---
aliases: ["Newsletter SEO Sprint"]
Is A: Project
Belongs to: "[[25q1]]"
Advances: "[[responsibility-grow-newsletter]]"
Status: Done
Owner: "[[person-luca-rossi]]"
---
# Newsletter SEO Sprint

## Overview

Building on the pillar article strategy from [[24q2-10-pillar-articles]], this project was a concentrated 30-day sprint to boost organic search traffic and subscriber acquisition. The sprint had two components: writing 5 new high-traffic articles targeting keywords identified in an updated Ahrefs analysis, and overhauling the internal linking structure across all existing content to improve site-wide SEO authority.

The sprint ran through February 2025 and was timed to take advantage of the post-holiday traffic recovery in the engineering content space. By this point, the blog had about 40 published articles, but many lacked internal links and had suboptimal meta descriptions. The combination of new content and structural improvements was designed to create a compounding traffic effect that would support [[2025-reach-85k-subscribers]] through organic growth.

## Goals

- Write and publish 5 new SEO-optimized articles (2,500-4,000 words each)
- Audit and update internal links across all existing blog posts (target: every article links to at least 3 other articles)
- Update meta descriptions and title tags for the 20 highest-traffic existing articles
- Improve site-wide Core Web Vitals scores (target: all pages in "Good" range)
- Achieve a 30% increase in organic search traffic within 90 days of sprint completion

## Key decisions

- **Concentrated sprint, not ongoing drip.** Rather than publishing one SEO article per month, concentrated the effort into a 30-day window. This allowed full focus on SEO without the context-switching cost of alternating between newsletter writing and SEO writing. The trade-off was that the regular newsletter required extra preparation in advance to cover the sprint period.
- **Internal linking overhaul as a force multiplier.** The internal linking audit was actually higher-impact than the new articles. Many existing articles had zero internal links, meaning Google could not discover or weight them properly. Adding contextual links between related articles created a proper content topology that improved rankings site-wide.
- **Content refresh over new content for some keywords.** For 3 keywords where existing articles were already ranking on page 2-3, chose to refresh and expand those articles rather than write new ones. Refreshing existing URLs preserves accumulated link equity and is faster than starting from scratch.

## Notes

- The 30% organic traffic increase was achieved in about 75 days (ahead of the 90-day target). The internal linking overhaul was the primary driver — several existing articles jumped from page 2 to page 1 within weeks of gaining internal links.
- [[person-sara-ricci]] edited all 5 new articles and the refreshed content. The editing workload during the sprint was significant, and she flagged that future sprints should give her more lead time. Noted for next time.
- The article on "How to Run Effective Engineering All-Hands" became the strongest performer, reaching #3 on Google for its target keyword and driving ~1,500 monthly organic visits. This single article generated an estimated 200 new subscribers per month through its email capture CTA.
- Core Web Vitals optimization required some technical work — lazy loading images, reducing JavaScript bundle size, and optimizing font loading. These changes improved site speed across the board and had a modest positive effect on rankings.
- This sprint validated the content pillar strategy and demonstrated that concentrated SEO investment compounds over time. The articles written in [[24q2-10-pillar-articles]] continued to grow in traffic alongside the new content, suggesting that the internal linking network creates a rising-tide effect. Feeds into [[topic-newsletter-growth]] and [[topic-content-strategy]].
