Pondering Whether to get some SEO Help...

I've been running my main blog over @ revisesociology.com now since 2014, seven years, over 1300 posts and 25 million views, not bad for just me on my lonesome...

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It's an A-level sociology site, content is free to view and that drives sales of my premium revision for exam resources.

I know the basics of SEO - as follows:

  1. Post content regularly - for me that means at least twice a week.
  2. Write plenty of decent quality content, long form posts, long form for me means over 1500 words.
  3. Use at least one image per post and label and tag them .
  4. A clearly structured series of main pages, with links from relevant posts back to them.
  5. Tagging and categorising appropriately.
  6. Sharing to Facebook and Twitter.
  7. Update old posts regularly - for me I run a 2 year cycle of updates on the main posts.
  8. Engagement - a massive fail for me!

I do all of the above, except number, religiously - I have done for seven years.

I used to post every day in the early days, but that's when I was populating the site with the main content, then I relaxed to three days a week, now I'm down to 2, I should up that to three really, but the traffic's holding its own.

The traffic is seasonal, peaks in exam season (May, June), troughs in the summer holidays (August), and has been affected by Covid, especially year one, but then bounced back this year, pretty strongly, peaking in early spring probably because the 'in-school' assessments due to no exams again were a month earlier than exams usually are!

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It's a WordPress.com managed site with a pro-subscription - only $20 a month for that, and given the revenue the site generates, that's a tiny amount of money, and for that I get a lot of optimisation done for me on auto-pilot, so I don't need to worry about installing this or that widget.

HOWEVER, I know that SEO is a complex game and so I've opted to go with a company based in India called OMEFYI... $225 a month for an impressive list of services, there's about 50 things on the list (it goes on...)

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Really I'm curious to get their thoughts on an SEO optimisation strategy, I know there are things I could be doing better.

I've actually had dozens of emails over the years offering me SEO services and batted the lot of them back, but this particular one was polite, calm, not 'in your face' and they're not in the slightest bit pushy, which I like.

And I can cancel at any time and they offer a money back guarantee if I don't get their promised results after 6 months - which is page one ranking on Google for my Key Words.

The Key words for my site are pretty simple - 'sociology', 'A-level', 'Revision' and then a whole load of content words and phrases such as 'research methods'.

Or any other combinations the company suggests I target after they do a competitor search for me - there are a couple in particular I'd like to knock down the rankings.

I doubt very much if I'll get my money back if I don't get results, but at this stage of the game a little time spent on SEO is worth a punt of $1000 - and NOW is the time to pay for it - the exam season 2022 starts in about 6 months time - so 6 months of optimisation and I should be well set for increased advertising and sales revenues, hopefully!

Do I sign up...?

They've got back to me and are keen, but a stumbling block is that they want access to my blog, I'm guessing this means full administrative access, and something called FTP access.

Now it's real it's freaking me out a bit!

The potential for them to do lasting damage to my SEO has occurred to me.

Is it worth the risk?

More digging involved I think!

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Ecency