You’ve been working tirelessly on your blog and you have a solid footing. Now it’s time to get down to business and start reeling in some serious traffic. We’re right there with you. Here are five easy tips you can use to increase blog traffic. Ready…set…let’s go!
1.) Become Strategic About Your Content to Increase Blog Traffic
If you’re looking to increase blog traffic, the best thing you can do is create better content. You’ve probably heard it before – “Content is King.” It’s thrown around more than ping-pong balls at a frat party. However, creating “better content” isn’t just about quality. It also means being more strategic with your content marketing efforts.
The most effective content is the kind that fulfills a specific need. Think about your audience and what they genuinely love. Doing so is a great way to increase blog traffic. Content nowadays almost always falls into one of two categories: cool and funny or useful and educational. Choose one of them, and you’re probably off to a solid start.
If you need ideas for blog topics, check out Quora and see what sort of questions people are asking that relate to your industry. Buzzsumo is another great tool to explore what others have written about in your field and then make it even better with your own commentary and insights. In other words, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to increase blog traffic. If you’re seriously struggling for blog topics, you should check out these eight helpful blog topic generators.
When it comes to content style, aim for shocking statistics, elegant infographics, and captivating storytelling via video. You essentially want to create stuff that people want to link to and share.
Create Evergreen Content for Your Blog to Increase Blog Traffic
Let’s be honest here…updating blog content is a pain in the neck. Furthermore, evergreen content flat out increases traffic to your blog. This is why you should strive to ensure that most of your content is evergreen. Evergreen content is the sort of content that can live forever on the web and won’t become outdated. For instance, a post about this year’s Grammy’s nominations will become useless in just a few months. However, a post about classic films will continue to be relevant for years to come – thus it is evergreen.
Create Awesome Headlines to Increase Blog Traffic
As a blogger, it is essential that you craft tasty headlines that your audience simply cannot resist. Your headlines will get visitors to your site and will capture their interest.
Some may even argue that your headline is more important than the actual content in your post. If you have great content, but it’s hiding behind a less than stellar headline, it’ll die quickly. Appearances are everything. You just wouldn’t show up to a wedding wearing your stay-home-sick clothes. The same goes for your headlines…you simply cannot rely on lackluster headlines to promote your blog posts.
No matter what you’ve heard before, don’t hesitate to experiment with different types of headlines. Share your post multiple times with different headlines and see which ones work best.
Create a Newsletter to Highlight Your Standout Posts and Increase Blog Traffic
Promotion needs to be a pillar of your content strategy. How else do you expect your finely tuned blog posts to garner the attention that they deserve?
One quick and easy way to increase blog traffic is to start collecting emails for a blog newsletter. Once you’ve captured those contacts, you can send them regular emails featuring your best posts. This is a great way to bring already familiar visitors back to your website. Since these readers are already comfortable with your blog, they’re likely to explore a bit more on their next visit. You never know what they’ll stumble upon!
2.) Don’t Shy Away from Keywords if You Want to Increase Blog Traffic
If you really want to increase the traffic to your blog, keywords and SEO have to be a central part of your strategy. People typically get anxious if you mention SEO these days. However, search engine optimization is fine and dandy when done correctly. Actually, it’s more than fine – it’s magical! You get targeted traffic from Google and users find the information and answers they’re scouring for on the web.
So go ahead, shout it from the mountain tops, “I care about keywords!” Say it loud and proud.
The core thing to remember with SEO is to experience all good things in moderation.
Use keywords in your content text to increase blog traffic? Yes!
Overstuff your content completely with search queries? No.
Link to other related blog posts you’ve written on the topic at hand? Yes!
Saturate your post with links so that every other sentence is dotted with blue hyperlinks? No.
Let keywords influence your outline and help bring your post to life? Yes!
Google conducts billions of searches every day. Trust me, you want to use keywords to get a slice of that pie.
How do you stand a chance these days with more sites and advertisers online than ever before? Well, the answer is quite simple – long-tail keywords!
Why do Long-Tail Keywords Matter for Bloggers?
Long-tail keywords are search phrases composed of 3+ keywords. They’re far easier to target (and cheaper in terms of PPC) because there is less competition for these phrases. Targeting long-tail keywords is really your only chance of getting the top spot on Google SERPs.
For instance, you may love to rank high in Google for “health food” if your business is a health food store. However, there is a fat (or slim) chance of this happening. “Health food” is a pretty competitive search term. However, if you engaged with longtail keywords and extended your search terms to include “health food meal plans” or “health food on a budget,” your chances of ranking for those longer keyword phrases is immensely higher.
SEO for Blogging: Finding Long-Tail Keywords to Increase Blog Traffic
How do you brainstorm all of these awesome long-tail keywords? Great question! The answer is simple – start with Google. All you need to do is start typing in a phrase and see what Google’s autocomplete suggestions pop up. Next, put a few of those terms into Google and scratch down some of Google’s related search suggestions. The suggestions are located towards the bottom of the page.
Next, take all of the long-tail phrases you’ve brainstormed and put them into Google Keyword Planner. See which phrases drive the most traffic (you’ll also want to take a look at other keyword phrases Google suggests) and set your sights on the ones with high search volume and low competition. These are your gold nugget long-tail searches! Try to create content targeted around those keywords.
SEO WordPress Plugins for Bloggers
There are some awesome WordPress plugins designed to help bloggers with SEO. These tools make it easy to set up your URL slugs correctly, help you craft ideal meta descriptions, setup sitemaps, and make navigating other SEO technical bits a breeze. My goto favorite is WordPress SEO by Yoast.
3.) Find Your Niche and Hunt It Down to Increase Blog Traffic
It’s essential that you’re strategic about where you spend your time when it comes to promoting your blog. It’s nice to establish your presence across an array of social networks, but you’ll quickly burn out if you try to excel on every social site.
Dip your toes and see which social networks work best for your brand. Is your blog heavy with visuals? Then you’ll likely find success on Instagram or LinkedIn. Is your blog catered towards nerd culture? Then you’ll strike it rich if you find the right subreddits.
If you’re looking for worms, you go dig in the dirt. To drive traffic blog traffic, you need to go to where the worms hang out. Know where to find your worms. Understanding your audience is also key for building strong referral links from relevant websites.
Employ Google Analytics to see which websites are fueling your referral traffic. Locate the forums and sites that your target audience visits, and get active. Engage in discussion and post links or blog comments where appropriate. This is big – you can’t come across as spammy. You need to be perceived as a valuable member of the community who is sharing something worthwhile. If someone mentions needing advice about planning healthy means fo reach week, go ahead and point them to your resource. if they’re discussing how to string a lacrosse stick, you should probably move along.
Once You’ve Found Your Meat and Potatoes, Go All In
Once you’ve discovered your core networks, make those your focal point. Neil Patel highlights how Upworthy limits the number of social sharing buttons present on any given page. Upworthy also does a phenomenal job of crafting curiosity-focused headlines and emotional content!
The seemingly limitless choice paradox shows that too many choices can overwhelm and stress users. While we may assume that more choices are better, studies have shown that most individuals are happier with fewer options, rather than hundreds.
Upworthy only has two share buttons – Facebook and Twitter. You should seriously consider limiting your social sharing selection to the sites you get the most leverage out of on a regular basis.
Want More Traffic? Ask!
Sometimes getting what you want can be as easy as asking for it. A study conducted by Social Bakers found that users who asked followers to “RT” their posts on Twitter received 73.48 retweets per post. This is a stark contrast to the 2.09 retweets received when they didn’t employ the “RT” call-to-action.
In short, if you want people to share your content, ask them to do so!
This goes for just about all the different CTA’s. While your intentions may seem obvious to you, reiterating the course of action for your audience greatly increases the likelihood that they’ll follow through.
4.) Optimize for Speed and Mobility
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but your visitors aren’t going to sit around and wait for your blog to load. If your page isn’t coming up fast enough, they’ll hit the back button and move on to the next Google listing, which is likely a competitor. Need to check your site speed? No problem! Google’s Page Speed Insight tool will provide you with your speed score. It’ll also give you tips on how you can improve your site’s load time.
On a similar note, modern users spend nearly 3 hours/day on their tablets or smartphones. That being said, going mobile is a no-brainer for bloggers. If you don’t think your current blog is up to the task, consider checking out one of these awesome plugins. These plugins help create a version of your blog that is optimized for mobile devices.
- WEPtouch Mobile Plugin
- Jetpack by WordPress (the mobile them option is built-in)
5.) Play Nice with Others
Good old fashion manners go a long way online. If you’re looking to increase blog traffic, you’ll want to establish good relationships with other bloggers in your niche. Sometimes you’ll even want to team up with your rivals.
Comment on other blogs and be active in various communities. Consider interviewing popular industry bloggers or including others in a “best of” style post. Once you have a blogger cited or featured in one of your posts, tag them in a tweet to let them know. Chance are that blogger will retweet and share a post mentioning them, which earns you more shares and traffic as a result.
Linking to your own posts works wonders for SEO, but it’s vital to link to outside sources as well. This signals to Google that you’re not a spammer and helps build a positive relationship with other bloggers with whom you link to. Establishing good relations also makes pitching guest posts a whole lot easier.
Closing Thoughts
If you follow these five tips, you’re likely to increase traffic to your blog in no time flat!
