Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic
Attracting people to your blog isn’t as simple as writing a post and waiting. We can all agree that it would make our lives so much easier if that were the case. To help more people notice your blog, we have complied 21 of our best tips and tricks you can use to increase clicks to your blog.
Every blogger who believes they are creating great content and doing everything right at some point questions why their traffic and click-throughs aren’t higher. You’ll hear it everywhere that ‘SEO takes time’ but are you doing everything you can to maximize traffic to your blog?
The time it takes to build a successful blog and begin to see tangible benefits, often is longer than people are willing to commit to build it, so they quit. It you work at it long enough the results will come and you will see your traffic start to go up, you will find it easier to build a social media audience and combine that all together and you will begin to attract more brand collaborations.
Below you will find 18 of the most proven tactics to help you start to see success on your blog with an increase in traffic and click-throughs to your content.
Write more blog posts
There are numerous studies that show the more content you share to your blog, the more traffic it will receive. According to HubSpot, blogs that share 16 posts per month receive 3.5x more traffic than websites that posted 4 times per month. Frequent activity on your blog in the form of new content helps build your recognition with the Google algorithm. If you want to stand out on Google, think about how you can increase the amount of posts that you write.
Easy to read content
How you structure your blog posts not only makes it easier for your readers to consume but it also makes it easier for Google to understand what it is about. Properly setting up things like sub-headers, bullet points and numbered lists all help you make your content easier to read.
Promote all of your blog content on social media
Every time you share a new blog post, make sure to notify your audiences across social media with specific social media posts linking to your new blog content. Using relevant hashtags will increase impressions (and traffic) to your blog. An added benefit of posting about new blog content is that it gives you easy content inspiration if you are struggling to come up with social media content to post.
Research your blog post titles
How much time do you spend creating the titles of your blog posts? When written correctly, blog post titles can rival the actual content for significance in driving results. Your blog post titles are what make people stop and consider clicking on your post when they are scrolling Google (or social media). Spend some time looking at other blog posts that have been written on the topic you are going to write about and see how you can make yours better.
Always do keyword research for your blog.
Keywords are the heart and soul of any high performing blog post. Every successful blog relies on a well-executed keyword strategy. There are many free tools you can use to make sure your keyword research is effective and efficient. A great free option is Neil Patel’s UberSuggest. Find one keyword opportunity for each blog post that you write and incorporate it into the title, headline and a few times throughout the post. You can take it even further and include it in the image tags and post URL. A sound keyword strategy helps show Google precisely what your post is about. This helps Google show it to the right people, increasing the chances that they click
Focus on your niche
Sometimes bloggers try so hard to increase their traffic that they start writing blog content about topics that aren’t relevant to the content they have been writing to that point. This is often because bloggers don’t feel like they are making progress. Successful bloggers commit to who their target audience is and remain committed to those topics and themes throughout their journey.
Use relevant photos in every blog post
A picture says a thousand words. You can find multiple studies across the internet that show how photos provide an increase in blog traffic. There are two main reasons why photos help your blog. The first is that each photo you use can include relevant keywords to your post in the image tag, which contributes to your search engine optimization. The second is that photos generally make your blog post look more visually appealing. Some bloggers go beyond photos and include things like video and GIFs.
Use videos
Videos always have higher engagement than written content. Offset words on the page with relevant YouTube videos to make your blog posts even more valuable to your readers. Google owning YouTube means that videos will help Google further understand what your blog post is about.
Use internal and external links
Google likes to see links to other sites that are relevant to topics, names or companies that you mention. In addition, if you have other blog content or web pages that would be useful for your readers based on what you say in a new post, link to them as well. Linking to external sites increases the likelihood that they will link back to your blog (backlinks are a good thing).
Capitalize on social sharing buttons
The odds are that your readers will have their own social media accounts. Make it easy for them to share your content on their own social media by using social sharing buttons. These buttons will allow them to share the entire post or if you set it up, specific sentences.
Re-purpose evergreen content
A huge advantage of blog posts is that the entire post, sentences or themes can be used in other social media for months or even years after it was originally shared. Linking back or mentioning the original post in any new content will help bring new eyes to old posts. You can also update blog posts for different years or add to them if new information and insight becomes available.
Guest posting
If you don’t know what guest posting is, it is when you invite someone to contribute a post that they write to your blog. This is a great option when you are suffering from writers block! The added benefit is that when you share someone else’s post on your blog, they will likely share it with their audience – driving their traffic to your page.
Offer guest posts to other people
If you can identify other blogs that have built an audience that is relevant to your own, ask about writing a guest post for them. It helps them by not having to create content on their own and you benefit from their audience learning about you as well as receiving a likely backlink from the site.
Ask for comments
As you wrap up blog posts, always try to work in some kind of call to action. A great strategy if you have comments enabled is to ask your readers a question and directing them to leave their answer in the comments section at the bottom of your page. Comments show Google that your page is engaging and people are valuing it high enough to take the time to comment.
Social media ads for blog promotion
Where is your largest audience on social media? If you’re just getting started, where do you think your audience is spending the most time on social media? If it is Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, you can spend a few dollars to promote your blog posts like an ad on social media with all of the clicks coming to your blog.
Run giveaways
Giveaways are popular tactics on social media platforms such as Instagram, however, they can be done on your blog. Set the entry requirements to include sharing a link via social media and tagging you in it (so you can see who has entered) and watch your traffic climb. The prizes can be provided by yourself, Amazon gift cards work well, or invite companies you love to contribute something.
Build a mailing list
You should be collecting email addresses on your blog (or if you’re a business, be emailing your users). In your newsletter emails, include snippets from your blog post with a link to read more on your blog. People are busy so providing small snippets will intrigue subscribers to click and read more who might otherwise skip your post entirely.
Use your email signature
You probably spend a lot of time sending emails and have an email signature set up? Add new blog posts with a short call to action to your email signature. This will increase the impressions on your content and result in a trickle of clicks from a new source.
Which of these haven’t you been doing and which of these will you start using today?
