I'm not a pro at all, and this is my own experience
Sometimes, I write posts just to talk about things that are important to me, or bother me, like the cold weather I'm getting RIGHT NOW

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No SERP, keyword research done, just writing about one subject. No backlink, no magical dance around the firepit.
My first post started to get traffic. It was getting 5 visitors at first, then 10, 20, 50 a day… and people actually read my post (I wanted to tell them "go away, that's personal stuff").
How comes? The post is cached, and Google sends traffic for keywords around the theme – i.e., post about awful weather, Google sends visitors who search for "What's another word for bad weather?" or "What does bad weather mean?", etc.
I wrote another one about beer brewing, and the same phenomena happened… while posts written for my niche are stuck at 1 or 2 visitors a day…
How comes? Full KW research, painstaking backlink building for 1-2 a day while posts with nothing done but me writing for myself jump up to 50 a day?
Maybe I'm not good at writing for my niche, so I asked someone ($$$) to write me a post for a specific keyword, and the light bulb went on… I read the post, and I felt it was blah blah KW blah blah LSI and blah, focusing too much on keywords and Google.
It felt very artificial but the SEO tool said it was an awesome post!
I rewrote it for myself like I do about gardening, weather, and beer making… a few weeks later… google started to send visitors who stayed over 2 minutes per visit…
I think that Google is more interested in genuine content vs. written for purpose content. Since I build backlinks just for the site authority (I still believe it is important) but my articles are really me talking, asking questions (I do get answers) about subjects within my niche.
As soon as I see traffic on an older post going down… I refresh it, and Google is happy to send me visitors to read the updates.
As I said, I am NOT a pro and do not pretend to be. This is just my own experience , and any constructive comments would be VERY welcomed