Christopher's Big SEO Experiment: Getting Started

Changes are afoot in my online presence.

After some four years or more of managing multiple websites for my various projects I've finally broken down and decided that enough is enough.

Going back maybe five years, I combined all my websites into one. It was a mad, eclectic mess where serious articles on technology and digital marketing fought for space on the homepage with stories about vampires and magic, tips of self-hypnosis, and recipes that I liked. I started to build a brand around my position at this, if not unique then at least unusual, intersection of interests and expertise.

Then... my bottle went.

I was writing a book about SEO and every bit of best practice I was reading and reviewing was screaming at me that what I was doing was wrong. What was my niche? What were my homepage keywords? What would my title tags be? Oh, the humanity of it all!

And so I gave up on my wonderful, melting pot of nonsense. I bought domains (a lot of them) and broke my site up into chunks. Then I brought it back together and broke it up again because I wasn't happy with the technical build. And then I pulled it all a part a third (maybe even a fourth time) and rebuilt it again.

I followed every bit of best practice, every bit of guidance from Google. I behaved. I complied.

And I hated it.

I ended up with a whole bunch of "me too" sites. I was yet another digital marketing guy, yet another food blogger. The quintessentially unique thing about my blog, those intersections of story-telling and technology, film-making and marketing, hypnosis and pie baking (OK, maybe not the last one), had been lost.

So, I made a big decision coming into 2022.

Screw Google

I spent nearly ten years in "Agency Land", helping people to build websites and build businesses through great search engine optimization, digital marketing, and great e-Commerce technology. (Those guys are still available if you need them). Leaving that behind means I get to write more freely about digital marketing and worry a little less about whether or not I'm setting a perfect example.

It's also a great opportunity to run an experiment on Google by challenging the accepted wisdom about fitting your site into a niche and see if I can create a site that ranks well across multiple disparate terms.

This is the start of Christopher's Big SEO Experiment. Only time will tell what we're about to learn.