So, you have a blog. And you already know people won’t magically appear. Now you need to know how to get traffic for your blog. Here are seven steps you can take to start getting website traffic.
Stay Focused
Make sure that your blog has a clear focus. It’s important that both search engines and readers can identify what the blog is about. Determine what you want your site to be known for and make sure your blog content reflects that.
Know Who You’re Talking To
Make sure you understand the exact person you’re trying to reach. At first, this may not seem like something that could increase traffic. But, if you are writing your articles so they can apply to anyone and everyone, you are talking to no one.
By trying to attract everybody, you aren’t helping a specific person. You will end up attracting more people by writing to one individual. This will allow your content to be detailed and actionable. You will attract more than the one person you are targeting when you write in this manner. If you try to write for everyone you will bore them all.
Stick with Evergreen Content
For steady, long-term traffic growth, try to stick with evergreen content. Evergreen content is always relevant and appears fresh even after long periods.
When you write about timely content you often get an immediate traffic boost. But, then the traffic goes down over time. The opposite happens with evergreen content. Evergreen content acts as a resource and the value doesn’t dwindle over time. That allows for traffic that remains steady and can even increase over time.
Perform Keyword Research
To get traffic to your blog, you want to make sure you are writing content about topics people are looking for. Writing takes time, so make sure you are spending it to write about things your audience cares about.
Leverage keyword research to fine-tune your topics and ideas. Start with your list of ideas, then perform keyword research to grow your list and add data. You can then rank content based on high monthly searches and low competition. For directions on how to do that, view our complete keyword research tutorial.
Write Many Titles
The title is important. Often, the title will be the only thing people read when deciding if they should continue. Take a few extra minutes to come up with three to five title ideas. Once you have options you can narrow it down and choose the best fit.
Understand SEO Basics
To get traffic to your blog you don’t have to be an SEO expert. But, you do need to be aware of the basics. You need to understand how to write for SEO and how to add on-page optimizations.
A few of these basics include:
- creating content so it’s easy to scan
- adding the keyword to the first paragraph and subheadings
- adding a meta description
To stay on top of SEO basics, you can download the On-Page Optimizations Cheatsheet below.
Post Consistently
And the last tip to grow your traffic, is to post consistently! The exact frequency of your blog updates isn’t as important as the fact that you are consistent. Choose a frequency that you can commit to (I choose weekly) and stick to it.
Once you’ve decided on a frequency, create a plan. Create a content calendar and plan out which article you’ll publish on which day. Try to plan out a quarter at a time. That way, you have lots of ideas in the pipeline. That will make it easier to batch content and you will be less likely to miss any updates.
Traffic growth will likely be slow to start, but don’t give up. As you remain consistent, you will start to see traffic grow. And as it grows, it will pick up momentum.
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