How to Increase Your Blog Traffic – The Easy Way
Starting a blog these days has become easy with platforms like WordPress. However once it is up and running, the next big challenge you have is to bring more traffic to your blog or website.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a marketing guru to promote your blog. You can easily increase your blog traffic to get more visitors by using some proven best practices.
In this article, we will share some of the easiest and tested tips to increase your blog traffic like an expert marketer.
Unlike other articles on growing blog traffic, we are only going to share tips that we have personally used to increase our website traffic to millions of pageviews every month.
We also have done our best to make this the most comprehensive website traffic guide, so you can have a holistic blog traffic strategy for your business.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Before You Start – Setup Push Notifications for Your Site
Website push notification helps you stay in touch with your visitors after they leave your website, so you can bring them back. This is the top 5 traffic source on WPBeginner.
We use the tool called PushEngage. It’s a freemium software that we highly recommend for all bloggers, website owners, and eCommerce sites.
It lets you send notifications to your visitors mobile or desktop device that are hard to miss, so you get a much higher engagement rate than social media or email.
The best part is, you can communicate with visitors after they’ve left your site.
We use it on all of our websites, and it’s by far the best traffic channel for us.
Not many website owners know about this tactic because it used to be hard to set up in the past. PushEngage has made that easy. Here’s how to add web push notifications in WordPress.
Once you do this, any of the tips below will drive compounding traffic growth!
1. Create Audience Profiles to Understand Your Users
Before you start creating content for your blog, it’s important to spend a little time understanding your target audience and what they are looking for.
You can quickly build an audience framework by answering the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What problems are they facing that you can help solve?
- What kind of content are they looking for?
- How would they ideally try to find the answers to their questions?
Answering these questions will help you get a clearer picture of your target audience.
You can also expand on this by adding further personalized questions such as:
- How old are they?
- What are their occupations?
- What is their education level?
- What is their expertise level in the subject matter of your blog?
These audience profiles are also known as buyer personas in the eCommerce industry. If you run an online store, then we highly recommend that you check out this detailed guide on how to create a buyer persona with examples and templates.
2. Do Keyword Research to Plan Your Content Strategy
Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover specific words and sentences that users type in Google and other search engines to find the content they are looking for.
Normally, beginners just rely on their best guesses when creating content. As you can imagine, this strategy is a hit or miss.
If you use the “best-guess” strategy, then there’s a high chance that your articles will likely not rank high in search engines.
Simply because no one’s looking for the keywords you have used, or there is just too much competition for those keywords.
By doing proper keyword research, you will unlock the following benefits:
- Discover actual search terms people are looking for
- Find unique content ideas for popular search terms
- Learn from your competitors and beat them with better content
- Create a series of pillar-articles to drive steady traffic to your blog
Now the question is how do you actually do keyword research? Luckily, it is not as difficult as you would think.
There are a lot of free and paid keyword research tools that can help. We use SEMRush for our content strategy.
All you would have to do is enter a keyword, a competitors blog/website URL, or your own URL to find out more keyword ideas.
We have created a detailed guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress blog with step by step instructions.
3. Make an Editorial Calendar
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Once you have done the keyword research, you’ll likely come up with tons of blog post ideas.♥️
Sometimes, the large list of keywords can overwhelm beginners to a point where they simply give up.♥️
To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, we recommend creating an editorial calendar (a game plan). Remember, no large blog was built in a day.♥️
It takes time and consistent effort to create a successful blog.♥️
Creating an editorial calendar will help you create and stick to the plan.♥️
There are plenty of useful tools that you can use like Asana and Trello to name a few.
These tools come with a powerful set of features that will help you stay on top of your game.♥️
The goal is to organize, create a bird’s eye view of your strategy, and be more productive.
Here are some more tips on managing your editorial workflow more efficiently.
- Don’t be too hard on yourself. Start with two articles a week and gradually increase your pace when you can.♥️
- Be consistent with your publishing schedule. Make sure you follow your calendar and publish regular content as planned.♥️
- Add notes, keyword ideas, and outlines to your calendar. This will help you produce better quality content when you sit down to write.♥️
- Use colors, tags, categories, and other features in your calendar app to make it more visual and organized.♥️
Here are some more tips on managing an editorial calendar for your blog.
4. Create Comprehensive and Useful Content
The most important thing that users and search engines look for is good quality content.♥️
For a blog, a quality piece of content is usually a comprehensive article on a specific topic that covers all the details. This makes it extremely helpful for users.♥️
These comprehensive articles are known as “pillar articles”. Other experts may refer to them as flagship content or cornerstone articles.
Basically, these are your most important articles. You need choose the most promising keyword and then provide as much information as you could in one long-form article.♥️
You should create as many pillar articles as possible to cover all the important keywords in your industry.♥️
Following are some tips that you should keep in mind when creating pillar content:
- Pillar content could be any type of article. For example, a how-to guide, tutorial, comparison article, opinion piece, a listicle, and so on.♥️
- The difference between pillar content and other articles is that your pillar articles are more comprehensive and provide in-depth information on the topic.
- Your pillar articles are not time-dependent. They are evergreen and always useful. Although we recommend keeping them updated with new information to stay on top of search results.♥️
We will cover more tips later in this article that will help you create high-quality pillar articles to get more traffic from search engines.
5. Make Your Content Readable♥️
As we mentioned earlier, search engines and users love longer and comprehensive articles that provide all the information they need.
Now the problem is that humans have a short attention span.♥️
A slight difficulty in reading or understanding will put off your users, and they will leave without looking at all the useful information that you offered.
To solve this problem before it happens, you need to make all your content easy to read.
A good place to start would be to present your article in bite-size sentences using a friendly tone and lots of visuals.
Following are just some basic tips to make your content more readable and user-friendly.
- Use smaller sentences and paragraphs. This leaves a lot of white space around text making it easier to look and read.
- Try to improve typography by using more readable fonts, large font-size, and plenty of line spacing.
- Check the readability score of your content. Yoast SEO comes with a built-in tool for that, you can also find tons of other online readability checkers
- Use a grammar checker. We recommend using Grammarly, it not only checks grammar but actually helps you write better.♥️
- Use images, screenshots, videos, infographics, and other visual elements. These media elements make your article highly-engaging and easier to read.
6. Learn and apply the SEO basics to your Website♥️
SEO is a set of best practices that help you make your website more search engine friendly. You don’t need to be an ‘SEO Guru’ to improve your website.♥️♥️
Contrary to popular belief, anyone can do SEO for their own websites without hiring an expert. There are plenty of SEO tools and plugins, free advice, and step by step tutorials available that you can use.♥️
We recommend using All in One SEO plugin for all WordPress websites. It is the most comprehensive SEO and website optimization tool. The free version includes all the SEO features that you will need on your website.
You can learn all you need to know about SEO, in our complete WordPress SEO guide for beginners. It includes step by step instructions, and it is the exact same SEO setup that we use on our own websites.
7. Learn to Write Great Headlines
When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the first thing they see is your article headline.
A catchy blog post title stands out and gets more clicks. Whereas a plain and boring headline gets ignored, and users are likely to scroll by it.
This makes headlines very important.
You need to learn how to write better titles for your blog posts that capture user attention and get more clicks.
Luckily, blogging experts have been doing research on headlines for a very long time, and you can benefit from their findings.
These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:
- A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
- It offers users a reward and value
- It promotes the content by including target keywords
Copywriters use power words to trigger emotional responses. They tell users why the article is valuable or what they will get from clicking on the headline.
Lastly, a good headline includes a call to action for users which is often subtle and sometimes implied.
To learn more, we recommend you to check out these headlines that went viral and what you can learn from them.
You can also use the following free headline analyzer tools to help create better headlines:
Our team regularly uses these three tools to create better blog post titles and headlines.