Growing blog traffic is not as simple as posting content and expecting people to show up.
Even the best content will struggle to become popular if steps are not taken to inflate its growth. And the reality is that it is now much more challenging to bring in more visitors than ever before.
Here’s the deal. Millions of blogs are being written every year, and to grow your blog traffic, yours need to be a touch above the rest. The good news is that there are methods you can incorporate to help you with this.
In this post, we will look at the most powerful ways how to grow a blog in 2022 and for years to come.
Before we jump into specific ways to increase blog traffic, let’s go through the two main elements of a blog you need to focus on, which is especially important to know for novice bloggers.
1. Content – You cannot write about any topic and expect to get great results. You need to know who you’re writing for and what information they’re seeking. The content you write needs to be relevant, up-to-date, and engaging enough to keep people coming back for more. You will see increased blog traffic only when writing with a targeted audience and relevant topics in mind.
2. Optimization – Your content needs to be optimized for search. Blogs don’t simply get “found” on Google. You will need to follow (at least) a fundamental SEO checklist on both the content and the blog site to start ranking for the target keywords. Without search engine optimization, people won’t be able to search for and find your blog.
“When in doubt, stick to the basics” — that’s the main principle we follow in this post.
You may wonder, “how quickly can you grow a blog even if I utilize all optimization tactics?”
Each case is unique, but we can define one common tendency—growing a blog cannot be done quickly.
In SEO, traffic generation takes time, and any changes you make today will only show results in a few months. Especially when you’re just starting your SEO journey. So, don’t go into this, expecting your blog traffic to skyrocket right after the publishment. That’s simply not realistic. But rest assured that with the right practices, you will see your traffic starts increasing progressively.
To accelerate your blog’s growth, you can consider promoting the articles via email marketing and social media platforms. There are many email marketing software available in the market to ease your work.
There’s no getting around it. The content you write will make or break your blog. And the kicker is that it’s not just the text itself that attracts readers, but other content elements you include as well.
Start with crafting your words well to write an engaging and valuable article.
Then, look at additional things you can do to help your blog become more visible and exciting for online users:
Once you’ve identified your target audience and area of expertise, you need to define which topics are hot at the moment. Typically, writing about “old-fashioned stuff” will not garner many views.
Instead, you need to conduct some research to identify content ideas that people are interested in right now. You can do this through tools or websites such as:
– Quora – Here, you can find people’s most recent questions on a topic. You can also check the amount of interest each question generates to determine whether it’s a viable blog post idea.
– Hubspot’s blog topic generator – Simply enter a target keyword, and the tool will generate a list of compelling topic ideas you could write about.
– Answer The Public – This tool will give you all the questions and autocomplete searches on Google that people have searched for on a topic/keyword. It’s information generated from real users, so you can ensure they’re relevant.
The advertising industry built itself by writing compelling headlines, and it’s one of the biggest market movers in the world today. People have identified the power of headlines since the early 1900s and have been using them to entice people to read.
David Ogilvy once said:
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
A great headline is usually attention-grabbing and/or polarizing, with an aspect of storytelling. Here are some superb titles examples:
SEO is a foundation for increasing blog traffic. The following proven SEO tactics will help you get your content shown to more people:
Keywords need to be included in a blog post, but many people forget or simply don’t know about using long-tail keywords. These are more extended versions of key phrases people use when searching for something specific online.
Long-tail keywords are super actionable as they drive more targeted traffic to the site. They are also less competitive keywords in the SEO world and can help you rank more easily and quickly. In fact, the Search Engine Journal experienced a 78% increase in organic traffic after optimizing its site for long-tail keywords.
Use long-tail keywords as the base for any blog post you write. It gives you a better way to structure your content based on the question posed by the keyword.
For example, “SEO content writing for beginners” is a long-tail keyword that gives you more context than “content writing.”
While content optimization is a key SEO ranking factor, all elements on the page require your attention. Inserting compelling and relevant images (infographics, graphs, screenshots) into the blog post along with keyword-optimized alt tags makes the content more visible on SERP (Search Engine Results Page), easier to read, and shareable.
Alt tags help in two ways. First, they make it easier for the Google bots to understand what the page is about, leading to faster indexing and improved rankings. Second, they put the image into the “Images” section of SERP for the relevant keywords.
Videos are considered to be the best form of capturing online user attention simply because they divulge a lot of information in a short amount of time. They also provide more context to the text. Some people may be too lazy to read the entire blog, so the easiest way to convince them is first to introduce them to the topic using a video.
And here’s the thing, you don’t need to master video creation. You can stick to your forte of writing content while simply creating a video using a screen recorder or another video editing tool that doesn’t require technical knowledge.
By doing so, you are adding another element on the page that helps with SEO while giving your readers more value.
Look, learning how to grow a blog is not rocket science. Simply understanding how Google works and what people are searching for can go a long way in helping your blog grow. Don’t overcomplicate things to the point where you’re left feeling helpless. Improve upon the foundation of your blog, and your blog traffic will increase as a result. The answer here is consistency, not always originality.
To boost your blog’s growth and get impactful results 3x faster, consider hiring a professional content marketing & SEO agency. Cooperating with the first-class marketing specialists and writers from ReVerb means you’ll be updating your blog with exceptional articles on a regular basis and effectively promoting your site using the most advanced and powerful SEO tactics.