How to Increase Blog Traffic for Your Business

Apr 25, 2018

23Would you like to know how to increase blog traffic?

Blog traffic can mean big business. About 47% of buyers tend to read 3-5 articles before making a buying decision. To get them to buy, you have to get them to visit your site first.

Keep reading to learn how you can get more traffic to your blog.

Use Analytics & Webmaster Tools

If you want to know how to increase blog traffic, you have to know your baseline or starting point.

The only way to do that is with data.

If you don’t already have Google Analytics or Google’s Search Console set up, that is the first thing you should too.

You should also get connected to Bing’s Webmaster Tools.

These tools will give you insights as to how much traffic you’re getting and where it’s coming from. You’ll also see how long people spend reading your blog posts.

Know Your Audience

Another way to get more traffic to your blog is to research topics your audience is interested in. You can do that by researching questions posted on Reddit and Quora to get ideas.

For example, if your blogging about personal development, you might find that a common theme is that people are looking for ways to be more productive.

You can then write out content ideas based on productivity. You can also take that a step further and get content and keyword ideas from this keyword research tool.

You can also look at Buzzsumo to see the headlines of the most viral articles to see what people are sharing.

This will help you get content ideas that your readers are interested in and make them SEO friendly and shareable.

Write Guest Posts

Did you come across sites in your research that welcome guest posts?

Maybe you saw a site that shared the same target audience as yours, or there was a thought leader’s site in your industry that welcomed posts.

This is an excellent opportunity to expose your work to more people and get valuable backlinks to your site. If you get an opportunity to write for the right website, you can even get paid to blog.

Just be sure that the sites are more popular than yours. Otherwise, you won’t get the traffic or backlink benefits.

Expand Your Audience

One way to increase blog traffic is to expand your audience. You can do that by making your blog friendly to international audiences.

Let’s say you have a blog post on how to increase blog traffic in English. You’ve been learning enough Italian to be able to translate that to “scrivere un blog di successo.”

You’ve just opened the door to a brand new audience and an opportunity to get more blog traffic.

Don’t worry if you feel overwhelmed by the thought of having t translate your entire site.

The great thing about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything, translation included.

Create a Great User Experience

As a blogger, you have to create an excellent user experience. That means having a site that’s easy to load, easy to use and readable across many devices.

This point is often overlooked by bloggers, but what they don’t realize is their site could be costing them traffic.

People want and expect fast websites. Up to 40% of people will leave your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. To make matters worse, if you’re blogging for an e-commerce site, 79% of shoppers will never return if they think your website is slow.

The first thing you should do is check your site’s speed. There are a couple of tools to use to do that, from Google’s Page Speed Insights and Pingdom.

Both tools will tell you if your site is slow and what you can do to fix it. Sometimes, it can be as simple as compressing images. Other times, you might have to adjust the code.

Use Images in Your Posts

Would you like to know how to increase blog traffic with visuals?

The use of images is part of the user experience, too. When you use images, you increase the chances of the article being shared.

The images used have to be relevant to the content and add to the article, not take away from it. Infographics are a great tool to use if your content has a lot of data.

People like to read statistics, but they tend to process them visually. That’s why infographics are so powerful. Readers can quickly look at the graphic, process it, decide it’s interesting, and share it.

That, in turn, will generate more traffic to your blog.

Use Content Aggregators & Syndication

One simple way to increase traffic to your blog is to list it with content aggregators.

These are tools that other people looking for great content to share use to curate articles to post. Sites like Alltop, Feedly, and RightRelevance are popular content aggregators.

Social Media & Email Marketing

Social Media Examiner found that 81% of marketers who used social media for just 6 hours a week found that website traffic increased.

That’s just about an hour a day to increase traffic to your blog.

The one thing to note here is that you don’t have to be on every social network. You just need to be on the networks that your target audience uses.

If you have an email list, you also want to stay connected with them throughout the buyer’s journey. Most of the people who visit your website won’t be ready to buy.

You can stay top of mind by blogging and emailing your list. This gives them a reason to visit your website again and again.

With email marketing, you’re increasing traffic, and you’re nurturing prospects, which increases the likelihood they will buy.