If you’re wondering “How can I increase traffic to my blog?” listen up! This post is for you! Getting free traffic does take some time and effort. But if you’re consistent with those efforts on a daily basis, your blog can start getting more and more traffic: steadily and certainly.
Firstly to get traffic to a blog you’ll need to create a lot of content. Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty to write your posts about. That way you have a greater chance of your posts ranking on the search engine results pages. Despite those shorter tail keywords getting tonnes of traffic, you’ve very little chance of ranking for them because of the huge online competition; even in an uncompetitive niche!
There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and they can’t all rank number one on Google for their chosen keywords. So looking for the “low hanging fruit” of keywords means you have a chance of ranking; especially if you make a good job of creating some quality content for those particular keywords.
How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog – Writing Quality Articles
So start by using Google’s keyword planner and make a plan of finding those long tail keywords in your niche which have traffic, but also low competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages.
If you go after the more competitive keywords, you’ll often have zero chance of a ranking on the first page of Google. Even with some long tail keywords, it can be competitive. But a small chance of a ranking for low search volume keywords is better than no chance of ranking for high search volume keywords.
Create a lot of high quality content and use an SEO plugin to help you write. I use Yoast SEO which is free for WordPress. Yoast gives you an easy to use plugin which helps you write for SEO. But also you should write for your visitors, since the people who actually read your posts aren’t robots!
How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog – Automate Content Promotion
While you should aim to steadily grow your volume of posts over time, more content doesn’t automatically mean more visitors. You also need to promote your content and get eyes on it. Otherwise Google (and the other search engines) can’t see how people are reacting to it. This is one of their ranking factors among others. Google uses a lot of factors to indicate how to rank your content including:
- Backlinks from other sites – how many and the quality of them
- Volume of content on your site
- Quality of your content
- How visitors interact with your content
- Age of your domain
- Topic you cover and other competing sites
You can promote your content on social media, through email marketing and you can also use some paid advertising to do it too. Ideally you should automate the distribution of your content as you publish it. You can give yourself a hand with this by using a few free plugins:
- Revive Old Posts – lets you syndicate your content (new and old) to your social media profiles
- Social media like buttons – use them to encourage easy sharing of your content from your visitors
- Push Engage – lets visitors opt in to be notified of new posts as you publish them
How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog – Pay For Traffic
Another quick and simple way to increase traffic to your blog quickly is through running some paid advertising. You can even use platforms which will crawl your blog and create dynamic ads based on your content. Set up a Google Adwords dynamic ad in minutes and it will show ads based on your content.
You can also set your budget at a level which you can afford, from as little as a few cents a day if you wish. Paid traffic is of course the fastest way to generate traffic. Plus, it’s easily scaled up when you’re ads are working, bringing in sales.
Build Backlinks
Backlinks are an awesome tool if you want to generate more traffic to your blog. Backlinks have a double fold benefit to bloggers.
- They can bring in traffic directly from the websites which link to them.
- They boost your SEO score with Google and the various other search engines, boosting your listing power on the SERPS – search engine results pages.
It’s no secret that backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors of Google so it’s definitely worth taking the effort to build them. Back linking starts with creating valuable content which people should naturally share over time. If you build a back link profile (manually) which doesn’t show a natural progression over time, it can be flagged as deceptive practices and you’re back to where you started. Google may penalise you and down rank your content as a result.
Ideally build backlinks from other authority websites within the same niche as yours. This can be done by reaching out to website owners who offer guest posting opportunities. Start with a Google search for guest post opportunities within your niche. You can also comment on some blogs and they allow a backlink to their site.
If building backlinks sounds like your idea of a nightmare, you can outsource this task to the professionals. I’ve used this site for outsourcing of my SEO.
Keep Going
Over time if you do enough of the above measures, you should start to see your traffic growing. But with blogging this can take some time and it will of course also depend on the niche you have chosen to build your blog in. In a competitive niche, it will take much longer to attract free traffic than in one will little competition.
After around 400 blog posts is typically where you should see a big uptick in your traffic stats. Google have recently changed their algorithm (again, sign) and this has meant a lot of previously ranking content has taken a hit. Unfortunately there’s no way around it – you are a little reliant on the search engines for your traffic as a blogger. It does however remind you to take charge of your traffic through building an email list.
Build An Email List From Your Blog
An email list puts you back in charge of your traffic. By sending out regular updates you can send subscribers back to your newer content. Getting eyes on your content is a good thing because your visitors will share it with their friends (if they have any!) and on social media. Some will even link to your content if they are a blogger themselves.
To build an email list from your blog you need to offer something of value to your website visitors. An ebook or some kind of free course is perfect. Make sure you showcase your offer on every page of your site, so more of your visitors get to see it. Have a clearly defined benefit driven offer which is appealing to your visitors. See also the power of email marketing.
Summary
You can increase traffic to your blog in many ways. Here’s the shorter version:
- Write quality content which is optimised for the search engines – use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. This is the cornerstone of all your other strategies, so make your content as good as possible.
- Build backlinks by reaching out and doing guest posts, blog commenting or outsource this task to a professional.
- Use plugins which help you syndicate your content and get more eyes on it – Revive Old Posts, Postplanner, Push Engage, social media share plugins etc. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.
- Build an email list – an email list puts you in charge of your traffic. I use this autoresponder.
- Keep going – although it can take some time and serious effort to build your blog readership, it’s worth the effort in the long run. Make a habit out of doing the above over and over and never quit!
- Don’t forget to thank me when you make it!