This article has recorded well over 100,000 pageviews since publication, overwhelmingly from organic traffic sources.

I wrote it a few years back for my personal Blogspot account, which I titled Alternative + Underground Music. This was an entirely personal muck-around blog that I updated a few times each year with observations about music. It had little structure and no objectives beyond being an outlet for personal writing.

Nonetheless, it was also a testing ground for my interest in SEO. To that end, I published content in my preferred voice and style of writing, but occasionally also applied some keyword research and SEO principles into my articles.

This piece about the late Motörhead front-man and lead singer, Lemmy Kilmister, was one such article. Motörhead, if you didn’t know, was a band that was enormously influential on heavy metal, punk and rock music. A significant part of their identity was based around their charismatic and unique front-man, Lemmy.

This article was published in a simple 10-point listicle style. I then amended it with SEO terms collected from simple keyword research. If you’ve read it, this is why there are some slightly ‘unusual’ turns of phrase and grammatical redundancies (e.g. [Lemmy from Motörhead], [Motörhead discography], [Motörhead album Overkill]). These are in fact deliberate keyword insertions.

Initially this piece received a modest amount of search traffic. Then on December 28, 2015, Lemmy passed away. Within days, this article recorded a tremendous surge in search traffic. It tapered down within a few weeks, but ever since it has continued to record traffic. To date, it’s received well over 100,000 pageviews, almost exclusively from organic sources.

What I find extraordinary is the way in which the application of some pretty basic SEO principles led to a disproportionately strong presence in search results.

It was published on an obscure private blog, with no incoming links, no formal social media presence, and no static front-page from which to index articles. Yet this article was already attracting a modest amount of traffic even before a momentous event (Lemmy’s death) led to the tremendous spike in organic traffic.

To me this illustrates the power of SEO. Namely, while you can never predict exactly what the result will be in Google, you can nonetheless try to aim for something good by applying best practice SEO principles.