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Are you tired of pouring time and effort into your blog, only to have it go unnoticed by your target audience? As a blogger, driving traffic to your website is crucial to its success. Without visitors, it’s like having a beautiful billboard in the middle of the desert – it may be stunning, but no one will see it.
There are so many ways to drive traffic to your blog, but in this article, we’ll be focusing on three key buckets, and how to get the most out of them.
SEO
Think of SEO like gardening. Just as a gardener carefully tends to their plants, SEO involves taking care of your website to ensure it grows and flourishes.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimising your website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines like Google.
By using SEO techniques, you can attract more organic traffic to your blog, much like how a well-tended garden attracts bees and butterflies.
Just like a garden needs sun, water, and nutrients to grow, your website needs certain elements to be optimised for SEO. These include on-page factors such as the content on your website, the use of keywords, meta tags and link building.
Other factors that can impact SEO include page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and user experience. By incorporating these elements into your website, you can create a strong foundation for your SEO strategy.
Let’s take a look at some of these in more depth.
Keywords and meta tags
Keywords are like fertiliser for your website. They help search engines understand what your website is about and improve its visibility in search results.
By conducting keyword research and strategically incorporating keywords into your content and meta tags, you can improve your website’s ranking on search engines.
However, it’s important to use keywords in a natural and authentic way, much like how a gardener would use fertiliser in moderation to avoid damaging their plants.
Pro Tip: Create a free account and check out the Magic Keyword tool on SemRush to conduct powerful keyword research.
Link Building
Link building involves getting other websites to link to your website, which can improve your website’s authority and visibility on search engines.
However, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity when it comes to link building.
This means that you want to make sure that the websites that link to you also follow SEO best practices and produce good quality content for users.
Content on your website
With Google’s ‘helpful content’ update, we know that search engines prioritise content that is valuable and helpful to users.
The more valuable, relevant and helpful that Google perceives your content to be, the more likely it is to appear higher up in search rankings – which means more traffic to you.
On top of this, having quality content on your website can help attract and retain visitors. When visitors find useful and engaging content on your site, they are more likely to stay longer, browse more pages, and share your content with others. This can lead to more traffic, backlinks, and social media mentions, all of which improve your website’s SEO.
Page load time, mobile friendliness, and website navigation
Search engines prioritise websites that offer a positive user experience, which includes fast page load times, mobile-friendliness, and easy navigation.
Page load time refers to how quickly your website loads in a user’s browser. Slow loading times can negatively impact user experience, and search engines may penalise slow-loading sites by ranking them lower in search results. Use a free tool like GTmetrix to test your website load time.
Mobile-friendliness is also essential for SEO because an increasing number of users are accessing the internet on their mobile devices. If your website is not optimised for mobile, it can be challenging to navigate, which can result in a poor user experience and lower rankings in search results.
On top of this, a website that is easy to navigate and has a clear hierarchy can help visitors find the information they need quickly and efficiently. If your website has a clear structure and is easy to navigate, Google will like it.
Measuring your SEO success is probably the most important step
Measuring your SEO success is like taking stock of your garden’s growth. Just as a gardener would measure the growth of their plants, you can use various tools to measure the success of your SEO efforts.
These include tracking your website’s ranking on search engines, monitoring your website’s traffic and engagement, and analysing your website’s user behaviour through tools like Google Analytics.
By measuring your SEO success, you can identify areas for improvement and continue to grow and optimise your website. Without measuring your level of success, you’ll never know whether what you’re doing is working and what to do to improve.
If you do all of these things, you’ll positively impact your SEO, which will likely lead to a greater level of traffic to your blog. More visitors = more conversions (if you have the right conversion paths set up on your website).
Although now ‘SEO’ and ‘Content’ can be seen as interchangeable terms, we are going to separate content into it’s own bucket, as we’ve seen firsthand the positive impact content makes on traffic generation.
The Rule of 3 Blogs Per Week
Writing three articles per week consistently has proven time and time again to have a positive impact on traffic generation.
One of the reasons this works well is because it is a part of the Inbound Marketing methodology, which is all about attracting new visitors to you through the production of helpful content.
Inbound marketing differs from traditional marketing, which interrupts people with unwanted ads and messages. In this way, you’re getting the buyer to come to you instead of going to the buyer yourself. With up to 63% of consumers starting their shopping journey online, this form of marketing works well in today’s digital age.
Here’s an example of how it works:
A buyer discusses the idea of having a swimming pool with their partner, but they aren’t sure if they actually want one yet, or which type of pool they would even get. So, they begin doing research on who a pool is right for, the different types of pools, and the cost of installing a pool.
As they do this research, they come across your brand, which has all of this information for them in the form of blog articles and videos. As they go through all of your information, they want to compare your company to another company to help them make their decision. That’s when they find out that you’ve already created an unbiased article reviewing some of the other alternative swimming pool companies in the market.
After going through their options, the buyer is ready to go with you because they view you as the most trusted voice in the space and as an authority and leader. As a result, you end up getting the sale. To top it off, the customer knows exactly what swimming pool they want, which add ons they want and which they don’t, which makes the sales process so much easier and quicker for you.
There are many ways to implement Inbound Marketing, but generally it involves producing content in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, guidebooks and other free resources.
How can you do this?
- Brainstorm content ideas: you can use three methods to brainstorm content ideas. First, you can ask your sales team to make a list of the questions that buyers are asking in the sales process. Second, you can use the Magic Keyword Tool on SEMRush to find questions that are searched by many users. Third, you can write a list of questions that customers have asked you in the past.
- Write articles to answer the list of questions you’ve written down: when you write your articles, you’re going to want to make sure that they’re answering your buyer’s question accurately. The more valuable Google thinks your piece is, the more traffic you will generate.
If you’re looking for a guide on how to write content, see our guide here.
So far, we’ve only talked about organic methods to increase traffic to your blog. However, paid media is nothing to pass by, so let’s take a look at it.
Paid Media
Paid media involves using various advertising channels to drive traffic to your blog. While paid media can be expensive, it can also yield significant results if done correctly.
Some examples of effective paid media channels that are best at increasing traffic include:
- Facebook & Instagram Ads
- Google Search Ads
- YouTube Ads
- TikTok Ads
- Snapchat Ads
How to create a paid media campaign that generates website traffic
To drive traffic to your blog through paid media, you’re going to want to:
- Choose the right campaign objective
- Create the right type of copy
Choosing your campaign objective
When you’re using paid media campaigns, you’ll usually be creating conversion campaigns, because it’s these that lead to sales.
However, when you want to drive traffic to your blog, you should opt to use Traffic based campaigns.
“Isn’t it a waste of money to run traffic campaigns?”
No. Traffic campaigns target those who are not yet ready to purchase. The thing is, when you’re driving traffic to your blog, you want to target these people.
Your blogs should educate users so that they move from not being ready to purchase to being prepared to make a purchasing decision. In this case, the objective of your campaign should be to drive traffic, not to make sales – it’s your blog that should help you drive sales.
Traffic campaigns can be beneficial, because they:
- Cost less than conversion campaigns
- Can drive a significant amount of traffic for a low cost
- Target those who may be interested but not yet ready to purchase, which is the perfect target audience for your blog
Create the right type of copy
When you’re creating your ad for a traffic campaign, you’re going to want to focus on doing a few things:
- Build curiosity in your ad copy. This will help you increase your CTRs and get more traffic for a lower cost.
- Make sure your ad copy is congruent to your blog. The more it matches what your blog talks about, the more successful your ad will be. This is because paid media channels work off an algorithm that measures the relevance of an ad to a landing page, where the more relevant it is, the more likely it is that the algorithm will help it be successful.
- Ad copy should be helpful. You want to add value in your ad copy without giving everything away, so that a user feels benefited from the ad, but not so much that they don’t feel the need to click through to the blog.
By following these steps, you can generate traffic from your paid media campaigns.
So, what’s next?
Now that you know how to drive traffic to your blog, it’s time to learn how to create content that people will engage with and convert on.
Click here to learn how to create high converting content for your blog.
