You’ve set up a blog and have put in the working necessary to establish. What’s left? It is now time to get down to business – focusing on increasing traffic.
How do you get started? Don’t worry we have you, covered! If you follow these five-step guide, you can quickly increase your blog traffic in no time. Let’s get started!
1. Make your content evergreen
When creating the content for your website, try to ensure it is evergreen. What is an evergreen content? Evergreen content are content which can be on the web for a long time without becoming irrelevant and losing its value. For example, writing about this year’s Oscar nominations will become irrelevant in a couple of months by a post on great movie classics will be relevant for very long time – evergreen.
2. Develop a content strategy
To increase your blog traffic, you would have to not just great valuable content but also have a content strategy in place. The phrase content is King has been thrown around a lot but what most web user do not realise is, it isn’t just about create content but great content. Creating great content isn’t just about quality, you also have to be strategic with the way you market your content.
Some of the most successful content answer or meet a specific need. To do this, you’d have to consider what your audience likes. There are mostly two types of content these days – educational and useful or funny and cool. Working with either one of them is a good way to begin.
Need ideas? You can visit forums like Quora to get questions being asked in relation to your industry. Another place where you can do some research is Buzzmo, you can view what others have written in your field and provide better. Alternative, you can use handy blog topic generators.
In terms of content style, go for rich storytelling through videos, beautiful graphics and make use of shocking statistics. The goal is to create content people would be willing to link and share. It is also smart to group your content into categories, so your blog visitors can easily navigate your website when they visit from a blog search or from other websites, instead of leaving immediately because they can’t see the information they want readily. By simply adding a category widget on the sidebar of your blog, you can quickly give your blog visitors, what they want.
3. Headlines are important
Irresistible, compelling headlines are an important tool in the arsenal are of any blogger who wants to be successful. Headlines are what capture interest and get people to your site. In fact, a lot of experts believe headlines are sometimes more important than the content of your post.
If you have great content but a subpar headline, chances are your content won’t get the traffic it deserves even though it is a good read. On the web, appearance is everything. Just like you would not go to a wedding in your sweat pants, do not publish a web post using use lacklustre headlines.
Try to experiment with different kinds of headlines and see which ones appeal the most to your target audience. Do not forget to make your call to action clear.
How can you do this? On your blog page, the “comments” link is not very easy to see because it is often in light grey. To fix this, all you have to do is change the CSS from the traditional “comments” button to “Leave a comment” when there is no comment or “Read comments” when there are comments. Placing a “Read more” button at the top of the blog excerpt is counterintuitive. It is best to have the “Read more” button at the foot of the excerpt and use a strong colour to make it more compelling – this can also be done using a simple CSS change to increase the chances of a reader clicking through.
4. Optimise for mobile and speed
Web visitors have a short attention span, they won’t wait around for your for a slow load blog page. If your page doesn’t show up fast enough, your blog visitors will leave and got to the next Google listing (your competitor). Losing traffic is a nightmare and is best avoided.
Not sure about your current site speed? We recommend you use Google’s page speed insight tool – you can use this tool to quickly view your blog page load speeds, this tool can also provide you with tips you can implement to boost your site speed.
5. Keywords are not the enemy
If you’re really serious about driving big-time traffic to your blog, SEO and keyboards need to be an essential part of your strategy. A lot of people get nervous when you mention an SEO or keywords for good reason – done incorrectly it can cause you to be penalised by Google. However, it is important to remember Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when done right produces some very remarkable results in terms of organic traffic. SEO also gets you some of the most targeted traffic from Google as users are looking for the specific information your content provides. This is the time to begin to foster a love affair with keywords!
The key to using keywords successfully is moderation. So:
- Do not put search bots and keywords before user experience
- Use keywords to influence to help conceptualise your post and influence outline
- Do not include so many links that your sentences become dotted with a lot of blue hyperlinks
- Ensure that you link to another related blog post you’ve written on a certain subject matter
- Do not use keyword stuffing to saturate your content with plenty of search queries
- Always use keywords in context with your post.
In conclusion
Lastly, to increase your chances of success, make sure you have great technical support, such as a good web hosting from Openhost NZ. With that fixed, if you follow these five steps, you will begin to see increased traffic to your blog increase in no time.