Starting out as a solo blogger blogging about personal life experiences wouldn't get you much organic traffic.

Friends often come ask me how they should do their SEO with the aim of gaining organic traffic and getting their blogs discovered.

Before, I'd always give them a few pointers on the best practices especially with the easy-to-implement optimizations. But I've since realized that personal blogs shouldn't waste time and effort doing SEO.

Here is the reason why.

Travel, food, or blogs with content mostly about personal diaries and stories don't have a "searching audience", meaning few to no one will look for these personal stories on search engines unless it is in a detailed guide format (e.g. SEA 14 Day Complete Itinerary).

I would now advice friends they should build an audience elsewhere first before directing that audience to their own blog.

Try as much as possible to leverage the massive audience on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Get people hooked on the content that you push out, slowly reveal that you have a personal blog and push them to subscribe for timely updates or other incentives and then keep them there.

An email subscriber is worth 10x or even 100x a Twitter or Facebook follower. That's because you have established a direct audience with your subscribers and they willingly subscribed to your blog with the expectation of more timely "updates" from you in the future.

So let's say you have a foodie Instagram account. What should you do then?

My general advice would be for you to create a simple website on a beautiful platform like Squarespace and then just make a copy of your Instagram content on there. Although you won't get much organic traffic at first, in the process of building up your Instagram audience and traffic, you can slowly divert traffic to your blog and ask people to sign up there.