How to Increase Your Website’s Blog Traffic

Everyone knows the importance of blogging. Not only does it satisfy two of Google’s most important ranking requirements, keyword optimization, and fresh content, it also positions your brand as an authority in its niche. Additionally, many people have made millions of dollars through blogging. Just ask Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post or Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. 

For all its positives, however, so many people still struggle with blogging. Ask any blogger, and they’ll tell you the biggest challenge is driving traffic to their blog pages. There are several reasons for this, but the fact remains that if you cannot get traffic to your blogs, then it means no one is reading them, which means you put in all that effort for nothing. 

It doesn't have to be this way. Let’s walk you through some of the best tips for driving much-needed traffic to your blog today. 

Know Your Target Readers

Great content will go to waste if no one gets to read it, right? That’s why the first thing to consider is your target audience. Knowing who you’re writing for will make it easier to develop ideas on what to write about.

Having a target audience in mind will also help you immensely when you eventually monetize your blog. So you have to know your readers’ demographics and characteristics.

Some of the questions you can ask yourself when determining your target audience:

• What is their age bracket?
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• What is their average income and lifestyle?
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• What type of content will they engage with?
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• What issues will they find relevant?

Establishing your target readers will make it less challenging for you when you formulate your content marketing strategy. Your keyword research will also be easier once you have this data on your target audience.

Formulate a Strategy for Your Content

Content is still the number one reason why online users flock to a website. That’s why quality content that resonates with your target audience should always be your priority. Also, if you think about it, nobody really wants to read content that’s irrelevant and poorly made. That’s just one way to lose your followers.

If inspiration for great content ideas seems elusive to you, you can always scour the net for ideas, like various social media platforms. Get ideas from trending topics since they offer clues as to what people are interested in at the moment.

A variety in your content won’t hurt. Try several types of content like high-quality images and videos to accompany your texts. Or schedule the kind of content you post, so it’s different every time. Also, consider that most internet users have a short attention span. So short paragraphs and subheadings dividing a huge block of text would help.

Do Keyword Research

One of the mistakes bloggers often make is that they overlook keyword research. You need to incorporate specific keywords for your blog to get picked up by search engines. These keywords are the terms that your target audience uses when they’re searching for content like yours.

Targeting the right keywords is like putting signposts on the road so your target audience can find you. Research long-tail keyword phrases connected to your content, so your content has a higher chance of appearing on search results.

Improve Your Site’s Speed and On-Site SEO

I think we can agree that most of us don’t have the patience anymore to wait for a slow website to load. We’ll likely just abandon the page and look for the next website that offers the same thing.

Improving your website’s speed is one way of increasing your traffic since users are more likely to stay on your page. Also, having a low bounce rate means that online users are less likely to go to your competitors’ sites.

One benefit of on-site SEO strategies is that it helps improve your website’s loading speed. On-site SEO strategies optimize your content to improve user experience, decrease bounce rate, and improve loading speeds by repairing issues like broken links, etc.

Create Backlinks to Your Blog

Backlinking means creating links that send users to your blog and putting those links on domain authority sites.

When creating backlinks strategies, it’s better to search for websites with a higher ranking than yours. Since they attract more online users, having a backlink on their site will give you the opportunity to reach out to their followers. Therefore, increasing your site’s incoming traffic.

Reach out to authority sites and ask them if they accept guest posts and the corresponding fees on their blogs. Leave backlinks on authority sites that are relevant or the same as your niche. That way, when their readers read your guest post and click the link back to your site, they’ll be reading content that’s relevant to what they were previously reading. So you increase your chances of gaining a new audience. 

Build an Email List

Email marketing is still the king. That’s why 87% of marketers use email to distribute their content. So when you’re aiming for a boost on your blog’s traffic, you need to get the word out about your site and what it offers. One way to do that is to start building your email list.

When you have an email list, you can send them materials that will entice them to visit your site. Email marketing is still one of the top marketing tools used today.

You can begin building your email list by creating landing pages with effective CTAs. When they land on your landing page and see that your offer is beneficial for them, they’ll click the CTA button and leave their info, including their email.

From there, you can start your email marketing strategies to convert them into your followers or paying customers.