How To Effectively Increase Traffic On Your Blog?

How to increase blog traffic? This is probably one of the most asked questions by many bloggers and those who have websites. Traffic is a crucial thing when it comes to blogging and running a website. Because without traffic, a website and blog won't be able to develop and have good performance. Although it's not that easy, increasing blog traffic is still possible.

You have to know that using a memorable, unique domain name, having a cool layout, and creating quality content are, unfortunately, not enough to increase blog traffic. There are other things that you must do, here they are.

Keyword Research

The first thing you can do to increase the traffic on your blog is by keyword research. Although creating content based on your personal idea seems interesting, this is not always suggested. Because if people have no interest in your idea, your blog traffic will stay low. By researching keywords, you can find the most looked for keywords by internet users.

You need to write content with a topic that many people look for. This way, your blog can potentially rank high on search engines like Google, as well as get high traffic. There are many tools that can help you to research keywords, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and many more. These tools will help you to find the right keywords for your blog content.

SEO Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a series of efforts to increase a website's visibility on search engines' pages. Properly applying SEO techniques can help your blog's ranking on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and organically increase traffic on your website. SEO is divided into three kinds, which are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Here is the explanation.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing various parts inside the website, including the content. Other things that you can do to optimize your on-page SEO are creating an attractive headline or title, creating a meta description that contains main keywords, using alt text on pictures, and so on.

Off-Page SEO

Opposite to on-page SEO, off-page SEO focuses on optimizing parts outside the website. For example, building quality backlinks, using anchor texts, enriching internal linking, and others.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a series of efforts to increase website authority by optimizing its technical side. You can do it by paying attention to Google index and crawling, increasing your website speed, paying attention to DA and PA score, and so on.

Make Your Blog to be Mobile-Friendly

For your information, mobile phones contribute 56% of all website traffic. This is a strong reason why you should make your blog accessible on mobile devices. If your website's user experience is poor, especially to mobile users, you might lose most of the potential traffic. Mobile-friendly blogs should be responsive.

This means that your blog should be able to automatically adjust its design to various device screen sizes. Visitors can browse your blog comfortably without having to scroll a lot. If you don't know how to do it, you can hire a professional or use a platform web builder with responsive themes and templates.

If you prefer to use a platform web builder, WordPress is recommended as it provides a lot of mobile-friendly themes. Responsive websites are also important for good SEO. Since Google has applied mobile-first indexing, it's bot prioritizes a mobile version of websites to determine rankings and indexing. As the result, unresponsive websites need to struggle to get a good ranking on SERP.

Increase Website Speed

Another way on how to increase blog traffic is by increasing your website speed. Does your blog take long to load? 47% of visitors expect a website to open within 2 seconds or less. 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So that if your blog takes long to load, visitors will likely leave your website, leading to a bounce rate.

Bounce rate itself is a percentage of visitors that leave a website. The higher the bounce rate of your blog, the lower the ranking of your blog on search engines.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of online marketing via website promotional activities by increasing website visibility. In a nutshell, if SEO is an organic way to increase website visibility, which is free, SEM is the paid one. The most common example of SEM is Pay Per Click (PPC), which is advertising a website.

Websites that use PPC can be seen through the 'Ads' description next to the articles that appear on the search page.

Long-Tail Keywords and LSI Keywords

Long-tail keywords consist of more than 3 words. These keywords normally lower search volumes than short-tail keywords but the competition level tends to be lower as well. You can start targeting high ranking on long-tail keywords first before competing on short-tail keywords. On the other hand, Latent Semantic (LSI) keywords are words or sentences that are considered semantically relevant by search engines.

LSI keywords aim to maximize keyword variations on certain topics. For example, the LSI keyword of the 'how to cook risotto' is 'how to easily cook risotto'. LSI keywords are necessary so that visitors can comfortably read an article without any keyword spamming.

Write Good, Quality Content

Content is the core of every blog. And interesting content will make visitors want to revisit your blog, again and again. And if you manage to draw visitors' attention with your content, they will likely share it with others. Note that good content is the informative one, meaning you need to do deep research. This aims to ensure that the content you create is unique, attractive, and detailed.

You can also use multimedia, such as video, pictures, and graphic information to make it even more interesting. Below are several tips for creating content that bring traffic to a blog.

Organize content based on ideas from a number of main keywords. Develop keywords into topics of writing. Make sure you choose keywords relevant to high search volumes. You can use tools like Semrush or Google Keyword Planner for further keyword analysis.
Create headlines that draw attention. Such headlines will draw visitors' attention on SERP. So, the more interesting the headline, the better. Headlines indeed have to attract people's curiosity.
Avoid using long, complicated keywords. Most people will just skim content to find the information they need. Therefore, it will be better if your content is brief, yet clear and informative.
Write informative content that can provide answers or solutions to frequently asked questions or issues. Put yourself in readers' shoes and estimate what they want to read. Moreover, avoid writing sentences that are not relevant, just because you want to add numbers of words. Also, avoid discussing things that are not relevant with your topic.
Use synonyms so that you don't use the same keywords over and over again.
Add pictures or videos. Long articles with so many texts without any other elements are surely boring. To make it more interesting, you can add some visual elements like videos and pictures so that readers won't find it boring reading your content.

To be able to write good content, you have to keep practicing. Over time, you will learn how to effectively write content and increase your blog traffic.

Audit Not-Updated Content

Regularly posting new content is surely effective to bring traffic to your blog. But you also must not forget old content. Search engines will continue to do website crawling to look for new content. Every time you update your old content, search engines' bots will crawl the page again to re-evaluate and update the ranking on SERP according to the changes made.

Updating old content can be a fairly quick way to increase your blog traffic. Because your old content might already have received a good ranking on SERP so that an update will keep it relevant and increase its ranking opportunity. You can use Google Analytics to figure out which content is popular and choose promising posts.

But remember not to update unnecessarily just to increase traffic. Focus on quality instead of quantity. These followings are some updates that you can have for your articles:

Fix any typo or mistype, inflexible sentences, and content writing flow.
Fix broken links and update your article sources, if possible.
Add new pictures, videos, or infographics.
Improve content accuracy by updating the information.

Evaluating your content is important to know the performance of each content that you have published. By doing so, you will find content that doesn't yet produce significant traffic. Instead of deleting this content, you can just update them. Re-research the keywords and maximize what makes the content poor.

Competitor Research

No matter the business or industry, paying attention to your competitors is an essential step. By doing competitor research, you will be able to know what should be improved and developed in your blog. You can do it by using the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis. Additionally, you can also use various tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs for competitor research.

Insert External Links

Collect as many inbound links or backlinks as possible to your blog. Backlinks are links that are from other websites that put your website link on their pages. Likewise, if you place a link from another website on your blog page, that website will get a backlink from you. Collecting external links is important to increase your blog traffic because it can help to maximize SEO performance.

The more backlinks you have, the higher your website opportunity to be seen by search engines' bots. Below are some tips to get quality backlinks:

Exchange backlinks and reach the websites that have the same niche as yours. Offer some of your content to be linked to their content and promise them that you will also link their content on your page. This can generate a mutual deal so that both your website and other websites can increase traffic.
Reach the brands that you frequently mention. If you frequently mention certain brands in your posts, try to contact the company once you have published your content. Send a message telling them that you have published a post that talks about their product. The company might be willing to give a backlink to your blog.

Create Internal Links

Sometimes, webmasters focus too much on backlinks and tend to forget internal links. In fact, both are equally important to increase traffic.

Search engines, especially Google, use external and internal links to determine a page's score. If it finds many links on a page, Google will consider the page important, potentially improving your blog's ranking among search results.

When you create content, always insert some internal links to relevant articles in your post. For instance, if your post discusses how to start a business, involve links of relevant articles that have been previously published, such as business ideas or tips. Another benefit of internal links is improving website navigation and user experience.

This way, visitors will spend more time on your blog. By providing internal links to relevant pages, visitors don't need to look for information from your competitors, which eventually will lengthen their visit time on your website. Here are some ways to build a good internal link structure.

Write a lot of articles. If you want to insert many internal links in your posts, you should have many contents to be linked. Focus on developing your content so that you can insert more links in your post.
Use flexible anchor texts. Insert links in your content with a smooth, natural flow. Use words that have existed in articles. Avoid writing unnecessary sentences just to insert internal links.
Make sure you only link to relevant content. This way, your readers still consider your content valuable, beneficial, and informative.
Internal links may be helpful, but if you put too many of them, it will only make your article look messy and ruin your user experience.

Those are several ways on how to increase blog traffic that you can try.