anyone actually increasing my seo successfully?

the one that surprised me was deleting stuff. we had loads of thin old posts that nobody read, some of them going after the same keyword as a better page. merged the useful bits into the stronger pages, redirected the rest, and the main pages climbed within a couple of months. less really was more on that site.

Yep, slowly. The things that actually moved numbers for me were boring: rewriting titles on pages that had impressions but a poor click rate, adding internal links from my stronger pages to the weak ones, and updating old posts instead of always writing new ones. Pages ranking around positions 8 to 20 in Search Console respond to that faster than anything else. What kind of site is it? Local business, blog and ecommerce all need quite different things.