Everybody wants to gain traffic, but more so for new bloggers, they want to know how to bring traffic to their blog that can ultimately boost their site’s ranking. I’ll give 13 SEO expert tips to boost your blog traffic.
These are search engine optimization tips I have followed, which will hopefully get you started on the right track in improving your search engine ranking!
Tip 1: Pick a Specific Topic to Focus On
Search engines would like people to find the most authoritative and correct results. Thus, your website’s content should reflect your expertise and technical skill. Want to share your recipes? Then food should be the focus of your site. Don’t blend crochet content with metalworking since your website is not a massive multinational corporation or a large news organisation that needs to cover all topics under the sun.
According to experts in the content marketing and SEO industry, Write long-form content of at least 1,500 words on your chosen topic to get on the radar of a major search engine. Be careful to avoid keyword stuffing. A good estimate of how many times to use keywords in your blog post comes from Junaid Ahmed from LambdaTest Inc’s “maintain the density of the primary keyword to at least 1% of the entire content.”
Tip 2: Improve Your Website SEO Performance
Size up your website performance, compress your images’ size, and avoid using too many redirect pages to avoid crawl issues and other significant issues that might tamper with your website’s ranking.
Search engines consider content copied exactly from another domain as copied content. Click To TweetMinimise HTTP requests and Minify and combine files. Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files and defer JavaScript loading. Minimise time to the first byte and reduce server response time. Besides, it would help if you chose the right hosting option for your needs. Once you have implemented all the above, run a compression audit to see your website performance improvements. If all these sound too burdensome for you, outsource them to a digital marketing agency.
Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm update is coming in May 2021. Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience. They made core Web Vitals up of three specific page speed and user interaction measurements: largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. Start now to improve your website performance so that your site and content can rank high in the SERPs.
You can also make your website more user-friendly to add a search box (e.g. like the one you see close to the bottom of this page) to your site. This will allow your site visitors to input their desired search queries into the search box on your site and receive the answers they need.
Many small business owners find these aspects of digital marketing and search engine marketing a bit challenging. You may have a small marketing team with no SEO skills. They may not have the time to undertake an SEO course in the basics such as on page SEO. If so, I’d suggest you hire an SEO agency or at the very least hire an SEO manager.
Tip 3: Understand Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a popular free tool provided by Google. In fact, 66% of all websites using analytics technology are now using Google Analytics. Google Analytics works by recording a website’s data and then presenting it in in-depth tables, charts, and graphs. Understanding Google analytics reports and Google analytics terminology is essential for your business.
The best step you can take to improve your SEO in 2021 is to learn Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a good tool for understanding your website so you can make intelligent data-based decisions. Metrics will help you understand how you are ranking and your audience to better curate content for them.
You can use Google Analytics (GA) to discover who your site visitors are, where they came from and what they’re doing on your site. Google Analytics collects user information using a tracking code. You don’t need to understand the contents of the code. It’s critical to understand your traffic to focus your budget and time efficiently in the ever-changing online marketing world. Understanding user behaviour through your Google Analytics helps you improve the user experience, refine features and content, and build a product/service that is useful to your customers.
Today it's no longer enough to integrate keywords into your content. You have to optimise your content for local search intent. Click To TweetTip 4: Avoid Black Hat SEO
Don’t be spammy or shady about your SEO. A few of the black hat SEO techniques I can think of now are:
- Paid Links: According to this definition, paid link building is when a website pays a third party domain for a followed backlink that points back to their domain. While link building is a core tenet of SEO, paying for links is strictly forbidden by search engines and can cause harsh penalties.
- Spam Comments: this term describes a broad category of spam bot or spammer postings that abuse web-based forms to post unsolicited advertisements in forums, blogs, wikis and so on.
- Duplicate Content: This content appears on the Internet in over one place that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.
- Article Spinning: they used the process of article spinning for search engine optimisation, in which applications create content that appears new from an existing piece.
- Cloaking: Google’s Webmaster Guidelines consider cloaking a violation because it gives our users different results than they expect.
- Doorway Pages: they intentionally craft these pages to manipulate search engine indexes. A doorway page will affect the search engine’s index by inserting certain phrases while sending visitors to another page.
- Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffers load long strings of words into a page’s meta tags, visible content or backlink anchors to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines.
- Guest Post Spam: The guest post spammer is looking for a ‘dofollow’ link back to their website (or the website of their client) so that it will boost their rankings.
- Copied Content: search engines consider content copied exactly from another domain as copied content. Sometimes entire pages are copied, and sometimes just parts are.
These are some black hat SEO techniques you need to avoid. To keep abreast of SEO best practices and all the latest news in the SEO world, you can read blogs like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and so forth.
Tip 5: Optimise Your Content for Local Search Intent
Today, it’s no longer enough to integrate keywords into your content. You need to optimise your pieces of content for local search intent. To optimise the product for search, use transactional vocab such as product words and brand names, including categories, and user intent modifiers such as buy, discount, coupon, sale, free shipping. We focus transactional query content on landing pages and easy-to-read product/service pages. Having a steady stream of great content on your website, through a blog, has a direct positive effect on SEO. Suppose you want to target local customers, attempt to create local content. By optimising your business and website for local search, you can connect with a highly motivated local audience ready to buy your product/service. These audiences will input their search queries into Google and other search engines, and your content will show in the SERP results for those search queries.
Tip 6: Roundup Posts
Round up posts are essentially aggregate content, opinions or “roundups” of great content from experts in your niche, in a particular industry or topic area.
Choose a question your audience is dying to read about, and create your list of experts who can provide authoritative answers to those questions. Create a Google Form to submit their answers and email your experts to politely ask them to provide their answers and opinions to your question by filling your form. From all the answers you receive, put your post together.
Having a steady stream of great content on your website, through a blog, has a direct positive effect on SEO. Click To TweetTip 7: Send Emails to Launch Your New Blog Post
Send plain text emails to launch your new blog posts since, according to this article, plain text emails are easy to create and have higher open rates than HTML-enhanced emails. You also need to include a subscription form, social share buttons, and RSS links on your website. This will make it simpler for your readers/visitors to subscribe to your blog and share any new content that you post.
Tip 8: Pay Attention to Your Headlines
A great headline is the most important aspect of creating great content. Because headlines determine whether your target audience reads your blog posts. Your headline is the only thing you can use to attract a potential reader on the Internet.
Practice how to write mind-blowing headlines to match your blog post ideas. Use tools like Headline Analyzer Studio to help you craft the best emotional headline possible to improve your click-through rate and motivate your audience to read your blog post. Spend quality time to write a couple of options for your headline and perform A/B testing on each to know which one will give you the best bang for your buck. In most cases, bloggers recommend adding numbers to your headlines (e.g. 20 Benefits of Using a Content Calendar) as people more frequently share headlines that contain a number. Your headlines are a good place to incorporate long-tail keywords to give you an edge in the SERPs. But avoid clickbait type headlines at all costs.
Tip 9: Focus on Internal Linking
An internal link refers to a link from one page of a domain to another page within the same domain. Internal linking improves usability through anchor texts helps spread link juice from one page to another to boost page views. Done properly, it could help improve your PageRank and other metrics like time on site, internal linking, crawl, and indexing.
As a site owner, you have complete control over the internal linking on your site, so use it to your benefit to boost your blog traffic. Internal linking not only provides your audience with further reading options but also helps you promote older posts. Your site’s layout and page relationships are more easily understood by Google’s web crawler if it has strong internal links.
13 SEO Expert Tips to Boost Your Blog Traffic Click To TweetTip 10: Social Media Profiles
You can get a backlink from a social media website by adding a link to your blog on all of your social media profiles. You can also use this as social proof on your website, your blog, in your tweets and emails to promote your blog. You don’t need to have an account on every social media platform under the sun. Rather, you need to be strategic in your use of social media in boosting your blog. The social media platform you use must add value to your overall marketing strategy.
Tip 11: Pay Attention to Your Bounce Rate
Do you have a high bounce rate? It means when people visit your site; they do not click, scroll, or convert. They visit and leave doing nothing!
As a website owner, one of the metrics that you should pay attention to is the bounce rate, which shows how many visitors navigate away after viewing only one page. If you pay attention to everything Google highlights in its forthcoming Core Web Vitals algorithm update, your bounce rate will go down. Specifically, make your website responsive and ensure that it loads fasts. If you create high-quality blog posts that offer value to your readers, your bounce rate will also reduce. It would be best to use Google Analytics or any other good analytics or SEO tool to check your bounce rate.
Tip 12: Get Strategic about Your Content
The best means to increase blog traffic is to create better content. At the heart of getting your blog noticed, and driving lots of traffic to it, is writing really great content. In most cases, it’s better to focus on evergreen content. Once you do this, all the tips in this article will drive compounding traffic growth! Besides creating fresh content, it’s good practice to update your old content when possible. Why? It will improve the user experience and help you get more organic traffic.
Don’t create content for content’s sake. Know what quality content will help your target audience and inspire them to visit your blog and take the desired action. When you know who your audience is, your content strategy can be effective. Check out what types of sites prospects are already visiting, which content they engage with, and what social media platforms they use. Building a content marketing strategy can positively affect your brand. The type of content you create can vary, such as video content, audio content and so forth.
Round up posts are essentially aggregate content, opinions of great content from experts in your niche, in a particular industry or topic area. Click To TweetTip 13: Hire an SEO Expert
Time is money and let’s face facts. Most of the tips I’ve mentioned above are difficult for the average website owner to implement. Most business owners have limited time for various activities. That’s why it’s best to leave it to SEO professionals to handle. When you hire an SEO expert, you can improve your website’s ranking in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Furthermore, it saves you much time. However, there is also the risk of damaging your site’s reputation if you hire someone who suggests ineffective practices or wrong SEO strategies.
These are the 13 SEO expert tips to help you boost your blog traffic. I often receive some questions related to the above topic, which I might as well use the opportunity to provide brief answers to below. If you need detailed answers and help with anything mentioned in this article, schedule a consultation.
How Can I Increase My Blog Traffic Fast?
Your posts should be mainly evergreen content to make them more appealing to search engines. Use long-tail keywords and add relevant topics to your posts. Include your keyword in the URL.
How Can SEO Be Used to Generate More Traffic?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a search engine marketer’s method of ensuring your website and blog posts appear in relevant searches, drawing in visitors and potential social shares.
A professional SEO expert can help you increase your website’s rankings, drive traffic, and make your business more visible to search engines. They will help you unlock your site’s full marketing potential with the power of a robust SEO toolset! Also, they will help you find and fix all your website issues and create optimised content to boost your website traffic.
The best means to increase blog traffic is to create better content. Click To TweetHow Can I Improve My Blog SEO?
It would help if you did your keyword research to find relevant search terms that your target audience uses to find your competitor website. Using the list of keywords you get from your research, you create quality content that will attract inbound links and satisfy the search intent of your target audience. This is essential for on-page optimisation. Utilise the keywords you’ve chosen throughout your post. Also, optimise your images with keywords. Reference others with links and allow readers to subscribe to your blog. Then use social media to broaden the reach of your blog posts.
Conclusion
The death of SEO, despite popular opinion, has been exaggerated. However, that does not mean what worked in 2006, 2010, or even last year will still work today. With hundreds of adjustments made to Google’s search engine algorithm each year, SEO is a rapidly changing practice.
Once you do this, all the tips in this article will drive compounding traffic growth! Besides creating fresh content, it's good practice to update your old content when possible. Click To TweetWant to boost the search visibility of your blog posts? Search engine optimisation is constantly changing. Knowing how to promote your blog will make your blog successful. Learn these tips for blog promotion, and start growing your blog right now! These simple strategies will increase blog traffic in 30 days.
What do you think about this? How did this work out for you? Tweet me @ademolaabimbola or @mauconline to let me know.
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