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A blog filled with fresh, innovative and original content is one of the most effective ways to engage your audience and attract new customers, but how should you direct traffic to your blog?
However insightful or informative your content is, people need to be aware of it in order for it to be effective. Without a healthy flow of traffic to your website or blog, your content won’t deliver the results you’re hoping for. However, there are some tried and tested strategies for increasing traffic.
If you want to reach a wider audience, get the best ROI from your content and boost engagement, take a look at these sure-fire tips for increasing traffic flow…
Getting traffic to your blog relies on you posting great content, so this is the first thing to address. Business owners often write their own blogs, but it might be worth outsourcing your content writing to an experienced digital marketer or copywriter. Whilst you’ll obviously have an in-depth knowledge of your company, time limitations and inexperience may prevent you from producing the best possible content for your site.
With assistance from a professional digital copywriter, you can ensure that your blog posts are filled with enriching and engaging content, as well as being fully optimised for use online. By taking a dual approach, and writing for readers as well as search engines, professional copywriters can help you to ensure your content is well-regarded and highly anticipated.
Uploading new content to your site on a regular basis can be good for your search engine rankings and your readership but be careful about what you post. In a bid to publish blog posts regularly, many businesses upload relatively short pieces of content. Worried that readers may not want to spend a significant amount of time reading a more in-depth piece, business owners try to play it safe by publishing shorter, broader blog posts.
However, studies have shown that short-form content isn’t as engaging or as effective when compared to longer pieces. Not only do readers want to see longer and more informative blog posts, they’re actively searching for them.
When you focus on long-form content, you have the opportunity to write in more depth about your chosen topic. This ensures you can give the reader a more valuable insight into the subject matter and increases their trust in you. Whether you’re writing an opinion piece, releasing company news or discussing new changes to the industry, long-form content should be your first priority.
When you’re writing your own blog, it’s easy to assume what people will want to read or what’s of interest to them. Similarly, writing about areas you’re familiar with can be less time-consuming than having to research an article from scratch. Of course, publishing articles or blog posts without conducting appropriate research can be somewhat of a pointless exercise.
If users aren’t searching for content on that particular subject or if there isn’t widespread interest in it, your hard work will go to waste. Whilst you might have chosen a topic which is bound to have some general appeal, there may be more important changes occurring in the industry. If so, your post is going to be overshadowed by more topic issues which are grabbing the reader’s attention.
Before you start writing, be sure to take the time to research what users are interested in and find out how they’re searching for related content. There are a wide range of tools to help you identify the most popular keywords, so it’s easy to find out exactly what users are searching for at any given time. With this information, you can choose a relevant and popular subject to write about and increase your number of readers significantly.
When users search for related or relevant content, you want your blog post to be the first thing that they see. To achieve this, you’ll need to ensure that you’re taking your SEO, or search engine optimisation, seriously. Broadly split into two categories, on-page and off-page SEO, your blog posts should always be optimised so that they can be ranked highly by search engines.
Optimising your blog posts means putting keywords into URLs and headings so that search engines are aware of what your content is about. In addition to this, any non-text content, such as videos or images, should be accompanied by a text description so that they boost your SEO rankings for related keywords and terms. Similarly, you’ll want to ensure that you include an enticing and keyword-rich meta description with every blog post. However, beware of keyword stuffing and don’t try to place the same keyword in your content repeatedly.
SEO is an industry in itself, so it can take some time to understand exactly how it works and how to optimise your content most effectively. Although on-page SEO is vital to high rankings, this should be accompanied by a comprehensive off-page SEO strategy too. By using an SEO company, you can increase the effectiveness of your SEO activity, employ a dedicated strategy to enhance your rankings and stay up-to-date with Google’s latest algorithms. Few businesses have the in-house resources to facilitate an effective SEO campaign but outsourcing your needs to an SEO company can be the quickest and most cost-effective way to improve your rankings.
As search engines value new content, many people seek to publish a new blog post every day, every week or every fortnight. Indeed, adding new content can be extremely valuable, providing it’s relevant, interesting and optimised. However, you needn’t publish brand new content every time you want to enhance your blog.
Instead, or as well as, posting new content, take the time to update your existing posts too. Older posts may contain outdated content but editing and adding updates can revitalise it. Furthermore, by adding new content to existing posts, you can turn short blog posts into long-form content and, therefore, ensure you’re meeting Google’s new requirements.
As SEO optimisation techniques can change over time, returning to existing posts gives you the opportunity to ensure they’re fully compliant with the latest SEO strategies. As well as giving your readers the best possible content, you’re also ensuring that you get the highest ROI when it comes to your content.
In order to increase your readership, you’ll want to share your content as much as possible. Whilst content is an important part of your digital marketing in itself, it should be used as part of a more comprehensive online marketing strategy. By sharing your posts on social media, for example, you can maximise the reach of each piece of content and dramatically increase your audience.
However, don’t assume you should be the only person sharing your content. By making your blog posts easy to share, you’re encouraging readers to share the content with other people. It’s easy to retweet someone else’s tweet, for example, or share a Facebook post, so ensure you encourage readers to do so. By placing social media buttons next to every blog post on your website, you can also encourage users to share content on social media directly from your site.
In addition to this, reader involvement can greatly increase the popularity and effectiveness of your blog posts. Enabling commenting and encourage readers to share their thoughts and opinions on your pieces, although make sure this is well-moderated. By encouraging users to comment on your posts, you’re also motivating them to return to your site and your blog to see how others have responded to their own posts.
Once you’re producing high-quality, long-form content, you’ll want to ensure that it also features a decent number of backlinks. These are links from other websites which direct users straight to your blog posts. Search engines value these highly, particularly if you feature links from high authority domains. In fact, backlinks are so important they are integral to any SEO or digital marketing campaign.
However, building an effective backlink network can be time-consuming. Whilst it is possible to ‘buy’ backlinks online, this should always be avoided. Typically, these involve links from sites with no value and sites which have been created with the sole purpose of providing backlinks. You won’t get any organic readers from these types of sites and search engines won’t be fooled either.
Instead, you need to reach out to reputable and relevant websites and persuade them to link to your blog post. Of course, even when you’ve got great content, this can be time-consuming and require a lot of effort. For the vast majority of business owners, working with a reputable SEO company is the best way to ensure your blog posts have an appropriate number of backlinks. Many SEO firms already have established networks of high-value websites they can approach for backlinks, and this can make a significant difference to the effectiveness of your content.
This is a collaborative post.
Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
Contact: [email protected]
