No matter what industry you are, blogging is one marketing strategy that businesses are leveraging to grow their company.
So while it is easy to start a blog, it is increasingly difficult to get traffic to your site.
That is why today I am going to share with you some proven strategies you can start doing today that will help you increase your blog traffic.
Over the years many experts have devised ways to which traffic can be increased but some of these methods have failed, some are even outdated has they no longer align with the Google’s latest algorithm – hummingbird.
Of course, google is a cornerstone in the process of driving traffic.
In this article, we will discuss the latest and proven ways to increase your blog traffic – these methods have been tried on many blogs and they yielded so much results in a short time.
If you have never done this before, don’t panic, we will make it as simple as possible.
Write for search engine
One of the most effective ways to increase your blog traffic is to leverage organic search engine traffic. This can only be achieved through proper keyword research. There are many free tools you can use to do your keyword research, google’s auto suggest is one of them. You can also make use of the search related items at the bottom of SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Other tools include Ubersuggest, Google Adwords, google search console, keyword everywhere (a browser extension) etc. Forums can also be used to discover topics that would likely get a lot of search engine traffic. With all of these tools, your intention would be to generate a topic that would get a lot of search engine traffic. How do you do this? Start by brainstorming, write down a couple of topics in your niche, go to popular forums like Quora or ‘answer the public’ see if people are searching related topics. If yes, the next thing is to start typing the topic gently into google search bar, you would notice that as you do that, google will begin to suggest a topic to you by auto completing your words. Those are the search topics that have high volumes. When you are done typing a suitable topic, go down to the bottom of the SERP, you would some other items. If you use the keyword everywhere extension on your browser you would get to see some additional items on the right hand pane of the page. Those other items would form a part of your content to aid LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). So what did I just say?
LSI is a function of the google algorithm that is able to recognize the context of a write up based on the relatedness of the words used in it. Google has become more intelligent, gone are the days where people stuff their content with a particular keyword and expect that google will land them on its firs page. Now when your keyword is ‘women fashion’ google does not expect to see just ‘women fashion’ everywhere in your post. It expects to see other words like women tops, female pants, jewelry for women, dresses, high heel shoes, wedges etc. This will enable google to know that your content as touched the several parts of that keyword – women fashion.
After writing your content, be sure to create a search Google console account where you can see the keywords that lead people to your website. Check what people search more and if your topic has impressions. When you see the search query that gives your post impressions, you might modify your post to suit that query better. That would give you some more traffic. On your search console, you can also get ideas for new topics when your content get impressions for a particular query and it doesn’t really supply the necessary information. For instance, if your post ‘how to write a short story’ is getting impressions for ‘writing children story’, you can just decide to write an article on that.
Write Complete Guides
There a lot of opinions about how long your content should be but the general opinion is that the length of your content is dependent on your niche and the audience you are writing for. However, it has been proven that long-form content get a lot of backlinks which increases the ranking of your website. Of course, this influences traffic to your website as google will prefer it to other sites with lower ranking even when they have the same of content you have. Long form content also increases the dwell rate on your website, which also gives you a good reputation from google. Google feels like if people spend a lot of time on your website, then your website is definitely meeting their needs.
A complete guide is simply a post or an article that touches every part of a topic as comprehensively as possible. It is very advantageous because people ask questions and they want a content that will supply them with sufficient information not just scratching the surface. That is what complete guides do. Short-form posts do have higher bounce rates than long-form posts.
Optimize your website for speed
One of the signals that is used by google to rank your page is the speed at which it loads. The faster your pages the easier for google to crawl. See what John Mueller, from Google says: “We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL).
Aside from this, people also do not like to wait on a page which takes a long time to load. This will lead to a high bounce rate which is not healthy for your website. To analyze how fast your web pages load, make use of google pagespeed insight.
This tool will also give you suggestions on how to make your website faster. Mind you, Google is experimenting to make its index ‘mobile-first’ meaning the actual speed of your site is dependent on mobile devices and not laptops or desktops. This means Google will be ranking website based on their mobile experiences. Aim to make your website load in 2-3 seconds.
Nice and Clean User Experience
A simple and clean website will always attract more visits than the clumsy ones. If your website is scattered and difficult to navigate, your bounce rate will be high and google will begin to rank lower on search engine result pages. The menu of your website should be obvious and easy to click. Don’t put important links only at the footer of your website and expect to get clicks to them. If you have adverts on your website, arrange them in a clean way. Don’t scatter ads all over the page, this will disgust your users and they would just bounce. Make sure the color of your font is highly contrastive to the background. Most times white plain backgrounds work better than colored ones. Make it easy for your user to move from one post to another or from one page to another without having to go back to the homepage.
Write Attractive/Emotional Headlines [not clickbaits]
Your headlines are very important to the success of your articles. In SERP people make judgement on your article based on the headline and the information you have included in the metadata of the post. So take your time to coin your headline perfectly, don’t be in a haste to write. When writing your headlines, there are several factors you should put in place.
Make sure your headline is descriptive and very specific. Buzzsumo discovered that the best headlines have a range of 12 – 18 words. Long headlines get more clicks than short ones but be careful not to use long urls. The text in your headline does not necessarily have to be a part of your url. If for instance you are writing ‘how to build android apps from scratch’ and your keyword is ‘android apps’, your url good be ‘yourwebsite.com/androidapps. Make use of brackets to add additional information to your headline, according to ‘outbrain’ adding brackets to headlines can improve CTR up to 38%
Headlines that start with the following phrases get more social shares – X reasons why, X things you, this is what, this is the, this is how, X of the, X ways to, This is why, The X best, How to make, These are the, Here are the, How to get, X stunning photos, X things that, X things to, You can now, The X most, X things only, Why you should etc. – Buzzsumo
You should also make use of ‘power words’ that catch people’s attention. For example, ‘effective’, ‘best’, ‘lovely’, ‘proven’, ‘actionable’, etc. You can use the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer Tool from Advanced Marketing Institute to check how emotional your headline is.
Make your posts attractive and easy to read
Spice up your articles with images and illustration. Also include relevant videos, this will draw more returning visitors and also increase your dwell rate. People will always come back to read your posts when they get relevant information without being bored due to your use of different content forms. Ensure you have Social Media share buttons so that your users can share your posts on Social Media. Don’t just put the buttons encourage them to share your post. Also, welcome comments from your audience as this will send a positive signal to google that your content is helpful. It can also improve the dwell rate on your website. Your comment sections are usually crawled by search engines so you could even get clicks to your page because of the content in your comment section.
If you are just starting your blogging career, you may want to check out this post. However if you already have your blog up and running, then what you need to do next is simply take one new tactic today and start implementing it.