Ongoing Remote Update: Paying for Content and Speeding Up Site

Current Goal

Ongoing Remote gets at least 10 Google search impressions in a single day in January 2021.

Tracker

Progress

Although my goal is modest, at only 10 impressions in a day, I am shooing much higher to increase my chances of actually achieving the target.

One of the principles I wrote in my notebook recently is that I should outsource anything that can be done both cheaper and better than me doing it myself. In this case, the writing of content is one of those things.

So yesterday I created a task to brainstorm 20 new FAQ topics:

Then I went on Fiverr and paid someone specialized in FAQ writing to fill in the answers. In addition I wrote one FAQ myself: What should I look for in a remote job?

I also realized that the copy on my site is also poor, and that I have no skill in writing sales/marketing copy. So I went on Fiverr again and paid someone to write it for me.

In the meantime I worked on SEO-related things that I am very talented at and can do better than just about anyone, or at least better than anyone at a reasonable price:

• I dynamically added schema markup for the FAQs, which can lead to featured results in Google like this:

• I replaced semantic-ui-react with picnic, which reduced the weight of my pages by over 100kb and pushed my mobile performance score to 100!

• I started working on replacing react with preact, which would lower my page weight even more. It’s working already, but I need to replace some test libraries for my unit tests to pass.
• I’ve also identified a better way to render my markdown-based FAQs. If I use remark to convert them to html over an API call, then I won’t have to import remark and it’s dependencies, which are 10’s of kbs. This is a great example of me using my expertise, because when I looked at optimization guides, none of them recommended this method and instead opted for heavier pages.

But with my performance score currently sitting at 100, I think I need to focus on more and more content and also ensuring that I have the right schema and html markup. I should make a content plan and then outsource the writing.

Roughly I think that if I can get 100 content pieces or pages up in the next couple of days, I should blow away my goal of 10 impressions in a day.