Blogging can help you boost your search engine optimization (SEO). It can establish you and your business as an authority in your field. This increases trust between you and your clients or customers. Blogging can also increase the number of people visiting your website exponentially. More traffic to your blog results in more traffic to your website. This can result in increased sales and revenue opportunities.

Here’s how you can increase traffic to your blog. 

SEO

When you write blogs, you should have your audience and a keyword in mind, unless you’re writing a news article. Mostly, you’ll want to optimize every piece of content you write. SEO helps you earn traffic to your website organically. The goal is to be the number one on search engine results pages (SERPs) so that when people search for your targeted keyword, they’ll click the first result (hopefully you).

Unfortunately, SEO takes a long time, so it’s important to optimize everything from the beginning of your blog so that you can get in the game quicker.  Luckily, SEO isn’t difficult, but it is time-consuming.

Here’s how you can start using SEO to increase your blog traffic:

Start with keyword research

If you want to rank number one on Google, you need to know which keywords to target. You can use both free and paid tools to help you determine which keyword is right for you. These tools will tell you how difficult a keyword will be to rank for. It’s typically best to go after keywords with a lower difficulty level so that you can begin ranking as soon as possible. 

Make a list of all of the keywords you’ll want to rank for. For example, if your business sells tax software, you might want to rank for keywords like “professional tax software” and even the name of the product you’re selling. Next, research each of these keywords individually to determine which one will be easier for you to rank for.

Write your post

You can optimize your blog while you write it or optimize it after. There are tools available to help you optimize your posts as you go, such as SEMRush Writing Assistant or SurferSEO.

Build links

Once your post is done, start building backlinks. Backlinks are just one of the many ranking factors Google considers when deciding where your blog will end up on SERPs. Backlinking is fairly easy to do. There are tons of techniques. One thing you can do is reach out to another blog that allows guest posts and provide them with your blog to see if they’d be interested in posting it. 

There are tons of other factors to consider with SEO, such as optimizing site speed and ensuring mobile-friendliness, but what we’ve described are the basics. If you want to learn more about how SEO can help increase your blog traffic, you can contact an SEO agency. They can help you with on-page, off-page, and technical SEO for the best results.

2. Social Media 

Using social media to push out your content will only get you so far. Your posts should offer value to your audience in the form of sharing curated content with your followers, reposting your followers’ content, or putting out free guides that don’t require people to give you their emails. Every few posts, you can choose to promote your very own blog and ask that people read it on your website to increase traffic.

Here’s how you can use social media to increase blog traffic: 

Use blogs to answer questions 

If your business Facebook page tends to get messages or comments from people who have questions about your industry, business, products, or services, you can use blogs to answer them. Make sure that you directly answer the question first and then let them know that they can read your blog for more information. 

For example, if you’re a bank or institution that provides mortgages, new homeowners may come to your social media page to send you a direct message about how they can get started. If you recently wrote a blog about how to get your first mortgage, you can let them know that they can call you to talk to a specialist, but you recommend starting with reading your long-form, informative blog post. 

Involve your community

To increase blog traffic, you can link to other blogger’s content and tag them. Make sure that your post makes them look good. They’ll be more inclined to share your blog with their own followers, ultimately increasing your blog traffic. 

If you need help finding influencers, you can use Google or Instagram to find influencers who are experts within your industry. The best way to reach out is to find them on LinkedIn or use their email address. 

Get involved in groups

There’s a Facebook group for every type of person. Join groups so that you can get in contact with other people in your industry and share your blogs with them. This allows you to directly target your audience without seeming spammy. Instead of asking for their information, simply invite them to read your blog. If they like what they read, they’ll sign up for your newsletter. 

3. Advertise your blog

It only takes a small amount of ad spend to advertise one of your blogs to bring traffic to it. Facebook is one of the best places to do this because it’s the cheapest place to advertise both online and off. Putting as little as five dollars behind your blog can help you reach thousands of people and get more people to your blog.

You can also advertise on Google, although depending on the keywords you bid on, you could be spending hundreds of dollars on just one blog. Google can be extremely cost-effective if you know what you’re doing. However, we suggest doing a few test ads to determine what works best for you. You may find that you don’t need Google ads at all and can get more traffic from advertising on social media. 

Final thoughts on how to increase blog traffic

Increasing traffic to your blog is easy if you have the right tools and expertise. You don’t need to be pay-per-click (PPC) advertising expert to get thousands of people to your blog, and you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars for those visitors, either. Use the tips above to help increase your blog traffic.

This guest blog post was written by Matt Casadona. He is currently a contributing editor for 365 Business Tips. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys the San Diego life, traveling, and music.