How to Grow Your Blog Traffic

How to Grow your Blog Traffic in 2020?

Last Updated on February 21, 2021 by Santhosh Muralidhar

So, you want to know how to grow your blog traffic?

Blogging is an awesome way to grow your personal brand in the internet world. 

Getting more people to visit your blog is equivalent to getting more chances to help people and build a relationship.

Many new bloggers actually struggle to get traffic for their blog posts. 

This could be because of fault in the content strategy or due to the defects in blog promotions.

Getting traffic to a blog is all about getting the right type of people to your website who would actually find your content to be helpful and valuable.

So, in reality, growing your blog traffic will depend on so many factors like the quality of content, the market size of the niche, the audience engagement with the content, performance of the blog on search channels, number of visitors from other channels like emails, social, referral, etc.

Let’s now understand the practical logic to grow your blog traffic.

Create High-Quality Content That Actually Attracts People And Grow Your Blog Traffic

How to Grow Your Blog Traffic  - Writing Content For Attracting People

For blogs, Content is the articles that you are gonna publish on your blog. 

When you are learning how to start a blog you must think of your website to be like a 60*40 dimension site area.

And the blog posts and articles are like the apartments/villas/bungalows that you would construct on your site.

Basically, it’s all about giving people what they are looking for. 

The same logic and same Idea. 

If the apartments are in a good locality and have great structure, planning then obviously more people will get attracted to it.

Similarly, you can attract people to your content if it’s valuable and gives plenty of tips, practical solutions to people.

Attracting people with useful information and detailed solutions in your content is perhaps the best way to drive traffic for a blog.

People will engage with your articles if it is needful, valuable and helpful to them.

You need to have a clear picture of your audience in the mind while writing content. 

I suggest you do a good amount of research on your audience’s problems before writing content.

Because ultimately you are just gonna deliver value to people with your content. And you will have to basically connect with people with the right kind of information.

The readability of your content must be good.

Also, to grow your blog traffic, you must optimize the content with good on-page SEO tactics.

As you would probably know, I’m a big fan of Yoast

I would suggest you to use the same to improve the on-page SEO & readability part of your blog posts.

The grammar of your content can always be improved by using tools like Gingerly, Grammarly, etc.

Choose Targeted High Intent & High Search Volume Keywords For the Blog post to Grow Your Blog Traffic

How to grow your blog traffic - Choose High Intent Keywords with high search volume

While it is true that creating good content can help you drive a lot of traffic, there are other essential ingredients attached to the process of getting traffic.

Among them, the foremost important thing is to laser target your keywords that have got higher search volume.

You will have to target informational keywords for your blog posts. 

These keywords are actually used by people who are seeking to learn specific information by reading content or blog posts. 

Also, the informational intent oriented keywords always tend to have a high number of monthly search volume associated with them.

And for blogs that strive for delivering great information it would make sense to targeting informational keywords containing terms like how to, why, which, etc.

The following will help you to classify keywords on the basis of search volume.

  1. Monthly search volume less than 100: Low volume keyword.
  2. The Monthly search volume less than 1000 but greater than 100: Medium volume.
  3. A monthly search volume of greater than 10000: High search volume.

You will have to be strategic in choosing the keywords for your blog post.

I always feel that there are only two good tactics to choose keywords. 

One is to target a group of highly informational and high search volume keywords. 

While the other tactic is about targeting a large number of focused long-tail keywords that have less competition.

Targeting high search volume keywords might sound like a crispy idea to get a ton of traffic to the blog.

But you should be aware of the competition that is associated with the keywords. 

If you are targeting informational intent keywords then I will suggest you rank for keywords that have an SEO ranking difficulty of below 60 and a decent monthly search volume of 5000+.

It is not actually any rocket science logic. See, if you rank your blog posts for keywords that get lots of high search volume then that will make a huge number of people to visit your blog from search engines.

You can also think of analyzing your competitor’s keywords.

You might want to rank for your competitor’s top keywords that drive massive traffic to their website and posts. 

It can also be a good tactic provided that your posts are topically relevant to the audience.

Because if some particular set of keywords are able to drive a huge amount of traffic for your competitor’s posts, then such keywords could do wonders for you as well.

You can use tools like Ubersuggest and SEMrush to find out your competitor’s top traffic driving keywords.

Logic and Advantage of targeting Longtail Keywords to Grow Your Blog Traffic

While it is easy to rank for low competitive long-tail keywords, the magnitude of traffic associated with those keywords could also be on the lower side.

For blogs, getting organic traffic is one of the main objectives.

So for your blog posts, you could research a large multiple keyword lists of long-tail keywords that have got less competition.

Of course, just targeting one or two long-tail keywords for the blog posts might not give you huge traffic.

The goal here is to rank for more number of multiple long-tail keywords. 

You will have to add relevant phrases and terms and update your blog posts regularly.

Suppose For example one long-tail keyword might have a monthly search volume of 40. Yes, that is not so big number. 

But If you target some 60 long-tail keywords for your blog posts each having monthly search volume of 40, then you might actually end up getting 2400+ visitors to one single blog post per month.

Given the competitive nature of SEO, it is not always so easy to rank for high competitive keywords.

Again Competition is just one factor. 

Relevance and intent of the keywords used by your audience matter as well.

Not all keywords will relevant to your blog content. 

For example, if you are creating content for promoting an SEO agency then it might not make sense to target broad terms like SEO tips, SEO tools, what is SEO, etc.

You will need to basically understand what keywords your target audience would search for on Google. 

For instance, if someone is looking for SEO consulting, then they might use keywords like SEO agency near me, best SEO agency, etc instead of using terms like “what is SEO” or even “how to do SEO”. 

Hence, analyzing the intent of the audience and users is another important aspect of doing keyword research.

It is always a good practice to target long-tail keywords.

I personally feel that many times this kind of long 4-5 word phrase keywords by default have high relevance and intent attached to them.

You might see much faster results if you start focusing on adding less competitive long-tail phrases in large numbers for your blog post.

For picking long-tail phrases, I suggest you use the LSI graph tool/Ubersuggest. Both are awesome tools that will actually help you pick such long 4-5 word keywords that got good search volume.

Alternatively, you could use your Google search console queries reports and pick up the keywords from which are already driving lots of clicks and impressions to your blog.

From your blog’s traffic growth potential, I think it is best if you can effectively leverage both informative long-tail keywords and high search volume keywords for your posts. 

Update your content with the keywords that are already giving you clicks and impressions

Google loves content that is fresh and updated with relevant information.

You can actually increase and grow your blog traffic by adding more information and keywords naturally to your existing blog posts.

To find the keywords to update your content you need to follow the below steps

How to grow your blog traffic - Google Search console performance
  • Click on Page reports
Google Search console pages
  • Choose the blog post page that you wish to update
  • Go to the queries report for your page
Google Search console queries
  • Pick the keywords which have a good number of impressions and clicks
Google Search console Pick keyword
  • Open a Spreadsheet and enter those keywords which you found from your search console reports
  • Go to Ubersuggest and enter those keywords and pull up the reports one after the other.
Ubersuggest keyword overview

By using Ubersuggest you can get a great list of long-tail keyword ideas and suggestions for the particular queries that are driving traffic/clicks to your site.

Ubersuggest keyword ideas for queries

Start creating content around those long-tail variations of the head keywords that is already giving clicks and impressions.

The logic here is that it is much easier to boost rankings for those long-tail variations of the head terms and keywords which your blogs are already ranking. 

By doing this exercise on a regular basis, your blog will not only rank for more long-tail keywords but will also be driving an increased amount of SEO traffic as well.

Do Guest Blogging & Build Backlinks from the right type of Websites

Grow traffic by Guest blogging and link building

The concept of guest blogging is simple. 

There could be many high traffic blogs that are topically relevant to your website. 

You can approach those sites to do a guest post and get more visibility for your content. 

So if you could publish good quality content on other authority blogs in your industry then your author’s reputation.

Also, that will grow your blog traffic as well.

When I say the right type of pages, I’m not talking about getting a link from Forbes, Mashable, NY times, etc.

See, you could be running a fitness blog and Forbes could have great content around fitness.

But Forbes also has so much good content in other unrelated topics like finance, health, marketing, etc.

Basically not every person who visits Forbes website is inside your target group of audience. 

Particularly those people who read health and travel-related posts on Forbes site are not your target audience for your fitness blog.

Now that does not mean to say that you will have to forget other factors like traffic, DA, etc and just get backlinks from every less popular website in the fitness niche.

The logic here is to get backlinks from websites where your users or target audience might be visiting in large numbers. 

By doing guest posts on topically relevant websites you will improve your site’s referral traffic and indirectly that can boost your Google rankings as well.

You will have to first begin by creating a good list of websites that your audience would regularly.

Next start your homework by analyzing those websites traffic, popularity, authority, etc.

Remember it is always good to build backlink from a site that has got a higher amount of traffic.

Start doing research about the content present on those websites.

Carefully observe what topics and content are being posted by other guest bloggers.

In Guest blogging, it is vital to create suitable content that resonates perfectly with the audience present on the website.

Your Guest posts must be tailored to the audience and should specifically attain a purpose.

You will need to understand and define what type of topics are in huge demand to be published on those guest blogging websites.

Don’t think of publishing some generic content for guest posts. 

It is always better to create unique and specifically valuable content for doing guest blogging.

Also, your guest posts will have to obey all the rules and conditions set by the content moderation team.

Usually, Moderators allow you to have at least one backlink to your own website.

Remember that if your guest posts start to get a ton of traffic then it also increases the chances of a lot of people clicking the links to your websites. 

Ultimately that is how you would boost your blog’s referral traffic and organic rankings as well.

 Backlinks can do wonders to grow your blog traffic if you build links in the correct way.

To get higher ranking positions on Google, Backlinks are very much essential.

And to drive a ton of referral traffic to your website, you will again have to go back to the concept of building backlinks.

Here is the big deal. Everyone will tell you “Create High-quality Content to build high-quality backlinks”.

 But not all links are the same and aren’t equal. 

Building a backlink is not just about getting some do-follow and no-follow links. 

And surely it is not just about writing some piece of articles and publishing on the web and getting a link back.

To ensure that you are building the right type of backlinks you got to keep the following in your mind.

Relevance:

The relevance of the potential backlink prospect matters a lot. 

You will have to be very specific and choose only topically relevant web pages and blogs while doing link building.

For example, as I said earlier in the case of your fitness blog,  you might have created good content about “fitness tips for working professionals”.

If you try to build backlink from other authoritative fitness blogs in your niche, it will help you get lots of referral traffic to your blog. 

Eventually, Google will pass more ranking juice to your links because of its relevance and traffic.  

DA, PR, Spam Score & Trust Flow:                 

Moz actually assigns a Domain authority score for a website by analyzing its inbound links, the total number of keywords that are ranking, Page rank, site traffic, quality of backlinks, anchor text, etc.

When you decide to pick a website to build a backlink you will have to ensure that it complies with all the quality rating factors of Moz.

Spam Score is basically a percentage value assigned to a website on the basis of its Good quality inbound links.

So, websites that are having a larger number of high-quality links and lesser amounts of bad spammy links will be having a low spam score percentage.

As a thumb of rule, a spam score of below 2% is considered to be good for a website.

Your Mentality and Thinking About Backlinks Matters a lot

Tell me why are you building backlinks? 

For only traffic & Rankings?.

Then perhaps you might not get those great results which you anticipate.

For Delivering value to people/ideal customers with your content?

Ha, this one is spot on. 

Your ultimate goal of link building must be to share links to awesome content that helps more number of people in your targeted group of audience and deliver valuable information to them.

See, for example as a reader when I’m reading content about “how to do SEO for local business”, I would be very pleased and happy to click on a link that contains information about “top 5 factors that contribute heavily for GMB local search rankings”. 

By using that tactic you will add immense value to people. In the long run that will lead to boosting your traffic and rankings of your blog as well.

I hope you got the proper logic behind doing backlink building now.

Leverage Email Marketing to Learn How to Grow Your Blog Traffic.

How to grow your blog traffic - Email Marketing

Traffic can be acquired from various channels like Organic Search, Emails, referral websites, social media, etc. 

To grow the traffic of the blog, without any doubt SEO has to be leveraged effectively.

But people will visit Google, they will check emails, interact with friends on social media and they also browse other websites. 

So, actually, your blog audience could be spending lots of time on various different online avenues.

Hence you got no option but to use multiple channels and learn how to grow your blog traffic.

I suggest every blogger collect email id of their blog visitor. 

Create relevant popups and forms to build a segregated email list.

Every time when you publish a blog post you will have to release it on emails. 

So, that the email newsletters will update all your blog subscribers about the new posts and content.

Add a suitable headline and Subject line for your email template. 

The subject line or headline can play a massive role in increasing the open rates of your email campaigns.

Similarly, the content or email message will play a big role in getting higher CTR and email traffic for your blog posts.

Tools like MailChimp will allow you to create separate templates for blog newsletters. The Email message must be unique. 

You can avoid adding too many links and large size image files in your email messages. 

The email content must be tailored to your subscribers. 

Personalizing the email headlines and content could be a great idea.

Explain the importance of the information and facts that you have shared in your content.

Try to convince your subscribers that you know their pain points. 

Basically you will hook your subscribers to read your blog post by explaining how exactly your information/solution is going to help them and deliver value. 

You will need to correlate the email message with the pain points and intent of your audience. 

Also, the message must topically relevant to the content/blog posts.

For blog newsletter campaigns, The goal of writing a good email message will be to drive more email traffic for the posts and website.

Of course, the logic behind doing email marketing is always to build trust/relationship with the audience and nurture the leads. 

But one has to be extremely good at the practical part of executing the campaigns as well. 

You have to focus on getting good open rates, click-through rates and get interactions from subscribers.

An Attractive Call To Action button could appear a lot appealing for the users to click on your links.

A/B Test your email campaigns to increase CTR and traffic.

A/B testing can de be done for both email headlines and email content.

You will aim to increase/enhance the open rates, ctr and overall email traffic for your blog posts by doing A/B testing.

Testing multiple headline variants and message variants will help you understand which headline and message will work fine and give good results to the campaigns.

Because when you send out an email blast not every single person in your list would open the emails. 

There could be many reasons for that. 

Not all subscribers would find your email headline relevant and catchy. 

And similarly, not every subscriber would open your emails would decide to click on your blog post links.

You have to understand that in a list of 1000 subscribers, ever person is unique and they have their own thinking level, challenges, pain points, and problems.

A/B testing helps you to experiment with your headlines or email content by targeting a sample size of your subscriber list. 

By analyzing the results of your A/B testing campaigns you would clearly identify the best performing headlines and message for your email campaigns.

Mailchimp will provide you all the infrastructure to do email A/B testing.

Using Quora & Pinterest To Drive Organic Traffic For Blog

Quora is a social media channel mainly used for asking interesting questions and getting helpful answers from community members.

Quora platform is more favorable for writing answers in textual content format.

The thing with quora is that it is very well suited for writing text-based content with suitable images/charts/graphs. 

People on Quora are usually searching for answers for some queries. 

And the user intent here is to read textual based content.

So, bloggers can also leverage Quora and write good content to get more traffic to their posts.

You must focus on writing thoughtful and valuable answers on quora.

Join relevant quora groups and communities that are suitable for your blog niche and topic.

You can answer topically specific questions for your blog posts. 

If the answers are good it will get lots of Upvotes and shares. 

By that way, you can build your quora follower base as well.

You can hyperlink the relevant words and include backlinks to your blog post within your quora answers. 

This helps in getting traffic to your blog posts from quora. 

But be careful don’t try to spam and over-optimize your answers with backlinks.

If you write more answers then quora will start recommending more questions for you. 

If your quora answers get a lot of views then a large number of people will start requesting you to write answers for them. 

Basically, this helps in further increasing your reach on the quora platform.

The organic reach on quora is also much higher than that of Facebook.

You can go through my quora marketing guide to learn the best tactics to get traffic from quora.

Using Pinterest to Drive Traffic

Pinterest is a social platform which is most suitable for sharing image and visual content. 

Various studies have shown that Pinterest has the highest organic reach than any other social media platform.

To begin with, first, you need to create pinboards. 

This helps in grouping your pins. 

You will have to create suitable pins for your blog posts. 

The pins must topically match the content of your blog post. 

Then you could share your pin with your followers on Pinterest. 

Every pin will have a web URL link attached to it. 

You could insert the blog post URL for every pin. 

So, if the image pins get a lot of likes and shares then it can lead to getting more traffic for your blog URL.

If a lot of people interact with your pins then it would increase the reach and traffic for your pins.

Focus on Increasing the Engagement Rates For Your Content

Always Aim to get a huge number of shares and comments for your blog posts.

Getting engagements by promoting the blog on Facebook is a good ranking signal for the Google algorithm. 

Hence this could improve your rankings and traffic for the posts.

When People love your blog posts they will start sharing them on their Facebook newsfeed with their friends and connections.

Hence your post could be displayed in a lot of people’s newsfeed. 

If the content is good eventually a lot of people will start to interact with posts.

So, obviously getting more shares can increase the exposure and traffic to your blog posts.

You can use plugins like Sharify to display social sharing buttons on your blog posts.

Placing the social sharing buttons on the top & bottom part of your posts and in the sidebar can be a good tactic.

Because every user will have different behavior. 

Some people might want to read the entire content and share your content in the end. 

For such people, it will be convenient to have a sharing button at the bottom of the post.

While other people might want to share your posts after reading your posts partially. 

They might love to come back and continue reading later on. 

In such a case, a social sharing button in the sidebar or on the top would be helpful for users.

Leverage Push Notifications And Grow Your Blog Traffic

Leveraging Push Notification

Push notifications are a great way to get returning traffic and visitors to your blog.

By using the push notification feature you can get free traffic for your blog posts without spending money.

You can use plugins like Subscribers or Push Engage to send out push notifications for your blog audience.

The concept behind sending push notification is explained below.

First, you will have to create a free account with subscribers and install the plugin to integrate the push notification feature for your blog.

A notification on the top left side of the browser will be displayed to all your blog visitors. 

If they click on the allow button then the user’s cookie will be saved to send future updates and notifications for your blog posts.

So, you will write a blog post. And you will publish it on your blog as usual.

When the content is released it will automatically trigger a notification to all your blog audiences who are logged in to their laptops or desktops.

And suppose if some users are away from laptops/ offline while you publish and release the post then the push notification will be sent to them immediately when they login to their device afterward.

In this way, you can get many people to return back to your blog without spending any money.

I hope you loved reading this article.

Don’t forget to share it on social media sites.

Thank you.


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