I got serious about understanding organic search for Jukkasoft somewhere towards end of 2019. With my favorite text editor open, I found this mystical piece of draft:

Recipe for stepwise blog changes

Make timetable of Feature Implementation
Define clear “Milestones” to the timetable
Prioritize changes, if you have many of them
Have a sort of A/B testing: save ‘pre’ Stats numbers
Implement the Feature!
Keep a Diary of Detailed Implementation
After implementation
Measure change in Stats
Write and Observe What Happened

Timespan and estimating effort

Don’t underestimate. Changes are often like small software development projects. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that of underestimating: happens too often. Keep your deadlines realistic, that gives ample self-confidence and you can always later on keep snipping time to get more accurate estimates. I’m personally still doing blogs just for fun, so it’s a bit different thing. However, even though I do Jukkasoft without commercial pressures, I like to experiment with scheduling and understanding the craft better – thus making estimates and timetables.

Distilling Stats impact from random noise

One issue that I’ve always been really curious is “how to get crystal clear measurements out of changes in a blog?”

The thing is, there’s quite a few kinds of “error sources” to blog traffic (Stats) measurement:

• as I’m doing the change, things keep moving meanwhile
• are the changes in blog’s Stats (numbers) due to external or internal causes?
• did a search engine do a major algorithmic update during the measurement period
• how could we have a clear “reference monitor” for Stats?

External causes that might change blog’s Stats

• Google algorithm update
• new Readers (users that subscribe to your content)
• a chance appearance in some media, which spikes the Stats up