How To Increase Blog Traffic – 6 Simple Strategies

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No matter how you’re driving traffic to your blog right now it’s important to make sure you’re looking at this from all angles, and diversifying your strategies somewhat to ensure you’re not left short when an algorithm change or a search engine update happens.

Social networks work great for driving traffic to your blog IF you have a great community and a great following. However, you’re at the mercy of these platforms and how much they want to put your content in front of your followers. The algorithm on Facebook for instance is a a bit ruthless and often your content gets missed by 95% or more of your followers.

I love a strategy that takes into consideration a number of elements and one that has longevity.

In this blog post we talk about 6 options for helping to increase traffic to your blog. Let’s dive in! 

[Disclaimer: This post includes affiliate links for which I may make a small commission at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase. I only recommend products I absolutely ❤️]

How to increase traffic to your blog

1. Make it easy for Google to scan your posts 

Google loves it when we make it super easy to understand what’s on a page. Create headers and subheaders using H2 and H3 headings. This way it’s easy for both the search engines and for your readers to scan your blog page and know what it’s all about. 

Make sure you’re using lots of varying formatting like lists and quotes. This is a great way to convey your point and also to ensure your readers are able to pull out the bits they need when scanning your page.

Concise lists are also a good way to up your chances of getting featured as a google snippet on the SERPs. A Snippet is the results box at the top of the page. I wrote an entire post on how to increase your chances of gaining a Google snippet if you’re interested in the nitty gritty details. 

Make sure your post has plenty of white space. And, break up your paragraphs into easy to scan sections. Forget everything your 12th grade teacher taught you about formatting an easy. And go for short and sharp snack sized bites of information that are easy to find. 

Finally, link to great external sites that might be valuable to add to your readers experience, this lets Google know you’re not interested in providing value and great content rather than just promoting your own work. 

Also, link to your other content that adds another dimension or layer to your blog post. Search engines love it when you show them the way around your site. 

You might also find these articles helpful:

SEO for Beginner Bloggers 

6 Content tweaks your readers will love you for 

2. Increase your backlining profile

It’s super important to increase your backlining profile so you’re signalling to the search engines that your site is valuable and highly regarded. Having your (do follow) link on another person’s high quality site tells Google that your site is valuable and it is important in the particular niche you sit in.

Its easy to get backlinking opportunities the right way by creating exceptional, highly valued content that other people in your niche want to organically link back to.

Other ways to gain backlinks are guest blogging, participating in roundup and collaboration style opportunities and answering callouts on services like HARO.

HARO

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a long standing PR platform that connects journalists with sources. I’ve used it for over a decade!

You simply sign up on their platform and can choose which type of queries you want to receive and how often. They send out callouts 3 times a day. You can then answer these callouts with high quality answers directly. 

Tip for using HARO: Be quick! Callouts don’t last long – normally only a day or two, and journo tend to grab the first, best high quality responses. So take 10 minutes each morning to scan your HARO lists. 

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is super simple and most bloggers are more than happy to accept guest posts on their blogs. Look for high quality, relevant to your niche blogs that you love. From a relationship with the owner and see if there’s an opportunity to share your expertise in a specific area.

Roundup posts

Roundup posts are a bit like callouts. Bloggers ask for a collection of responses to a specific need. But where they differ is in that the blogger is creating a curated post, normally of the top, or best of something.

Food bloggers participate in roundup posts regularly, for example “30 sumptuous fall recipes using gluten free pasta” … they post a request up on a community group asking for links to blog posts containing the thing they are seeking and then once they have enough will write a post featuring those sites.

Great for backlinks and really easy to do. A great group to join is Blogger round up requests. 

3. Write your posts to solve a reader problem 

It’s so much fun to write about your passions and what YOU want to write about but it’s really important that you’re writing for your specific audience and solving THEIR specific problems first and foremost.

You want to be writing content that your ideal audience might be searching for online.

There’s a tonne of great ways to find out what your audience is thinking about. 

Answer the Public is a pretty cool platform where you can type in a word or a string of words and it will generate a chart for you of leading questions that people might be searching for.

For example. If you type in smoothies it will return 80 individual results for questions people are asking right now about smoothies.

That’s pretty great market intell for you right there. 

You can scan sites like Quora to see what sort of things people are asking in the forums. It’s easy to add topics of interest to your Quora account and get notifications when someone asks a question in your specific niche. Be warned though!

You want to be adding value not just pimping for link clicks! Add value to others and make sure you answer their question on the platform first! Before even thinking of leaving a link to any supplementary advice. 

Join Facebook Groups for your niche and notice the type of questions people are asking. These recurring themes are great topic generators for your blog .

Finally, ask! Ask your readers what they want to read about. 

You might also find this article useful:

How to use Facebook Groups to grow your blog 

4. Be consistent – Google loves consistency 

Aim to pick a blogging schedule and try to stick to it. Think of search engines as octopuses (octopi? ) … they head out regularly and crawl the ocean – or in this case the internet- for interesting things to play with. 

Search engines regularly crawl the internet to find new data. This includes crawling your site regularly. How often they crawl your site depends on a few different factors… But one is how regularly you post.

Google gets to know your routine and if you’re consistently posting 3 times per week, it gets to know that. This process is carried out by the scheduler. 

Once they have discovered new content they then set about indexing this content. New content goes to the parser where data extracted then added to the index. 

When someone searches for a query on a search engine that search engine then deploys a number of algorithms to rank relevant content. 

Make sure Google gets to know your rhythm and post consistently. I like to post around 12 articles a month. So my schedule normally looks like around 3 blog posts per week, depending on my other activities like course creation and guest blogging commitments. 

I aim to post high quality, relevant and fairly metay (normally 1200 -2500 words) posts at least 3 times per week consistently. 

5. Write evergreen content 

Evergreen content is the stuff that sticks around for agesssss…. It’s the content that is timeless. You want to make sure that the majority of your content is evergreen, meaning that no matter the time of year of how long has passed, it still remains highly relevant. 

Seasonal content like Christmas posts or posts for events has a time limit on it. 

Great evergreen content can generate traffic for a long, long time, done right. Make sure you’re updating your evergreen content regularly with new and up to date information.

Consider making a couple of your evergreen content pieces your cornerstone content.

This is content that makes up the most important and meaningful pieces on your site. The ones you want to rank highest and the ones that will drive visitors out to other blog posts on your site. This is easily done with the Yoast plugin, see here for instructions. 

6. Optimise your blog for speed 

Search engine love speed. And the speed of your site is one of the top things that google looks at when deciding which sites to rank. Speed affects where you’ll rank. Backlinko conducted a study looking at factors for well ranking websites and found that site speed was among the top contributing factors. 

You can check your site speed on Googles Page Speed Insights tool  or here on Pingdom.

And they’ll even tell you how to improve your score if its low. Some of the things you can easily do to increase your site speed are below.

How to improve your website speed  

1. Use a lightweight theme on your blog
2. Reduce the number of plugins you use 
3. Delete inactive plugins
4. Reduce the size of your images on your pages and save as jpgs
5. Upload images in the correct size to your blog pages
6. Use a CDN (content delivery network) 
7. Create your site with mobile users in mind 
8. Compress your images before uploading or use a compression plugin 
9. Upgrade your web hosting to a faster service
10. Delete unused imagery in your media library 

Noone wants to wait around to see your page loading. They’ll simply click off and go to the next result on Google if it takes too long.

The difference in bounce rates going from a loading time of 1-3 seconds and 1-5 seconds is a whopping 58%. You don’t want to be that site that’s having their hard earned traffic bounce off at that rate right! 

Recap: 6 ways to increase traffic to your blog 

1. Make it easy for Google to scan your posts 
2. Increase your backlining profile 
3. Write your posts to solve a reader problem
4. Be consistent 
5. Write evergreen content
6. Optimise your blog for speed

No matter how awesome your posts are it’s a great idea to get your bases covered from all sides and maximise the potential for people to find your content.

Try a couple of these tips above and let me know how you get on in the comments below! Love to hear from you! 

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