Hi! Since 2013 I run a food recipes website called Sabores de Israel! Between 2013 and 2016, I published regularly and grew the site to 45,000 monthly unique users at its peak. After that, life took me in other directions, and the site remained online but with no new content.
Now, in 2025, I decided to revive the project — and take the opportunity to validate several SEO hypotheses.
SEO Hypotheses I Wanted to Confirm:
- Freshness is crucial: every page needs updates at least every 6 months.
- Keyword expansion fuels growth: more keywords (especially long-tails) = more impressions = more traffic.
- Content depth and user intent alignment directly impact ranking potential.
- User feedback is a goldmine for SEO improvements.
- Site speed and hosting matter — but content quality and structure matter even more.
What Has Changed?
Complete Website Rebuild
- Killed the old ThemeForest theme, which used WPBakery and some Elementor pages (I hate page builders!).
- Rebuilt the entire site from scratch using the Twenty Twenty-Four minimal block theme from Automattic.
- Customized the theme to fit my needs perfectly. I’m extremely pleased with the new results.
Infrastructure Optimization
- Still on shared hosting at Hostinger, with LiteSpeed server and plugin, using their online services for images, CCSS, and other LiteSpeed optimizations.
- Using Hostinger’s CDN infrastructure.
- Updated permalink structure: removed the old “.html” extensions and migrated to clean, modern folder-style URLs, implementing proper 301 redirects and updated canonical tags to preserve SEO value.
Massive Content Rewrite
- Anchor recipes were expanded to over 2,000 words.
- Rewrote almost all posts using customized GPTs, tailored to match my writing style and content vision.
- Analyzed user comments on each post to better align content with user needs, and created meaningful FAQ sections.
- Performed deep keyword research focusing on user intent, both short-tail and long-tail expressions.
- Improved structure, clarity, and search relevance across all content.
Results After 21 Days
GA (Google Analytics):
- Sessions: +73.4% (15K)
- Active users: +78.7% (13K)
- Views: +81.4% (18K)
- Event count: +77.1% (55K)
→ Dramatic growth in every metric!
GSC (Google Search Console):
Comparing the two periods (15/03–05/04 vs. 05/04–26/04), we can see:
- Total clicks grew from 9,060 to 14,500, a +60% increase.
- Total impressions rose from 299K to 664K, a +122% increase.
- Average CTR dropped from 3% to 2.2%.
- Average position fell slightly from 9.6 to 11.9.
Important:
- CTR and average position dropped because of the massive increase in indexed keywords (from 3,838 to 12,900 according to Semrush!).
- This is expected: when you rank for more KWs, many of them are in lower positions at the beginning, dragging averages down.
- But clicks and impressions exploded upwards – which is exactly what we want!
SEMrush:
- Organic keywords: +234% (now 12.9K)
- Estimated organic traffic: +262%
- Traffic cost value: +778%
→ The site was reborn.
Lessons learned so far:
- Content is still the King (but only when aligned with search intent and users’ needs).
- Technical simplicity wins: no page builders, clean infrastructure, minimal plugins.
- Update and respect your old content: listen to your users (comments!), and evolve your posts accordingly.
- Good infrastructure matters, but perfect speed isn’t everything: Even though I still have technical improvements to make (e.g., cron jobs are partially blocked by cache plugin, limiting CCSS and image optimization over QUIC.cloud), the site is already growing like crazy. Perfect speed helps — but strong content and structure move the needle even more.
Tools used in this project:
- GA
- GSC
- SemRush
- Ubersuggest
- Google Page Speed
What’s next?
This is just the beginning. I’ll post a new update after completing the first 30 days to see how trends evolve over time. I believe the momentum will keep growing, as new content continues to be crawled and evaluated.
If you’ve been through a similar process or have insights to share, I’d love to hear them.
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