How to get traffic Increase your website’s blog traffic in 2021 in 10 quick steps.

How to get traffic Increase your website’s blog traffic in 2021 in 10 quick steps.

Article content

Find the right author (probably not you!)

Use keyword research to determine the topic of a good blog post.

Focus on creating persistent content.

Keep your blog content up to date by updating existing posts.

Accompany your blog posts with clear images.

Optimize your blog posts for search engines.

Save the email address.

Encourage posting on social media.

Participate with users.

Establish backlinks to blog posts

But let’s start with a big question:

Why blog?

There are three main reasons

Why blogging. First of all, blogs can be fun. It allows you to express yourself and share your views with more potential people.

Second, if done well, a blog can help you establish yourself (or your company) as an authority in your field.

The third (and most important) blog can significantly increase the number of visitors to your website. Hubspot marketers, companies that regularly publish blogs, typically generate 55% more traffic than those that don’t

Companies that do not publish blogs. We all know what high website traffic means: more sales and revenue opportunities.

But how do you build a successful blog?

1. Find the proper author! (Advice: maybe not.)

At the center of obtaining your journal noticed, and driving legion traffic to it, is writing extremely nice content — which content goes to be far better if the person writing it’s each knowledgeable and dependent on what they’re writing about.

Posts that are written from the heart — and not by a content farm — are way more possible to be the posts that interest folks and crucially, get shared.

BUT: it would be the case that you simply in person aren’t the simplest person to write down the posts for your site.

Maybe you’re not a good writer; perhaps you don’t have time to devote to blogging.

If either of these statements seems like it’d apply to you, take into account hiring an author who is capable of making actually nice journal posts and setting up the hours to try to do so.

Whoever winds up writing the posts on your website, their temperament has got to shine through. Readers determine with writers as a result of there’s a lot of two love — or perhaps dislike — about their personality, mouthiness or tone of voice.

If a reader likes YOU as a writer — and not simply the standard of the content you’re manufacturing — you are far a lot of probability to draw in an ardent following.

So, confirm your temperament comes across in your posts. This helps you type a rapport along with your readers, who is also more inclined as a result to come back to your journal just because they such as you as AN individual.

2. Use keyword analysis to spot good topics to web log regarding

It’s very easy to take a seat down and write blog posts that cover, in goodly depth, topics that no-one specifically |is especially} interested in.

Similarly, it’s easy to write down a blog post covering a part that individuals are very interested in, however, to grant it a title containing keywords that nobody ever searches for.

Keyword research is your friend here: you’ll be able to use a large variety of keyword research tools love Semrush or Ahrefs to get the quantity of monthly searches for particular keywords, and conclude however tough it’d be to rank for explicit search phrases.

Do keyword searches on Semrush.

The trick is to spot phrases that you simply will use in your web log that generate an inexpensive quantity of traffic, except for that there isn’t huge competition.

Tools and resources for parsing keywords.

For an additional elaborate scrutinize the way to notice the simplest keywords to use in your blog, you may do worse than check out Semrush’s guide to keyword research. You’ll conjointly get an exclusive 14-day trial of the merchandise here.

And our Semrush review, Ahrefs vs Semrush and Moz vs Semrush posts can assist you decide more about a number of the keyword research tools available.

If you’re a Chrome user, you may even be fascinated by a replacement SEO tool, GrowthBar, that works as a Chrome extension and is offered at a lower price than a number of the product listed above. A 5 day free trial of GrowthBar are often accessed here.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you must make sure that your keywords feature all told the correct places in your post — its title, meta description, headers and body copy (more on all that in a very moment).

3. Target making long-form content for your journal

Studies show that ‘long-form content’ performs higher in search results than short or ‘thin’ posts. Long-form content refers to posts with high word counts that get in large depth on a selected topic.

There are a few of reasons why long-form content helps to come up with higher positions in search results.

First, longer posts can naturally be a lot of keyword-rich and so more seemingly to come about as results for ‘long tail’ keyword searches.

Second (and maybe more importantly), the in-depth nature of a long post is a lot of seemingly to satisfy readers who stumble upon it — it’ll be more likely to Reply to your visitor’s request, or solve their problem.

As a result, the post is more likely to induce shared on social media or get coupled to from alternative sites — with terribly positive implications for traffic.

Remember: don’t make the length

Though long-form posts generally attract more readers than very short ones, it’s necessary to not get too over excited with length.

If you’re making large articles only for the sake of ticking a ‘long-form’ box, and this is often at the expense of making helpful content, it’s unlikely that you simply are going to be rewarded by either readers or search engines for doing so.

Quality is key, as Google repeatedly creates clear in its recommendation on a way to make content rank extremely in search results.

4. Keep your journal content contemporary by change existing posts

If you are doing any analysis into blogging and SEO, you’ll encounter countless articles that stress, however, very important, it’s form ‘fresh’ content so as to come up with smart search results and traffic to your site.

However, I’d caution against decoding this as an instruction to solely manufacture new posts.

With my very own content, I’ve found it rather more helpful to specialize in quality over amount — and instead of blogging each day only for the sake of it, I like better to invest my time keep my existing content as robust (and as in-depth) as possible.

I do that by unceasingly reviewing older posts and enhancing them with the foremost up-to-date info available.

Not solely will this send the ‘freshness’ signals to Google that the search engine’s algorithms approve of, however, it generally will increase the length of posts and helps offer the ‘long-form’ content that tend to perform higher in search results.

(That’s to not say after all that I ne’er publish new content. It’s additional a case of guaranteeing that existing content isn’t neglected, however, rather systematically improved upon).

5. Bring strong photos to your diary.

It’s very vital to use sensible images in any blog posts you publish.

There are four main reasons for this.

First, it facilitates readers get away with what you’re writing regarding (this is especially important if you are exploring troublesome ideas — visual aids will really help alter matters).

Second, the most image related your post can sometimes show up whenever your guests share one among your posts on social media, and if it’s an uninteresting picture, it’s so much less likely to come up click through to your site.

Copyright-free image sites like Unsplash, pixel can help you find great images for your blog posts.

Third, like text, pictures will be optimized to assist your content seen in search results. By adding appropriate keywords to a picture’s ‘alternative text, file name and caption, you’ll be able to help search engines gain a much better understanding of what your post is regarding (and by extension, help the post appear in relevant search results).

And finally, sensible images help to create your content look authoritative. If you utilize an exquisite piece of photography rather than a dodgy piece of computer graphics to accompany a journal post, it is much more seemingly to be taken seriously — i.e., scan within the initial place! — By those that encounter it.

Two vital things to recollect regarding journal post pictures

Once adding images to your blog posts…

Keep an eye fixed file size — massive image files can increase page load time, which may successively have an effect on however search engines treat your content in search (search engines prioritize high-speed pages rather than longer pages).

Solely use images that you simply have the rights to — if you don’t have a license for an image, you’ll be able to find yourself obtaining punished many bucks for breaching copyright (thankfully there are several nice royalty free stock image sites, like Pexels and Unsplash, which will assist you avoid this problem).

6. Optimize your diary posts for search engines

There are a series of technical steps — referred to as ‘on-page SEO‘ that you just should go for offer your blog posts the simplest likelihood of performing arts well in search.

You ought to always:

• Produce blog post titles that replicate your keyword research, and accurately describe what you’re writing regarding
• Embody keywords in every post’s universal resource locator that reflect the content
• Use keyword-rich headings (H1, H2, H3 etc.) to interrupt up content
• Use keyword made EL text and filenames for your images.

For a couple of additional tips about this space, investigate our post on the way to build your content visible in Google search results.

There are a few ‘technical SEO’ steps you’ll be able to take. Google prefers content that hundreds extremely quickly — a few things which will facilitate during this area include:

• Making certain all image files are as tiny as potential (without being pixelated)
• Avoid unnecessary scripts on the page
• Using CSS style sheets instead of some inline CSS
• Register your website with Google Search Console

Important: optimize your diary posts for ‘real’ readers too!

It’s easy to specialize in all the items you’ll be able to do {to make|to form|to produce} an exploration rule like your blog posts — and straightforward to forget that it’s really humans that you’re attempting to impress!

There are a couple of stuff you can do to make your blog post additional appealing to ‘real’ readers:

• Avoid jargon or advanced language — in most cases, it’s best to assume that the individuals reading one in every of your posts are comparatively new the topic, therefore create and structure your content accordingly.
• Use comparatively large, easy-to-read fonts on your diary.
• Guarantee your blog uses a ‘responsive’ style — i.e., one that displays your content befittingly for the device, it’s being viewed on (mobile, tablet, portable computer etc.).
• Confirm your blog hundreds, quick — a slow-loading post place individuals off reading it.

7. Capture email addresses

Once you’ve attracted a visitant to your diary, you ought to forever decide to capture their email address. This enables you to apprize guests via e-newsletter of recent blog posts, which may end in additional traffic and shares.

To try to to this, you wish to make sure that there’s a knowledge capture kind on your blog post, not simply on a ‘sign up to our mailing list’ page on your site. You’ll do that employing a sidebar, pop-up box or an easy text calls-to-action to encourage individuals to affix your mailing list.

Once making this sign-up form, keep in mind to spell out the advantages of contain the list — the worth that your a website visitant can get out of turning into a subscriber.

For example, instead of employing a boring ‘join our mailing list’ decision to action, highlight the type of resources a subscriber can expect to receive, the talents they’ll learn and so forth

If you utilize an email promoting tool (like Getresponse, Aweber, Mailchimp or Mad Mimi) you’ll use your RSS feed to power your e-newsletters, that means that each time you add a replacement diary post your subscribers will mechanically receive an e-newsletter with a notification concerning the new content.

Use caution with pop-ups (or ‘interstitial’ as Google likes to decide them). They will dramatically increase the amount of leads you generate, however They can even have a negative impact on search traffic, significantly if over-used on mobile versions of your site. Learn additional about Google’s approach to pop-ups here

8. Encourage social sharing

Actively encourage your readers to share your web log posts — be specific along with your requests for individuals to post your content on Twitter, Facebook and alternative social networks.

If they follow these encouragements, not solely do you have to see an increase in traffic to your posts, however you’ll even be causation refined ‘signals’ to go looking engines concerning the recognition and quality of your posts (the jury is out on whether or not social sharing incorporates a direct impact on search results, but there will appear to be a correlation of sorts).

Using a tool like Riesling or Add this — which permit you to feature a truckload of clever social sharing icons to numerous components of your website, similarly as knowledge capture forms — will facilitate during this regard.

Will the platform matter?

Loads of individuals marvel if web logging is best done on a specific platform.

Well, there’s fully nothing to prevent you running a no-hit blog on fashionable website / on-line store builders like Shopify, Squarespace, Big Commerce or Wix — and following the information in this post can assist you increase traffic to (and sales from) sites designed those platforms.

However, if you wish to make a full-blown publication, or web log professionally, then there’s loads to be aforementioned for mistreatment self-hosted WordPress.

WordPress started life as a blogging tool and provides a number of blogging options that you simply won’t generally notice on hosted web site building solutions (for example, content versioning, SEO tools and advanced categorization options).

9. Encourage comments and user engagement

Encourage individuals to feature their own views at the lowest of your posts. There are 3 reasons why this is often beneficial:

It creates additional keyword-rich content on your website (content which will be indexed, and graded highly, by Google).

It can facilitate, encourage come visits to your web log, as discussions take hold in your comments section.

Some SEO specialists believe that Google treats blog posts that generate a great deal of community discussion preferentially to those with none comments — probably as a result of it will increase ‘dwell time’ on the post.

10. Build backlinks to your posts

On the terribly simplest level, there are 2 key ingredients to making sure a web log post rank in search:

First, your post must contain quality content.

Second, it’s to own a great deal of backlinks — links from alternative sites — inform to it.

We’ve lined the ‘quality content’ bit earlier: you primarily have to be compelled to specialize in manufacturing long-form posts that cowl the subject you’re writing regarding clearly, and in substantial depth. Continually aim to satisfy a reader’s query; to unravel their problem.

Obtaining backlinks usually a way tougher task, because it involves reaching resolute alternative bloggers / website owners, and asking them to incorporate a link to your content on their posts — it’s kind of like an internet PR campaign of sorts.

This type of reaching could be a time intensive affair, however, it’s important, and if you are taking a radical approach to it, it will prove terribly fruitful.

An alternative choice with relevance backlink generation is to rent place of work to try to to this on your behalf — but you’ve got to use caution here, as hiring place of work or authority who then goes on to place (or worse, buy) links on low-quality websites will truly do additional hurt than good.

Once building links,

• Specialize in websites that have an honest name (you can use the ‘domain authority scores’ provided by SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to seek out out which of them do or don’t).
• Continually make sure that the links you’re building be in context (for example, if you’re building a link to a site regarding shoes, don’t build links on posts about ice cream)

Related reading on SEO written / blogging

you’ll notice a number of these alternative posts concerning traffic generation and blogging helpful:

A guide on how to create a guide: SEO style.

SEO for Bloggers: The Perfect Guide for Newbies (2021)

A simple guide to employing an independent writer

How to begin a game journal (And build additional Money)

Niche ideas Blog which make money in 2021

How to make money from blogs in 2021? A step-by-step guide in creating a blog.