I’ve been blogging for about three years now. I started out with a personal blog where I wrote about food, fitness and inspiration. For the most part, I wasn’t worried about tips to increase blog traffic, SEO, page views, followers or comments. I would just write. A lot. I wrote a blog post almost every weekday for a year. As a result, I began to see followers subscribe, page views increase and comments appear on my posts. It was a lot of fun!
Now I have this business blog and for about two years we’ve worked as a team to be very conscious of what works and what doesn’t work with regard to blog traffic and visitor retention. We experiment with different forms of content, research keywords, post almost every weekday and share our content through social media and our weekly e-newsletter.
Over the years, we’ve experimented with how often we post, what content is most interesting to our readers and whether or not video is worth all the trouble. So today, I thought it would be helpful to share 15 tips to increase blog traffic that we’ve found to be successful as far as blog ROI is concerned.
15 Tips to Increase Blog Traffic
Although every blog is a bit different, you can incorporate these tips gradually and begin experimenting with what seems to work for your target audiences / ideal visitor. Copy and paste these tips into your blog editorial calendar and make sure you’re monitoring your Google Analytics (and that you’ve installed it!) before you begin so you can see the fruit of your labor. You’ll notice the difference!
1. Compelling headline backed by science and experience. There are certain words that catch a person’s attention and make them want to click. Read this for ideas: The Research and Science of Blogging.
2. SEO your posts. Meaning, research your keywords and include a focus keyword in every post. This will help with search engine clicks to your post and organic traffic.
3. Original content. Think outside of the box and don’t feel like you have to copy the same genre of content everyone else is sharing. Interesting, original posts get more clicks.
4. Round-ups. We all click on them. Roundup posts get clicks because we like the idea of seeing a bunch of resources grouped together at once. Roundups written smartly should bring resources and ideas together that are new, different or very helpful.
5. Get over yourself. This is the starting point … to get more clicks, you must blog and blog often. Don’t get caught in your own head worrying about what people will think, which will keep you from posting often. Just do it!
6. Use compelling images. Please steer clear of boring stock images. Get creative and use easy tools like Canva to add text to images or make a custom image that’s eye catching.
7. Learn from others. What sort of content do you like to click on? There’s your first hint to what content might be interesting to your readers. See how headlines are being constructed and look for themes like: numbers, short titles, intriguing topics, etc. Warning: beware not to mislead your readers by resorting to click bait type headlines.
8. SEO your images. Incorporating keywords within the “alt text” of your blog post images will help them rank in the “Images” tab in search and encourage click thrus. See why a compelling image that helps communicate your post content is so important? 😉
9. Sharing Buttons. Your blog post must have social media sharing buttons that are easy to see and use to encourage quick, seamless sharing. The more shares, the broader your audience and the more likely your post will get views.
10. E-news opt in. Include an e-newsletter opt in within each blog post to encourage visitors to come back and keep up with what’s new on your blog. This will increase blog post views as e-newsletters go out to announce new content or special promotions and blog subscribers re-visit your site.
11. Refresh old content within new posts. A great way to bring attention to older content is to include it within new blog post content. This could look like linking to an older post within a new post, including an older post in a round-up or mentioning blog content within other content like e-newsletters and videos.
12. Share multiple times across social media channels. Despite all that time spent writing a post, it’s tempting to just hit “Publish” and be done with it. This is a big mistake. Don’t just share your blog post on social media once and move on. Share it on all your social channels and share it multiple times on Twitter with Buffer.
13. Use your homepage. Your homepage is a perfect spot to showcase new blog content. If you look at our homepage as an example, you’ll see we have a tab that leads to our “Blog” and blog subcategories, several images that lead to current blog content and a “What Others Are Reading” section in the footer linking to popular posts.
14. Re-share old posts within Twitter. Use the tool Revive Old Post to take your old blog content and periodically share it on Twitter. This tool saves a ton of time and is a great way to expose older posts to new audiences.
15. Pin your posts. Think your blog posts aren’t Pinterest worthy? Think again! Pinterest is a significant source of traffic for the majority of our clients. Just make sure your image is compelling and that it accurately reflects the content that will be viewed once the “Pin” is clicked so as not to mislead anyone.
There you have it! Fifteen tips to increase your blog traffic in 2015 and beyond! Let me know what you try out and what you think could be added to this list in the comments below. Happy blogging!
