Six months on a marathon training blog

jaaP

Search visits on the running blog went from about 2k to 3.1k a month since April (WP 6.9, https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/ free). Not viral, but it paid for itself!

What moved it: I merged 14 thin posts into 4 long guides and had to redo every internal link by hand. Two weekends.

What I lost: the "how many km a week" queries. Google's AI answer eats those now, Search Console shows the impressions but the clicks are gone. It might be the guides get them back, I can't tell yet.

christopher

The merge is the thing, tbh. Content still wins. I did something similar on the plumbing site last year. We had 9 little "how to fix a dripping tap" type posts that each got 3 visits and I folded them into one page and that one page now brings in more than the 9 did together because Google just stops splitting you up against yourself.

Did you set 301s for the 14 old URLs? That's the bit people forget. Rank Math has redirects built in, or https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/ if you want them separate, but you have to point each old URL at the right guide and not just at the home page, that fixed a dip for me once.

jaaP

Yes all 14 through the Rank Math redirections, 301 each, old URL to the guide it ended up in.

Forgot to say I got one wrong though. The old "long run pace" post pointed at the nutrition guide for a whole week so people looking for pace advice landed on a page about bananas and gels and nobody told me becuase who emails a running blog about a redirect!

Search Console caught it. Impressions fine, clicks on that guide down to almost nothing. This is fine dog meme for seven days. I'd check your 9 once more, just to be sure.

tamara

The merging part is where I'd get stuck. How did you pick which 14 went together? My ceramics blog has about 60 short posts, glazes, kiln days, market weekends and I can see that some belong together but I'd have to guess where the line is.

jaaP

I didnt guess: I let Search Console pick. Pages report, one post at a time. Look at the queries each one got over 12 months.

When two posts got the same queries they became one. That was the whole rule. Three posts all showing up for "first marathon training plan" is Google telling you it can't tell them apart either so you'd merge those and leave the kiln day posts alone if nobody searches for them anyway.

Warning, this takes an evening per 20 posts! It should work the same for glazes. It might be your "market weekends" ones are just diary and stay as they are.