How to Increase Blog Traffic — 10 Simple Steps

 How to Increase Blog Traffic — 10 Simple Steps

Nikhil garg

UPDATED: APRIL 25, 2021

Increase blog traffic - an image of somebody typing

In this article we look at how to increase blog traffic: below, you’ll find 10 really simple steps you can take to generate a MUCH larger readership for your posts.

But let’s start with an important question: why blog in the first place?

Why blog?

Well, there are three main reasons.

First, blogging can be a lot of fun. It allows you to express yourself and share your views with a potentially large audience.

Second, done well, blogging can help establish you (or your business) as an authority in your field.

And third (and most importantly), blogging has the potential to dramatically increase the number of people visiting your site. According to inbound marketing experts Hubspot, businesses that blog regularly tend to attract 55% more traffic than those that don’t.

So, if you write well and are blogging about a subject in which there is a sizeable interest, you can end up with a large amount of traffic on your website.

And we all know what lots of traffic to a website means: increased sales opportunities and revenue.

But how do you go about creating a successful blog?

1. Find the right writer! (Hint: that might not be you)

At the heart of getting your blog noticed, and driving lots of traffic to it, is writing really great content – and that content is going to be much better if the person writing it is both knowledgeable and passionate about what they are writing about.

Posts that are written from the heart — and not by a content farm — are far more likely to be the posts that interest people and crucially, get shared.

BUT: it might be the case that you personally are not the best person to write the posts for your site.

Perhaps you’re not a great writer; perhaps you don’t have time to devote to blogging.

Blogger at work

Finding a great writer is key to the success of any blog.

If either of those statements sounds like it might apply to you, consider hiring a writer who is capable of creating truly great blog posts and putting in the hours to do so.

Whoever ends up writing the posts on your website, their personality has to shine through. Readers identify with writers because there is much to like — or even dislike — about their personality, mouthiness or tone of voice.

If a reader likes YOU as a writer — and not just the quality of the content you are producing — you are far more likely to attract a dedicated following.

So, make sure your personality comes across in your posts. This helps you form a rapport with your readers, who may be more inclined as a result to come back to your blog simply because they like you as an individual.

2. Use keyword research to identify good topics to blog about

It’s really easy to sit down and write blog posts which cover, in considerable depth, topics that nobody is particularly interested in.

Similarly, it’s easy to write a blog post covering an area that people are really interested in, but to give it a title containing keywords that nobody ever searches for.

Keyword research is your friend here: you can use a wide range of keyword research tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs to discover the number of monthly searches for particular keywords, and find out how difficult it would be to rank for particular search phrases. 

Keyword research is crucial to successful blogging

Carrying out keyword research in Semrush.

The trick is to identify phrases that you can use in your blog that generate a reasonable amount of traffic, but for which there isn’t massive competition.

Keyword research tools and resources

For a more detailed look at how to find the best keywords to use in your blog, you could do worse than check out Semrush’s guide to keyword research. You can also get an exclusive 14-day trial of the product here.

And our Semrush review, Ahrefs vs Semrush and Moz vs Semrush posts will help you find out more about some of the keyword research tools available.

If you’re a Chrome user, you might also be interested in a new SEO tool, GrowthBar, which works as a Chrome extension and is available at a lower cost than some of the products listed above. A five day free trial of GrowthBar can be accessed here.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you should ensure that your keywords feature in all the right places in your post — its title, meta description, headers and body copy (more on all that in a moment).

3. Focus on producing long-form content

Studies show that ‘long-form content’ performs better in search results than short or ‘thin’ posts. Long-from content refers to posts with high word counts that go into HUGE depth on a particular topic.

There are a couple of reasons why long-form content helps to generate higher positions in search results.

First, longer posts will naturally be more keyword-rich and therefore more likely to crop up as results for ‘long tail’ keyword searches.

Second (and perhaps more importantly), the in-depth nature of a long post is more likely to satisfy readers who come across it — it will be more likely to answer your visitor’s query, or solve their problem.

As a result, the post is more likely to get shared on social media or get linked to from other sites — with very positive implications for traffic.

Remember: don’t overdo length

Although long-form posts typically attract more readers than very short ones, it is important not to get too carried away with length.

If you are creating huge articles just for the sake of ticking a ‘long-form’ box, and this is at the expense of creating useful content, it is unlikely that you will be rewarded by either readers or search engines for doing so.

Quality is key, as Google repeatedly makes clear in its advice on how to make content rank highly in search results.

4. Keep your content fresh by updating existing posts

If you do any research into blogging and SEO, you’ll come across loads of articles which stress how vital it is to create ‘fresh’ content in order to generate good search results and traffic to your site.

However, I’d caution against interpreting this as an instruction to only produce new posts.

With my own content, I’ve found it much more useful to focus on quality over quantity — and rather than blogging every day just for the sake of it, I prefer to invest my time in keeping my existing content as strong (and as in-depth) as possible.

I do this by continuously reviewing older posts and enhancing them with the most up-to-date information available.

Not only does this send the ‘freshness’ signals to Google that the search engine’s algorithms approve of, but it typically increases the length of posts and helps provide the ‘long-form’ content which tend to perform better in search results.

(That’s not to say of course that I never publish new content. It’s more a case of ensuring that existing content is not neglected, but rather consistently improved upon).

                                                 By:- Nikhil garg