How to Increase Your Blog Traffic – The Easy Way

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a marketing guru to promote your blog. You can easily increase your blog traffic to get more visitors by using some proven best practices.
Unlike other articles on growing blog traffic, we are only going to share tips that we have personally used to increase our website traffic to millions of page views every month.
We also have done our best to make this the most comprehensive website traffic guide, so you can have a holistic blog traffic strategy for your business.

Create Audience Profiles to Understand Your Users

Before you start creating content for your blog, it’s important to spend a little time understanding your target audience and what they are looking for.
You can quickly build an audience framework by answering the following questions:
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What problems are they facing that you can help solve?
  • What kind of content are they looking for?
  • How would they ideally try to find the answers to their questions?
Answering these questions will help you get a clearer picture of your target audience.
You can also expand on this by adding further personalized questions such as:
  • How old are they?
  • What are their occupations?
  • What is their education level?
  • What is their expertise level in the subject matter of your blog?

Do Keyword Research to Plan Your Content Strategy

Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover specific words and sentences that users type in Google and other search engines to find the content they are looking for.
Normally, beginners just rely on their best guesses when creating content. As you can imagine, this strategy is a hit or miss.
If you use the “best-guess” strategy, then a lot of your articles will likely not do well in search engines. Simply because no one’s looking for the keywords you have used, or there is just too much competition for those keywords.
By doing proper keyword research, you will unlock the following benefits:
  • Discover actual search terms people are looking for
  • Find unique content ideas for popular search terms
  • Learn from your competitors and beat them with better content
  • Create a series of pillar-articles to drive steady traffic to your blog
Make an Editorial Calendar
Once you have done the keyword research, you’ll likely come up with tons of blog post ideas.
Sometimes, the large list of keywords can overwhelm beginners to a point where they simply give up.
To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, we recommend creating an editorial calendar (a game plan). Remember, no large blog was built in a day.
It takes time and consistent effort to make a good blog.
Creating an editorial calendar will help you create and stick to the plan.
These tools come with a powerful set of features that will help you stay on top of your game.
The goal is to organize, create a bird’s eye view of your strategy, and be more productive.
Here are some more tips on managing your editorial workflow more efficiently.
  • Don’t be too hard on yourself. Start with two articles a week and gradually increase your pace when you can.
  • Be consistent with your publishing schedule. Make sure you follow your calendar and publish regular content as planned.
  • Add notes, keyword ideas, and outlines to your calendar. This will help you produce better quality content when you sit down to write.
  • Use colors, tags, categories, and other features in your calendar app to make it more visual and organized.

Create Comprehensive and Useful Content

The most important thing that users and search engines look for is good quality content.
For a blog, a quality piece of content is usually a comprehensive article on a specific topic that covers all the details. This makes it extremely helpful for users.
These comprehensive articles are known as “pillar articles”. Other experts may refer to them as flagship content or cornerstone articles.
Basically, these are your most important articles. You need to choose the most promising keyword and then provide as much information as you could in one long-form article.
You should create as many pillar articles as possible to cover all the important keywords in your industry.
Following are some tips that you should keep in mind when creating pillar content:
  • Pillar content could be any type of article. For example, a how-to guide, tutorial, comparison article, opinion piece, a listicle, and so on.
  • The difference between pillar content and other articles is that your pillar articles are more comprehensive and provide in-depth information on the topic.
  • Your pillar articles are not time-dependent. They are evergreen and always useful. Although we recommend keeping them updated with new information to stay on top of search results.
We will cover more tips later in this article that will help you create high-quality pillar articles to get more traffic from search engines.

Make Your Content Readable

As we mentioned earlier, search engines and users love longer and comprehensive articles that provide all the information they need.
Now the problem is that humans have a short attention span.
Slight difficulty in reading or understanding will put off your users, and they will leave without looking at all the useful information that you offered.
To solve this problem before it happens, you need to make all your content easy to read.
A good place to start would be to present your article in bite-size sentences using a friendly tone and lots of visuals.
The following are just some basic tips to make your content more readable and user-friendly.
  • Use smaller sentences and paragraphs. This leaves a lot of white space around text making it easier to look and read.
  • Check the readability score of your content. Yoast SEO comes with a built-in tool for that, you can also find tons of other online readability checkers
  • Use images, screenshots, videos, infographics, and other visual elements. These media elements make your article highly-engaging and easier to read.

Learn and apply the SEO basics to your Website

SEO is a set of best practices that help you make your website more search engine friendly. You don’t need to be an ‘SEO Guru’ to improve your website.
Contrary to popular belief, anyone can do SEO for their own websites without hiring an expert. There are plenty of SEO tools and plugins, free advice, and step by step tutorials available that you can use.
We recommend using Yoast SEO plugin for all WordPress websites. It is the most comprehensive SEO and website optimization tool. The free version includes all the SEO features that you will need on your website.
You can learn all you need to know about SEO.

Learn to Write Great Headlines

When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the first thing they see is your article headline.
A catchy blog post title stands out and gets more clicks. Whereas a plain and boring headline gets ignored, and users are likely to scroll by it.
This makes headlines very important.
You need to learn how to write better titles for your blog posts that capture user attention and get more clicks.
Luckily, blogging experts have been doing research on headlines for a very long time, and you can benefit from their findings.
These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:
  • A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
  • It offers users a reward and value
  • It promotes the content by including target keywords
Lastly, a good headline includes a call to action for users which is often subtle and sometimes implied.
Our team regularly uses these three tools to create better blog post titles and headlines
Make Internal Linking a Routine Task
Now that you have started creating good content, it is important to link to your articles from your existing blog posts. This is called internal linking, and it plays a huge role in SEO.
Here is why internal linking is so important:
  • Internal links help Google understand the context and relationship between different articles on your website. It then uses this information as ranking signals.
  • Internal links, when placed strategically and in context, can help you increase page views and reduce bounce rate.
  • It is harder to ask third-party websites to link to your articles. It is way easier to create links on your own site.
We recommend making it a habit to link to your older articles from your new articles.
Because internal links play such an important role in SEO, we have even made it part of our pre-publish checklist for our writers.

Start Generating More Backlinks

A backlink is an incoming link to your content from an external website. Backlinks are one of the most influential signals in Google’s rankings.
Getting backlinks from reputable websites and blogs is very difficult. Not just for beginners, even experienced bloggers struggle with it.
Here are some tips to get quality backlinks to your website:
  • Reach out to influencers and reputable blogs in your industry, and then tell them about specific content on your website that they might want to link.
  • Write guest posts on other blogs and websites.
  • Interview influencers and bloggers on your blog. They will likely want to let their users know to come to check out their interview, and you’ll get a backlink.
  • The easiest way to get a backlink is to add a link to your website on all your social media profiles.