Six ingenious ways to drive organic blog traffic

0
Dec 27, 2019 / by
Six ingenious ways to drive organic blog traffic

The SEO game is, ultimately, all about traffic. The very reason for the existence of search engine optimisation is to drive more eyes and more clicks to your content. But as time has moved on and Google has gotten wise to the shady tactics of yore, it’s become a more difficult game to play.

Where once it was all about driving traffic by any means necessary, the playing field of today necessitates a more selective and natural approach: You’re not just trying to gain clicks, your trying to gain conversions, and you’re only going to do that if your content is firing on all cylinders and your SEO strategies are doing likewise.

The key is to keep everything as organic as possible – striving for natural click-throughs from a search engine rather than through pay-per-click advertising. This is traffic that has been earned – not bought, and is made up of people who genuinely want to know more about what you have to offer. But can authentic traffic be generated through good old-fashioned online buzz? Maybe so, as long as you’re putting your resources in all the right places.

Readers first – search engines second 

Start with a profile of your ideal reader/consumer (a persona, if you will) so that you know who you’re addressing and how to reach them. This is the person you are writing for.

Not Google. If you can create content that resonates with your ideal customers then SEO will improve organically. Granted, this is easier said than done, but generally speaking, knowing your audience means knowing what they are looking for and, thusly, knowing what to provide for them.

Don’t stop blogging

WritersIn the early days of SEO, blogging was always the most popular and effective route to site traffic and whilst there have been many changes in the last decade, that much is still true today.

The real art is in finding a middle ground between too much content and not enough content and in making that content consistently engaging, helpful, and optimised for your market and your personas.

You should also ensure you’re invested in the blogging community. Comment and link to blogs that share your niche and they will hopefully do likewise.

Long tails and sharp arrows

When it comes to keywords, the long and specific phrases will always draw in the users who genuinely want to find your content over the vague keywords.

You are more likely to rank high if you can own a more niche sphere of influence. Essentially, it’s about shifting away from the “throw enough at the wall” mentality and onto a more focused and precise strategy.

Focus on the little things

The things that other (lesser) SEOs overlook are the things that will really make a difference in drawing organic blog traffic. Focus on getting your metadata and descriptions spot-on so Google actually knows what you’re talking about.

Work on your links

Not only should you be building up your internal links and using new content to guide readers to more relevant content on your site to keep them there for longer but you should also be encouraging incoming links.

Google will always prioritise sites with lots of incoming links, particularly when they come from authoritative sources. Indeed, only encourage links from sites that you trust – otherwise, you might end up damaging your reputation and your inbound traffic, in kind.

Use the tools at your disposal

SEO might have changed, but so have the number of incredible tools available to us. Social media  (love it or hate it) is an immensely powerful tool for increasing your online exposure and there is an abundance of analytical tools, such as Google Analytics that allow you to track the popularity of your site and your SEO campaign in order to make sure it works even better next time. Don’t neglect these tools just because “everybody else is using them.” Because everybody else is using them for a reason!

Finally, you should never be afraid to ‘blow your own trumpet’, so to speak. Use your personal sites and profiles to spread the word and you’ll hopefully gain enough traffic to tell Google that your content is relevant, necessary, and useful. And that’s what this game is ultimately all about!

Tags: /