

But I’m not just working on SEO

In addition to the SEO work, I’m still writing new content every other week to let Google know I’m still around!

We have more DIYs that we finished up before we moved out that I want to share with you. And I also have a few thing home selling tricks that I wanted to share with you, too! Even though we don’t have a traditional home right now, there is still content to create.

Please know that I’m no SEO guru, but this allows me to continue growing OHME without creating tons of new content. As always with SEO, this may take a long time to show results. However, I am super comfortable that this is the best use of my time and hopefully will pay off in 3-6 month’s time.

Whew. If you’re not a blogger and still reading this, please go grab a cup of coffee! I apologize if it was a little dry.

And for my fellow bloggers, sometimes being forced to doing what you’re used to doing and change can do a little good. I’ve been avoiding doing this work for so long and now it’s the perfect time to jump in and update the old content!

Catch you soon my friends!

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I’m a busy mom of two little ones who is constantly looking for the yummiest meals that are quick to make for school nights. I am a big fangirl of chalk paint projects because they make my DIY skills look amazing– even though I’m not a pro. I believe in creating routines to keep our days in check– even if they change each season! I completely understand what it’s like to be a Type A personality who tries to plan all the things, but still, wonder where to simply start.I’m a huge fan of not being Pinterest perfect. I prefer done over perfect any day.

2 Comments

  1. I think this is a very good use of your time! I also purchased Debbie Gartner’s book and have started to implement her strategies. I had not heard of Uber Suggest so that’s a good tip to know. I’ve only got about a hundred posts and that’s enough in itself, you definitely have your work cut out for you.

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