I took last week off from writing a new blog post because I wanted to give my epic post on blogging mistakes a chance to gain some traction. I also figured it would be a good time to see how some of my efforts worked out as I worked on increasing my web presence after all that work I did on my mobile speed.

This is speedy!

First, let’s talk about the goals I set out to accomplish when I announced at the beginning of September that I was going to write 12 posts in the month:

1. Kickstart the search engines
2. Show people that it can be done
3. Inform, educate, entertain
4. Show expertise

Let’s get #2 out of the way. I indeed wrote 12 posts for the month of September, which included that monster last post. Eight of the 12 were more than 1,000 words, with a total word count of 17,330 for the month. That’s about a 3rd of the way to having an entire book; I can live with that.

We can also get through #3 and #4 pretty quickly. I wrote what I consider one entertaining post which also was informative, and I think I wrote one educational post about images, with the rest being informational; at least that’s how I categorizing them. Some of those posts showed my expertise in blogging after so many years; I may not make a lot of money but I certainly know how to crank out some articles. 🙂

I know, it’s #1 that most people want to know about, since that was the biggest thing I was worried about when I started talking about the difference between being mobile friendly and mobile speed, and how all my rankings had suffered drastically this year. I also know I wasn’t alone on this one, but as always I’m willing to take on the challenge of doing the testing.

When I wrote about my test in writing a post every day in December on my business blog, I noted that it hadn’t worked and I had no real clue why. This time, I thought it might have to do more with the mobile speed, which was probably lacking back in December on all my blogs since I didn’t even know it was a thing to consider. If that were the case, then it’s no wonder that my content aims didn’t work.

I also did a bit of research in August & September and noticed that for all of my blogs almost none of my new content was being seen by at least Google, although Bing seemed to be finding me. I have to admit that was kind of scary, since I’d written a few things I really believed would have done really well with a lot of people. Even looking up some of my titles word for work on Google didn’t show any of my articles on the first page unless they showed up on someone else’s blog that I’d commented on. That’s when I knew I was in some serious trouble.

Thus, the 12 posts test. What’s happened has been kind of amazing; let me share some details:

1. On August 31st, my Alexa ranking was 859,918 and the blog was in free fall. On September 15th, the ranking was 934,330. As of yesterday, October 9th, my ranking was… 644,985! No matter what you might think about Alexa not being totally accurate, that’s still a pretty nice recovery if you ask me.

2. Because I took all of last week off, I went to look at my Google Analytics on Sunday to see what they might tell me. First, my overall traffic has doubled from the month before, as well as my pageviews; that’s not depressing at all. As a matter of fact, September was my highest month for both since last September; nice!

3. Something else Analytics showed me was that 7 of the articles I wrote this month were in my top 10 in the last 30 days… which is something that’s never happened before! My post from the 30th about blogging mistakes is at #5 with “30 mistakes you’re making blogging” and if I put the entire title in, without the quotation marks, it comes up #1… which is what it’s supposed to do. That means Google is indexing me again; yay!

That’s not bad, right? It gets even better for me across the board. I had 4 posts on my business blog in September and my Alexa ranking went from 1,114,055 to 881,170 in the same time period. In actuality, 4 of my 5 blogs increased their Alexa rankings in September, even with little content. The one that didn’t actually increased from the 1st to the 15th because I’d posted a pretty nice article in the first week of the month but it slowly fell after that; it really needs more content. 🙂

I’m feeling pretty good about things at this juncture. I think it shows that if you can achieve proper mobile speed numbers and have enough new content that your traffic numbers can improve. It’ll be interesting to see how well this blog does as I go back to a mainly once a week posting schedule, which hopefully will leave me more time to write for my other blogs as well.

Are you now encouraged to try to increase your mobile speed?