I do not actually think raiding by surface ships as a tactic available to the Germans in World War 1 is unreasonable but what I am trying to communicate is that the RN has a lot of responses and it is a strategy fraught with risk.
Oh, you want the strategy where the fleet outnumbered 3:1 by a globe-spanning coalition of enemies can win a world war
without taking any risks! Gee, why didn't you just say so? :^)
Seriously, the major advantages to a raiding strategy is that the Atlantic is very huge and airpower and radar - the things that shut down raiding in 1941 - are not factors in WW1. So it is very difficult for the RN to defend against raiding with its 21kt dreadnoughts and poor-range BC's,
especially if the raiding ships have a speed advantage that allows them to avoid combat with enemy battleships. The major disadvantage to a raiding strategy was lack of range in the German capital ships to do so without restocking coal somewhere in the North Atlantic basin. But that was a
design choice by the HSF before the ships were even built, which did so by following the wrong doctrine, one of Mahan's decisive battle. As if Tirpitz just read a book and decided to build a navy on the basis of some American naval officer's conclusions. Yet Germany was a
land power. If on the day its armies were in Brest, Rome and Moscow the German navy didn't have a single battleship left afloat,
Germany still has won the war.
Tirpitz's misconception was that the Royal Navy was adverse to risk whereas if anything its flaw tended to be the opposite, the deliberate cultivation and promotion of risk junkies because it unnerved the enemy. It is partly the reason someone like Jellicoe was so important to the Navy, he understood his personal pride came second to preserving the fleet for the next war while still being aggressive enough to take out the HSF if it gave him the opportunity.
Tirpitz was the wrong man for the High Seas Fleet expansion because he didn't seem to understand naval strategy enough to do his job properly. He built a fleet that better suited Britain's needs than Germany's. That's why I said the HSF would have been better off with him cashiered - at least then it could have built a smaller, but much more flexible and useful, fleet. Take torpedo boats for example. In Tirpitz's thinking raw numbers = combat power. So, he built TB's as small and numerous as possible. But for Germany, raw numbers of TB's were not as important as range, speed, and firepower. Germany's geographical situation demanded more CL's and DD's.
Now I think you have to be careful about assuming that moving German ships around more is the answer. The British too could move ships and ships can move fast. This means that the British once they know where German ships are can switch them to respond to the German attacks. If they know the Germans are going for coastal traffic they can cover the East coast with patrol groups and yes they might lose a fair few ships from these but they are equally likely to get German ships too and the balance of force correlation is heavily in their favour (this is even if we ignore the OTL experience of British light forces dominating German ones).
The way raiding worked is that the British couldn't just react in response to attacks because by the time they got to the scene of the attack the raider was attacking elsewhere. So, for example, if Hipper shows up off New York and sinks 100,000 tons of RN AMC's and merchant ships, and Beatty is currently sitting in Ireland with his BC's and QE's, then Hipper might be off the coast of South America by the time Beatty gets to New York. Beatty has to be at New York
before Hipper attacks. But, Beatty can't be in Ireland protecting the Western Approaches, in New York protecting that port, and off the coast of South America all at the same time. Beatty needs three squadrons, all superior to Hipper, in the three different locations to do that. But, if Beatty had 15 ships in three groups of 5 to defend against Hipper's 4, then 15 British ships are missing from the North Sea while only 4 German ones are missing from the North Sea. Bit of a problem there.