In April 2020 my blog was barely alive. I had moved to Hugo from Pelican and ignored any kind of SEO optimization for it. I thought it was stupid and that the best content would win. Little did I know that my content wasn’t even being found! So after thinking about it for a few short minutes, I decided to dive back into SEO and figure out how to bring my blog back from the dead.

There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now.

I made the switch over to Hugo a short while and love the fast builds. You can read all about me ‘crushing’ on it in my [What I Learned using Hugo](/hugo-static-cms/ post. There’s one main thing I want highlight in this post and it’s how to optimize Hugo for SEO. Hugo, just like any other CMS, is pretty good out of the box but you need to optimize it. Here are my Hugo SEO tips for optimization.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Please forgive me for my evergreen content creation and management sins. Yes, I admit I have mismanaged good content for the sake of expediency. The takeaway from this long post is this, always think about your reader first. Often I have ignored how my readers consume my evergreen content. For that, I beg for your absolution. I promise, on my CMS’s grave, not to stray from the path of good content creation and management again.

Recently I imported some custom reports in Google Analytics that I found online. They have been eye opening indeed! My most favorite ones are the Profit Index and Time of Day custom reports. Google Analytics assigns a page value to each and every page you have, provided you use Goals. Without using Goals, this won’t work! In my previous post, I wrote about how I started using Goals to see how readers interacted with my site.

This is my first stab at trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO here. A doodle/sketch just seems the fastest in this case. Update I have since given a lot of thought to SEO on this blog as I migrated it from one CMS to another. Each CMS handles SEO in a completely different manner and over time the migrations have had, in some way, a damaging effect here.

I’ve been going through a massive blog post purge and deciding which posts to keep or trash. Why? I have so many posts that were like Tweets, short and meaningless. They just bogged down my performance and really provided my readers with zero information. This blog started dying at the beginning of 2020, Google made some Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes and my blog started dropping like a rock. There were 100’s of similar blogs that were ranking better because they knew how to play the SEO game and I didn’t.

I’m in the process of merging and updating old posts with fresh insights and content. I dropped the AI part because what it really means is automation in this sense. Building blog traffic is always about writing great content and observing what Google’s AI does to get you to the top of the search results AI is just an algorithm that’s built on top of the existing data you have. In a sense you fit an algorithm, to the data instead of fitting the data to the algorithm.