I Was Obsessed With Rankings. Then I Realized It Was Making Me a Worse Writer.

By Gisela Ayu

There was a period where I checked Google Search Console every single morning. Before coffee. Before anything. I’d open the laptop, pull up the dashboard, and immediately feel either okay about my day or quietly terrible about it — based entirely on whether a number had gone up or down.

That’s not a healthy relationship with your work. But it’s also not uncommon in the SEO and content space, where performance metrics are always one tab away and the algorithm can shift overnight without warning.

What I didn’t notice until later was what the obsession was doing to my writing. I was so focused on what would rank that I stopped writing about what I actually knew and cared about. Every topic became a keyword. Every draft became a checklist. The voice I’d spent years developing started to flatten out into something efficient but forgettable.

The irony is that the content I was most proud of — the pieces that felt genuinely mine — tended to perform the best over time. Not immediately. But steadily. Because they were specific, they were honest, and they had a point of view that nobody else had quite articulated in the same way.

There’s a version of SEO that makes you a better writer: it teaches you to think about what people actually need, to be clear, to get to the point. And there’s a version that makes you worse: it turns everything into a metric and slowly drains the voice out of your work.

I had to consciously choose the first one. It meant checking the dashboard less. Writing about things I actually wanted to write about, and then figuring out how to make them findable. The numbers didn’t tank. If anything, they got more consistent.

Rankings matter. But so does still wanting to write next year.

#Tags:

SEO#ContentCreator#WriterLife#DigitalMarketing#MentalHealth

✍️ About Writer

✨ Gisela Ayu is a Jakarta-based freelance copywriter and SEO writer who has spent too much time refreshing dashboards — and is now in recovery. She writes about content, search, creativity, and the messy overlap between all three. 📊➡️✍️

• Full Portfolio: 📁 Gisela Ayu Portfolio
• Let’s Connect: 🚀 Landing Page