A new direction for England, Naturally

Blossoms and boats

Thanks for your lovely words and support for the site. Based on the premise that ‘sometimes change is good’, it’s now time to take things in a new direction, after the (very difficult) process of learning SEO to gain organic traffic. Based on the old phrase ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’.

In short, the site is not getting the traffic that it should be getting by now. It was created many years ago to help (not for profit). But now the need has also come to earn a living (still giving back at least 10% to animal welfare non-profits).

But the colossal amount of information on the site has meant that it is now ‘a site about everything’, which is confusing the search engines – and has also become too big, overwhelming and complicated, alongside personal life circumstances that need to be sorted out to simplify and slow down.

The one ‘social media’ of Pinterest was not working (algorithms have changed, the site is now saturated with AI images and combined this means it’s a massive job to make any dent into traffic coming back to this site, as its aim is to keep people on it to ‘buy things’, which is kind of everything this site is not about!)

Plus an ever-growing passion against litter, means this site now has oodles of posts about zero waste alternatives and other interests:

• Community (grassroots power, volunteering etc)
• Nature and animal welfare (wildlife, pets, birds, marine creatures)
• Zero waste (reducing litter by finding alternatives)
• Plant-based recipes (for animal welfare and health)

By adding so many ‘zero waste’ posts, the original niche of the site (community and nature) has been lost. This leads to overwhelm trying to fix things, and this leads to posts being changed and deleted. From listening to SEO experts combined with ‘intuition’ saying posts should be shorter and more unique/interesting to inspire.

All of this is not good for search engines, nor readers who get fed up of constant moving targets!

The solution (two niche sites!)

So the decision has been made to divide the site in two! It’s a bit scary (but so is life!) The new site at Zero Waste Showcase is going to be the ‘business site’ profiling all the lovely alternatives to single-use plastic and other litter (from around the world, not just England). This should ensure a niche site to help the planet, and hopefully also bring in the income.

So England, Naturally can be far simpler, and go ‘back to its roots’.

This is a lot of work (so thank you for your patience!). But hopefully the end result will be two lovely smaller sites that will be simpler to oversee, will help more (due to better niche traffic) and people can then be inspired.

People at England, Naturally can pop over to view alternatives to zero waste alternatives, or vice versa (buy a zero waste alternative, and pop over to see what England is really about – nature, meadows, seaside and wildlife!)

Huge apologies for all the changes to the site, but this does appear (from much research) to be the change that’s needed.

This is going to be quite complicated, to look at each post and decide ‘which site it’s best to be on’. For instance, the posts on ‘endangered species abroad’ are likely best on the worldwide site.  It’s also important to avoid ‘duplicate content’, so posts will either be on just one site, or rewritten if on both sites.

The end result should hopefully be two serene and lovely sites that can be ‘left alone from tinkering’, with occasional updates. And also enable a big rest!

Making just the tiniest change can change absolutely everything. If there’s an area where you’re feeling stuck, sad, frustrated, anxious, or disappointed, you can consciously choose to start fresh in that area today.