You’ve just written the best blog post the world has ever seen, and you’re excited to watch it bring in plenty of traffic for your business’s website. To your surprise, though, it doesn’t perform nearly as well as you’d hoped. So, what can you do to change that?

Writing a blog that drives high traffic isn’t just about being a wordsmith. You also have to take into account the factors that help people find content online, and optimize your content to work in tandem with those factors.

If you’re trying to figure out how to get blog traffic, read on — we’ll go over seven methods for improving blog traffic below.

Then, consider partnering with WebFX’s team of over 200 experts to further boost your blog with our content marketing services. Just call 888-601-5359 or contact us online to get started!

7 simple ways to increase blog traffic

To get the best results for your blog, you have to implement numerous optimization tactics both on and off your site. Here are seven easy things you can do to get more blog traffic!

1. Focus on user search intent

The first thing you should make sure to get right on your blog is addressing user search intent — that is, what users are looking for when they find a particular blog post.

This largely revolves around the keywords you target in your blog posts. If you write a blog post to target the keyword “how to replace a doorknob,” make sure your post actually tells users how to replace a doorknob, rather than just advertising the doorknobs you sell.

You can gauge the search intent for a given keyword by looking at the pages that are currently ranking the highest for it. Whatever intent they address, you should echo in your own blog post.

2. Target long-tail keywords

The search intent for a given keyword isn’t the only thing you should pay attention to. It also makes a difference what type of keywords you target. In particular, you should look into targeting plenty of long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are those that are several words long, and they often yield better results than short-tail ones. For example, it’s probably better to target “professional photoshoot ideas” than to just target “photoshoot.”

The reason long-tail keywords are often the best is that, due to being longer and more specific, they have:

1. Greater relevance to user search intent
2. A narrower range of competition

These qualities make them excellent tools for reaching a more relevant audience through Google and improving blog traffic as a result.

3. Optimize the user experience

Another simple answer to how to get blog traffic is to optimize the user experience on your website. If users have a negative experience when visiting your blog, it won’t take them long to click away from it, and you want to do what you can to prevent that.

One of the first things you should do is ensure that your pages are loading quickly. To help your blog pages load more quickly, you can:

1. Cache web pages
2. Limit redirects
3. Compress images

You can also optimize the reading experience by doing things like:

1. Breaking up paragraphs
2. Interspersing images
3. Using bulleted and numbered lists

These improvements will make for a much easier and more pleasant reading experience for anyone who visits your site, ensuring that they stick around long enough to read your blog posts.

4. Write evergreen content

When you write a blog post, it can be easy to only think in terms of the next day. “What can I include in this post that will be helpful and accurate when users see it tomorrow?” you might ask. But try to expand your perspective not just a few days, but a few years, into the future.

Aim to craft posts that are evergreen — that is, avoid including anything that would significantly date your content. Think about writing content that will hold up several years down the road and won’t feel dated.

Of course, you can’t always predict what trends will shift and what changes will occur in your industry, so sometimes blog posts will end up feeling dated regardless. When that happens, try to go back and update them to continue driving traffic.

5. Practice internal linking

Another way to increase blog traffic is to use internal links in your content. Internal links are links that lead to other pages on your site — in this case, particularly other blog posts.

The benefit of internal links is that they can help lead users to more than one blog post. For example, let’s say you write a blog post on how to set up a computer microphone. Somewhere in that post, you may refer to audio gain and link to a different blog post about that topic.

If your readers want to learn more about audio gain, they can follow that link to the other blog post. In doing so, they’re driving up traffic for your blog by reading two posts instead of one.

6. Publish on a consistent schedule

If you want your blog to maintain the traffic it acquires, you need to ensure you publish on a regular schedule. If your posts don’t go out consistently, you’ll find yourself starting to lose even what traffic you had.

Posting regularly doesn’t have to mean you publish incredibly frequently. You can put out one post a day or one post a month. Either way is fine, as long as you maintain a consistent schedule. That’s the only way you’ll increase blog traffic.

So, if you typically put out one post a week, don’t let two months slip by between two of your posts. Your readers might assume you’ve stopped blogging!

7. Earn backlinks

We’ve discussed internal linking as a way to get more blog traffic, but there’s another kind of link that can benefit your blog — backlinks. Backlinks are where third-party websites in your industry link to your blog posts in their own content.

This is beneficial for two reasons. First, Google takes backlinks into account as a ranking factor. When reputable websites link to you, Google sees you as reputable too and ranks you higher. Second, the backlinks expand your potential audience reach to the users on those other sites.

To earn backlinks, try looking for broken links on reputable websites in your industry. When you find some, contact the sites to let them know, and recommend they replace the broken links with fresh ones to your blog.

Mid-Size Businesses Trust WebFX

Their focus on ROI and their innate ability to communicate this information in a way that I understand has been the missing link with other digital marketing firms that I have used in the past.

Leah Pickard. ABWE

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Get more blog traffic with WebFX’s content marketing services

Now that you know how to get blog traffic, are you ready to apply that knowledge to your own business blog? If so, WebFX would love to help you! We have over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, so we know all about improving blog traffic.

With our content marketing services, you can get help writing every blog post on your site, as well as optimizing them for Google rankings. You’ll even receive a dedicated account representative to work one-on-one with you throughout the process.

To partner with us, just call 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!