A common factor among website owners is the need to drive sufficient traffic to their posts, products and services. Nobody wants to open a church and still be the sole congregation. You want people to visit your site. You want them to keep coming back and perhaps make one or two transactions on your social platform.
Whatever your reason is for owning a site, one thing is certain. You want traffic.
So today, we will discuss some tested and trusted means of attracting more people to your site on daily basis.
Write on Topics that Attract Traffic
Imagine visiting a cinema and being told that the movie for the day is one that has no action, thrills or spectacle in it. You will likely just leave, right?
As a student, I took several courses. Some of them were just very exciting to me, but for others, I just had to endure through them. If I had my way, perhaps, I would never have offered the boring ones.
Nobody wants to be ushered into another classroom with boring courses. We all want to be educated and thrilled by every piece we read. So ensure that your posts topics are interesting, engaging and highly informing. Don’t pick a topic that people do not really care about. Write on things that people want to know. You can use Google Trends, BuzzSumo and Feedly to find out what’s in demand.
Get a Good Writer
You do not need to be an Engineer or an Architect for you to own a plot of land. But for you to build on the land, you need the help of these professionals.
In the same way, many website owners are not writers. If you are one of such, then you need to get a good content writer for your website.
Your choice writer should be one that has a good command of the language in use, be knowledgeable in your niche and have the capacity to deliver in good time. You can find such writers online on Miduman, an online market platform where freelancers and clients meet for transactions.
Produce Long-form Content
Studies show that long-form content performs better in search results than short or ‘thin’ posts. Producing long-form content on a blog basically means that you need to write posts that go into HUGE depth on a particular topic.
There are a couple of reasons for this – first, longer posts will naturally be more keyword-rich and therefore more likely to crop up as results for ‘long tail’ keyword searches.
Secondly, the in-depth nature of a long post is more likely to satisfy readers who come across it. The post will be more likely to answer your visitor’s query, or solve their problem. As a result, the post is more likely to get shared on social media or generate backlinks to it on other sites – with positive implications for traffic.
Keep your Content Fresh by Updating Existing Posts
If you do any online research into blogging or SEO, you’ll come across loads of articles which stress how important it is to create ‘fresh’ content in order to generate good search results and traffic to your site.
However, I’d caution against interpreting this as an instruction to constantly produce new posts. With my own content, I’ve found it much more useful to focus on quality over quantity; and rather than blogging just for the sake of it, I prefer to invest my time in keeping my existing content as strong (and as long!) as possible by continuously reviewing older posts and enhancing them with the most up-to-date information that I can.
Not only does this send the ‘freshness’ signals to Google that the search engine’s algorithms reportedly approve of, but it typically increases the length of posts and helps provide the ‘long-form’ content which tend to perform better in search results..
Accompany your Posts with Strong Images
It’s important to use really good images in any blog posts you publish.
There are three main reasons for this: firstly, it helps readers get a sense of what you are writing about (this is particularly important if you are exploring difficult concepts – visual aids can really help simplify matters).
Secondly, the main picture accompanying your post will show up whenever your visitors share one of your posts on social media, and if it is a dull picture, it’s far less likely to generate clickthroughs to your site.
Thirdly, as with text, they can be optimised to help your content appear in search results. By adding suitable keywords to the ‘alternative text’, file names and captions for the images in your post, you can help search engines gain a better understanding of what your post is about (and by extension, help the post appear in relevant search results).
Optimise your Posts
There are a series of technical steps – known as ‘on page SEO’ which you should take to give your blog posts the best chance of performing well in search.
You should always:
- create blog post titles which reflect your keyword research, and accurately describe what you are writing about
- include keywords in each post’s URL that reflect the content
- use keyword-rich headers to break up content
- use keyword rich alt text and file names for your images.
There are also a few ‘technical SEO’ steps you can take. Google prefers content that loads really quickly – a few things that can help in this area include:
- ensuring all image files are as small as possible (without being pixelated)
- avoiding use of unnecessary scripts on the page
- using a CSS stylesheet rather than loads of inline CSS
- registering your site with Google Search Console
Encourage Social Sharing
Actively encourage your readers to share your blog posts.
If they follow these encouragements, not only should you see a rise in traffic to your posts, but you may also be sending subtle ‘signals’ to search engines regarding the popularity and quality of your posts (the jury is out on whether social sharing has a direct impact on search results, but there does seem to be a correlation of sorts).
Using a tool like Sumo – which allows you to add a truckload of clever social sharing icons to various parts of your website, as well as data capture forms – can help in this regard.
So go right ahead. Flood your website with as many visitors as you wish.
Don’t forget that after applying all these steps, if your website is not user-friendly and attractive in outlook, people will only be attracted to it but keeping them will be difficult. So consider adding a professional touch to your site.
If you do not have a website yet and wish to get one now, click here. If you already have one and wish to improve the outlook, click here.
To find out why you should own a website or how to create one yourself, click here.