10 Ways to Bring Traffic to Your Blog
There are many strategies you can take to improve your online visibility, from creating social media ad campaigns to optimizing your website for search engines.
One of the most classic and reliable methods is creating blog posts, a primary marketing strategy that has withstood the arrival of more modern approaches.
The Value of Blogging
The main reason you should keep uploading blog content is to establish yourself as an authority in the industry. A business that shows a deep understanding of relevant topics will attract more customers than those that don’t make the effort.
However, there’s another important purpose for blogs: visibility. Having content that answers the questions of your target audience will increase traffic to your website, bringing in more conversions and revenue. We’ll discuss this further in sections two, three, and four.
A good blog post provides value to the reader and allows them to better understand the solutions you offer, leading to more conversions and sales. That’s why it’s important to ensure that you have good traffic on your blog posts.
Below are the ten time-tested approaches that you can take to enhance engagement and readership for your blog posts.
1. Connect With Expert Blog Writers
If you want your blogs to bring people to your website, they need to be well-written. We can’t emphasize this enough: amazing content will do 90% of the work.
You can basically forget about the other tips if you’re able to produce engaging and impactful content. However, not everyone knows what makes great content, much less how to write it.
That’s why you need to partner with someone knowledgeable and dedicated to writing and the topics you want to be discussed. These professionals can translate your message into content that engages your audience and adds value to your site, all while remaining true to your branding.
They’ll already know about the other points below, and they’ll apply them to your posts as needed.
Take this example post from Hubspot’s Guide to Internet Marketing. The content is rich with information, statistics, and data provided by the experts; this shows expertise in the topic as well as creates trust in its audience.
They also include screenshots, Google Analytics data, and images to serve as visual representations of their content. This shows they have a great writer and researcher who are able to come up with this information to make it into one engaging post.
In a nutshell:
Hire a writer who’s an expert on the topic and who can also do research for said topic.
2. Lean Towards Long-form Content
Articles can be considered long-form content when they have a high word count. These articles tend to go in-depth about a specific topic, serving as an authoritative source for those who want to learn more about the topics presented.
Short-form is the opposite; this is kept short and sweet and usually focuses on one specific aspect of a large topic. Each variation has its own purpose; however, long-form content is more visible in search engines than short-form content.
Because of its keyword-rich verbiage, long-form content tends to crop up in long-tail keyword searches. These searches are ones that people use for very specific search queries.
Long-form content also leads to more reader satisfaction, as it’s more likely to address your reader’s question. Since they can also serve as resources, long-form blogs have a higher chance of becoming backlinks on other websites.
An example of this is the Restaurant SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide for the keyword “SEO for restaurants”. It has over 2,000 words that contain useful and specific information on how restaurant owners can use search engine optimization (SEO) to make them visible online.
In a nutshell:
Create long-form content, but make sure that it provides the answers readers are looking for.
3. Identify Good Topics with Keyword Research
We’ve introduced long-tail keywords, but they’re just one component of the larger process of keyword research. Keyword research is how you find and analyze the words and phrases that people use in search engines so you can incorporate them into your blog posts.
Instead of wasting your time uploading something that people aren’t interested in, you can dedicate your efforts to content that’s fresh and relevant.
There are many tools today that you can use to find the best keywords and analyze how well they perform in search engines. Following their data, you can then choose the best keywords and introduce them to your content.
This includes the meta descriptions, headers, title, alt text, and body of the copy. As trends change, you can update the keywords to maintain relevance — this brings us to our next point.
You can also use Google search to find keywords people look for. Using the “SEO for restaurants” keyword again, you’ll be able to find its related terms such as “SEO for a local vegetarian restaurant”.
4. Update Posts Based on the Latest Trends
Bloggers and SEO specialists know how important it is to keep your content “fresh.” But this doesn’t mean creating new posts to remain relevant — you don’t want to take the quantity-over-quality route. Fresh content means keeping your existing posts strong, authoritative, and updated with the latest developments.
Not only will this practice help increase your visibility in search results, but updated blog posts maintain your good reputation in the industry.
Keep in mind that this is an ongoing process, so you need to regularly do keyword research and stay updated on the current trends and news in your topic.
In a nutshell:
Update your blog with the latest trends or statistics to keep it fresh.
5. Keep Search Engines in Mind
We’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but SEO is an essential consideration for your blog posts. If done right, you can end up on the front page of search engine results, a coveted spot that ensures maximum visibility with your audience.
Make sure that your keywords are present in all of the aforementioned places, but also remember that this is just the on-page SEO. Many people tend to neglect technical SEO.
Search engines like Google and Bing will prioritize optimized websites when providing search results, so your website needs to be healthy, secure, and functioning properly.
These steps are part of technical SEO, which is the process that ensures that the technical aspects of your website are in order.
In a nutshell:
Using the right keywords in your content can boost your content significantly.
6. Entice Readers with Images
Blocks of text will intimidate or bore your reader, so you need to include visual interest in the form of images. Aside from adding appeal, an image will give your readers an idea of what you’re writing about, especially if the concepts are difficult to grasp or imagine.
These images will also serve as a preview for your blog post whenever it’s linked to another site.
Images also help with SEO, especially when you add alternative text, captions, and file names. Lastly, a good image can add to the overall credibility of your content. This is especially applicable for industries where visuals are important, like photography, interior design, and landscaping.
You can also add infographics to summarize your content. Here’s an example we wrote on How to Write a Press Release. Even though we put the ways on how to write a press release in the content, we also added an infographic to help summarize the whole thing.
You don’t need to repeat the expanded information, just a list of those strategies and add images, and colors to make it easier to read.
In a nutshell:
People are more likely to engage with content if there are visuals present.
7. Collect Emails Like You Mean It
Email marketing is still a strong approach, and your blog posts are a great way to increase your subscriber list. That’s why it’s good practice to gather the email addresses of your readers.
You can easily notify them with new blog posts, which can result in more traffic and shares.
So how do you collect emails? You can add sign-up forms to each blog post, but make sure that you add some variation and enticing copy.
Use pop-up boxes, sidebars, and other website features to encourage readers to join your list of subscribers, and don’t forget to outline the benefits of subscribing to the email newsletter!
Here are examples from Search Engine Land and Hubspot.
While the pop-up comes out on one of Hubspot’s blog posts.
In a nutshell:
Email marketing can make your blog more visible to both your new and existing subscribers.
8. Encourage Engagement Through Comments
One of the most visible manifestations of organic engagement in your blog posts is user comments. Here, real-life people can toss around their ideas and interact with you and other readers regarding your content and related topics.
With their words, you’re getting free, keyword-rich content that will help with your search engine rankings.
Speaking of search engines, it’s widely believed that blog posts with active community discussions are preferred by Google. This is probably caused by the increased “dwell time”, or the amount of time that users spend interacting with a post.
In addition, community discussions encourage repeat visits so users can respond to others and continue their conversations.
In a nutshell:
Let your post be open to comments or put a call-to-action (CTA) encouraging people to leave comments (“tell us what you think in the comments below”)
9. Make Sharing Easy
Another way to increase your blog post’s visibility is through social media, so you should have features and language that encourage sharing. This can include highly visible buttons, links, and other elements that direct them to popular platforms.
If done right, this could increase the traffic to your blog posts. It may also improve your visibility in search engines, but this correlation isn’t directly proven.
Outside of SEO and traffic, having others share your blog posts on social media sites increases your credibility. People trusting your article enough to put it on their feeds or timelines is a coveted form of marketing that’s only possible with high-quality content.
You can add the buttons on the side of the post as WordStream.com did.
In a nutshell:
Make your post shareable across social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
10. Create Value-Adding Backlinks
Last but not least, we need to talk about backlinks. These are links from other sites that redirect to yours, specifically your blog posts. This is another important consideration in a similar vein to quality content.
It may seem out of your control, since it’s the other websites that decide what to link on their pages. However, this process is the culmination of sorts for all of the points above.
If you create great-quality content, other websites will naturally gravitate toward your posts to use them as resources.
You can also reach out to them yourself and ask them to link their content to yours. It can be a time-consuming task on your own, but you can work with an agency or marketing consultant to carry out the project.
Make Your Blog Stand Out
Improving the traffic to your blog posts is a constant process that requires a good understanding of content, SEO, and user engagement. The ten steps above can serve as a solid foundation for how to build blog traffic; follow them for your upcoming posts and watch as your readership steadily increases.
If you don’t have time to do any or all of these steps, our team at Infintech Designs can help you. Our content marketing strategy can create quality, high-engaging blog posts and optimize them for the right keywords.
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