The Struggle. How to Get Consistent Traffic?

I've had this website for many years now and it has seen its ups and downs as it relates to traffic from search and other sources. Before COVID, the site would get around 2000 or more readers per month. Then as LLMs started to hit the scene, traffic dropped steadily over time. By the fall of 2025 traffic on the site had dropped to almost nothing. In September of 2025, I had 160 active users on the site and I think that those were mostly bots.

So I went ahead and made some improvements to the structure of the site and added some content. I added 500 in-depth articles about IT related subjects that interest me. And what was awesome was that suddenly traffic bounced back. I thought that this bounce back was due to adding all that content, and improving my site. And maybe it was, because it caused search engines to see my site again and start showing it to users. a Things were looking awesome! In fact I was seeing record numbers of people on the site every day. Every few minutes I would check Google Analytics and I would see 5-10 people in Realtime meaning that there were people constantly reading my material. Organic search increate

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Then suddenly on 2/19/2020, the sudden gift of search traffic just disappeared! Suddenly for the first time in several days I saw that there were no people on the site, in the middle of the day. As far as I can tell, something in the algo at Google had changed around Feb 9, 2026 to give me a lot of traffic, and on Feb 19 it all went away.

I don’t have an infinite corporate budget for advertising. I am just a guy on a laptop trying to make something people will read and the only ads I have are for my own books. So it is incredibly frustrating to see that even when you are trying to do everything right you are completely beholden to Google, X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram in order to drive traffic to your site. The only thing that I can do is keep grinding and hope that the forces that rule the SEO universe will give me their blessing, because getting technical seems to consume more time and money, and only get you incremental gains which will be taken away the next time Google changes their algo.

This is what I will likely do next. Continue to dig into Search Console and Analytics, strengthen my experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, try to optimize for local content if possible using my job board and to diversify my traffic sources. Or, I could just wait it out .

Have you experienced these issues with your blog or website? How did you approach fixing it? Did you see anything that worked for you? I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out on X. https://x.com/PeakGrizzly