Siri, Please Play "I'm Still Alive" TikTok Audio
I’m so obsessive. I’m so sickening.
Yeah, I know it was only earlier this week that I was talking about measuring website analytics to gauge the viability of a blog website and I said how I only went into that extended rant, asking myself Is My Blog a Good Idea and drawing out a guide to finding success in my niche, then after spending days battling with this, I said how I was going to get back to the actual work (creating content in my new decided upon niche focus for aroundLAwithTK).. and, I did.
Yesterday, I published a post that merged research keywords currently doing the site a bit a justice with the new “biker babe” niche content focus of aroundLAwithTK, listing locations of Tupac murals in SoCal while adding in why it’s a good idea to go by bike. The day before, I published a blog post about the best beginner bike trails and bikes path in Los Angeles for those interested in bicycle touring. So, I’m a woman of my word, boom. Done. (Not done. Far from done.. but yeah..)
Now, I don’t see how it would make me a looney bird to be back on these website metrics and trying to make it make sense. (I may indeed be a looney bird, however, this ought not be a charge against me in that case).
It wasn’t my fault, it really wasn’t. My mind wasn’t even on metrics and analyzations, it wasn’t. Google Search Console delivered a message to my email inbox, Your August Search performance for https://aroundLAwithTK.com, and what was a girl to do?! This led me down a rabbit hole as I’m at the debarkation of a 12-week content strategy plan for my blog website.
Hmm.. in these coming months, what type of performance should I be seeing on Google Search?
There existed no expectation, or clue, really, prior because how can you have expectations for results when you’re not doing the work?! Beginning to do the work now, I want to know how. How is this going to work? How do I know if it’s working? What types of results should I expect to see to know what I’m doing is working?
[Warning: This block of text turns into a tangent.] Because baby, I already don’t want to be writing about bikes and bike riding all the time, so if it’s not working, let a girl know! I could go write about other random stuff that doesn’t work for all that (difference being, it’d be something I’m in the mood to write about so results wouldn’t matter, per se, because I felt like writing about it anyway. Wait. Is that a light bulb moment? Go back to writing about whatever you want to write about whenever you’re randomly in the mood and don’t worry about who’s watching? Nah bih, that’s what you’ve been doing the last how many years of having this domain name and it has gotten you where? Here.. here figuring out a better way. You can do what you want to do later, TK, right now though, you have to build that strong solid base. Plus, you writing about whatever you wanted to write about whenever those moods scarcely came was not fruitful.. You barely ever wrote; for the most part, you been ‘round here paying for this domain name to give money away. Even though you much rather be on a bike and lack the desire to write about that bike life, at least you’re writing, at least it’s making you write aaaaaand it’s something you believe in, yo’ tail just wanna be a lazy bum ol’ bih and have somebody else write about it. Girl, now how did a little parenthetical note turn into a monster paragraph of its own? Back on topic, TK.)
Thinking about how my blog should be performing in 6 months made me wonder, well, how did it do the past 6 months?
By typing “Google Search Console” into my email reception search bar, I was easily able to pull up performance reports for the past 6 months of my website. The numbers were confusing, seeming similar from monthly report to monthly report without any clear pattern or trend. What do you do when you’re confused?! Talk to yourself in your signature long-winded, over-explanatory nature, inside of an artificial intelligence chat box and see what the system has to say.
I've decided I'm going to give my blog website 6 months of consistent effort with this new action plan I've created; I'm only in the 3rd week of this journey, but working on it is making me wonder how my previous 6 months were (when I wasn't uploading new content AT ALL... I don't think I upload a single new blog post in those six months; all of that traffic is coming from prior content on the site).
I asked ChatGPT about the ability to revive my website.
I didn't want to start over with a brand new blog website, as I like my current domain name and everything; however, I'm deciding to put in work for the next 6 months as if it were a brand new website. I don't know, can ChatGPT help me make sense of what I'm trying to do and if it's logical? Can I make this "old" website "new", so-to-speak, or is it dead?
First, I started by listing all of the metrics from Google Search Console’s monthly reports from the past 6 months, explaining that I actually don’t know what to make of any of it. If Google Search Console tells me congratulations or that I made some sort of achievement that I hadn’t prior, I say yaay.
Then, I continued by trying to express my predicament and the problems and unsureness I had around it.
As nice as these emails are from Google Search Console team, you can see how it can look like a whole bunch of nothing. It looks the same. The numbers aren’t that different. What am I even looking at in these performance reports? What should I hope and expect to see in performance reports going forward. I asked AI to help me make sense of the data about my blog.
Honey, me and ChatGPT, ha! Yeah, that’s my dawg. I’m trying to decide, was the response I received enlightening? Or was it that it’s validating?
This is how ChatGPT helped me with my blog.
Your Website Isn’t Dead — It’s Still Generating Traffic
You’d think Google Search Console showing me growing pages on my site would be enough to let me know, though neglected, my blog is still alive; it took ChatGPT backing that up to make me realize. | screenshot: @aroundLAwithTK
Despite not updating your blog, you’ve had steady traffic from previous content. This means that your website already has some authority, and people are finding value in what’s there, which is a great foundation. In fact, having clicks in the range of 783–901 and impressions over 50K each month shows your content still resonates.
Interpreting Past Google Search Console Metrics:
Clicks: These show how many people clicked on your website from search results.
Impressions: This represents how often your content appeared in search results (whether it was clicked or not).
Pages with First Impressions: This tells you how many unique pages of your site are appearing for new queries.
Your past six months show fairly stable performance, which is impressive given the lack of new content. However, your impressions and clicks did fluctuate, likely due to changes in search behavior, seasonality, or search algorithm updates.
Check out the pages where more readers riders have been rolling recently:
➤ How To Get Picked For a Game Show aroundLA
➤ Visit A Street Art Memorial Mural While You're aroundLA
➤ Only Broke Men Are Mad When Women Don't Date Broke Men
How to Approach the Next 6 Months
You can absolutely treat this website as if it were “new” by consistently uploading content, but you have the advantage of your site already having some presence in Google’s index. This puts you ahead of where you’d be with a fresh domain.
Here’s how to move forward:
1. Set Monthly Checkpoints in Google Search Console:
To assess your progress and compare the impact of your efforts:
Clicks: Expect a steady or rising trend if you’re targeting the right keywords and creating engaging content.
Impressions: A significant rise in impressions would suggest your content is being indexed and appearing for more search terms.
Pages with First Impressions: As you create more content, expect to see a rise in the number of pages making their way into search results.
2. Monitor SEO Indicators:
CTR (Click-Through Rate): This tells you how often people click your link after seeing it. Higher CTR indicates relevant content.
Average Position: Track how your blog ranks for its main keywords over time. Improving rankings show SEO efforts are working.
3. Use the Next 6 Months as a Baseline:
You now have a historical baseline of how your blog performed without updates. You can compare these next 6 months, after consistently implementing your action plan, to see whether the new effort is driving traffic and growth.
Types of Recaps to Expect:
Content Growth: Expect a rise in impressions and clicks as you publish new blog posts consistently.
Keyword Evolution: Look for new keywords that your new posts begin ranking for. Check the "Queries" section in Google Search Console.
Indexed Pages: Ensure that new blog posts are getting indexed by monitoring the number of URLs that are found and indexed by Google.
When to Evaluate Progress:
Give yourself the full 6 months before making any drastic decisions. Early on, you might not see huge shifts because SEO takes time. Around month 3, you should start noticing trends. By month 6, you’ll have enough data to determine whether your current niche is gaining traction or needs tweaking.
Graphing Your Past 6 Months
I'll create a visual graph using the data you provided from March to August. This will help give you a clearer picture of your past performance and serve as a comparison point for the next 6 months. Let me create that for you now.
Google Search Performance (March–August 2024): Web Clicks, Impressions, and Pages with First Impressions | chart graphic analyzing data created by ChatGPT
Here’s a graph summarizing your blog's performance from March to August 2024. It visualizes:
Clicks (blue): The number of times users clicked through to your website.
Impressions (green): The number of times your pages appeared in search results.
Pages with First Impressions (red): The number of new pages that received impressions.
This provides a visual reference for comparing the next 6 months of your content action plan. As you work consistently, you should expect to see upward trends, especially in clicks and impressions, as new content gets indexed and traffic increases. You can track how the new posts affect these metrics to determine the effectiveness of your plan.
How ChatGPT Helps with Blogging
It wasn’t enough for me to see it from Google Search Console, I had to hear it from ChatGPT. I needed someone else, in this case an artificial intelligence language model, to say it to me.
How was this information already available to me, only restated in another form, enlightening?
Having ChatGPT explain my Google Search Console analytics allowed me to better process the information. It brought to my attention points that I already knew. For example, it reminded me that I started the first 12 weeks of my content creation strategy plan at the end of August. In the explanation to the graph, it says that pages with first impressions is the number of new pages that received impressions — it would make sense that more new content results in more first impressions and that’s why the impressions line of the graph spikes at August, which is when I began posting new content to my blog for the first time in the past 6 months.
Why was this website consultation with ChatGPT pleasing, not quite a pat on the back, but a head nod as to say “yes”?
The response from ChatGPT about my website analytics was validating because it told me I was right about a few things.. well, a thing.. I didn’t need to start a new website! In my countless hours of research about how to build a successful blog, I remember hearing something about a blog being dead and the need to start from scratch with a totally new idea and a fresh domain. I hope ChatGPT is right about my blog being at an advantage for already having some skin in the game with Google and being at a good place for revitalization as steady traffic from previous content illustrates that my blog is nowhere near dead.
@abdankoo I Got Jumped On But Im Still Alivee‼️🖤 Bet They Want Pull Up Again 😈 #imstillalive #trending #viral #fyp ♬ original sound - AB DANKOO 🚀🥱
I won’t say it’s alive and well, oh but baby, my blog is alive!! [“aht!” sound as I stick out my tongue]
Riding Out
It’s a long road ahead.. dare I say a promising one? Looking at these website analytics and having chats with ChatGPT about my blog to help me process my thoughts is beginning to paint strokes of light in a dark tunnel. Lord knows a girl can get weary in them dark tunnels, child..
How do y’all feel about fan-supported sites such as Ko-Fi, Patreon, Buy Me A Coffee, etc.? Or even now how YouTube and Instagram have options on monetized and/or business accounts for website users to be paid members of an individual’s account? I’m definitely not in support of the full-blown membership to an individual’s account as if she’s Hulu or Peacock. OnlyFans, for example, will likely never makes sense to me.
Though subscribing to a single person’s platform, at the rate one can a streaming service with boatloads of studio quality content, is a bit illogical in my perspective, I am coming around to the idea of allowing for people that consume a creator’s work to give said creator a monetary gift if that’s what is on the consumer’s heart. I don’t agree that an Internet user should have to pay to have access to one single creator’s content on the Internet; it’s far too odd a concept for me, however, my mind can reach to understand a one-time gift after having consumed x amount of a creator’s content and wanting to encourage that creator to create more. Whew child, you see the internal battle I’m having before saying this? [breathes] If it’s on your heart to bless a girl trying to make it in this blogging world, my Venmo is @tekeyakrystal. A hot oatmilk chai latte with cinnamon powder seems to help me through hours of gathering, research and writing.
Thank you for riding, Riders.
