Bloggers often make big sacrifices to increase traffic. After all, traffic drives profits. However, after spending countless hours of your valuable time and energy slowly making your blog the best that it can be, you could still be disappointed with the results. Nobody (almost) wants to pay for website traffic, so what can you do get thousands of visitors or more daily?
How to Increase Organic Blog Traffic
The best website traffic is traffic that you don’t have to pay for. However, the success of your blog isn’t at the whim of search engine. You have considerable power to increase organic traffic by taking advantage of Google’s algorithms. At its core, Google wants users to have a great user experience. If you’ve heard content is king before, rest assured that this is entirely true. However, there are several other steps to boost organic traffic and grow your blog.
Do Keyword Research
The “right” keyword strategy has evolved considerably over the last few decades. While keyword stuffing and other types of ranking manipulation can have devastating results, keywords continue to play a role in organic traffic volume.
Keyword research doesn’t start by pouring over volumes of data. Instead, it starts with a solid understanding of who your audience is and what they are interested in. Keep in mind that this will change over time. Stay in touch with your audience. Interact with them, and bee on top of trends and current events affecting them.
Then, use various keyword research tools. Some of these are Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner and various paid services – including SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz and others.
Adjust Your Meta Strategy
When Google’s bots crawl your website, they pay attention to more than your keywords to learn what your content is about. Specifically, these bots look at meta elements, such as the headers, alt text, title tags, meta description and more. Most, but not all, of these meta elements are not visible to your audience. However, they should contain your primary or secondary keywords top optimize rankings.
Rank Math is a free plugin available on WordPress that can facilitate some aspects of your meta strategy. Yoast also has some of the same features. In addition, you can find an extensive range of meta tools through the paid SEO ranking programs, such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz and others.
Build Backlinks
If backlinks are the bane of your existence, rest assured that you are in good company. Some of the most popular blogs as well as corporate websites use professional backlink services to address this important aspect of website rankings and traffic. If you have decent traffic on your blog but aren’t a top-tier website, some bloggers may reach out to your for a link exchange or a guest post opportunity. Likewise, you can do the same thing. If you’re a new blogger or are struggling to get traffic, building backlinks sounds darn near impossible.
There are websites that can assist you with the backlinks process. For example, Copify, Adsy and others work by helping bloggers find suitable websites to host their links. Keep in mind that such services as well as the thousands of websites that work with them vary in terms of credibility, authority and so trustworthiness. Do your research. Start with a small link to test the process.
Keep in mind that Google penalizes websites that are caught buying do-follow links. Always choose no-follow links. These no-follow links can bring traffic to your website. They won’t directly affect rankings, but that extra traffic can drive natural links.
Improve Page Load Speed
Page load speed directly affects the user experience. Often, when a page takes too long to load, the user will click away and never try to return. If the page ultimately loads, the user will be frustrated and less likely to complete desired on-page actions. What can you do to improve your site’s load time?
- Optimized images
- Enable browser caching
- Enable compression
- Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Reduce server response time
- Eliminate render-blocking resources
- Optimize over-the-fold content
- Optimize web fonts
- Regularly monitor and test page speed
Interact with Your Audience
While driving traffic to your website is important, you want to keep your visitors on your blog and encourage them to come back. How do you do this? The short and sweet answer is by interacting with your audience. There are several ways to do this. First, you should always respond to commenters. Your blog doesn’t have to be a one-way street for communication. In fact, it shouldn’t be.
In addition, add interactive features when it makes sense to do so. These include surveys, quizzes, polls and more.
While these are all effective ways to put Google’s algorithms to work for you, remember that many factors are at play. Among those factors are the competition. If your competition is doing a better job overall, it’s going to rank higher. Be patient. Give your blog your full attention. See the results. It’s simple, but it does take time and effort.