My Single Best SEO Tip to Increase Blog Traffic

It used to be that you could get away with just plopping a keyword on your blog post and expect to increase blog traffic right away.

Okay maybe that is oversimplifying things, but being able to increase blog traffic has become more difficult for the average blogger.

The breakdown happens between the traffic you thought you were creating your content for and the traffic you are getting…

Yes, that’s right – its a simple disconnect between the two.

You’ll want to rework your poor performing content on your site to increase your blog traffic

I made a concerted effort to do just this myself about 30 days ago, and my blog traffic has increased daily. 

You might not be impressed with my total progression because you’ve heard claims from other people that they got hundreds of thousands of page views on their blogs.

However, I am an average person just like you. I don’t blog every day or have an army of people working on my content marketing for me.

For the average person going for a 5% blog traffic increase is considered commendable and do-able! My blog traffic doubled from December to January because of this SEO tip.

This month, the aim is to have more than a 5% increase. Did you know that my traffic has dramatically increased in the past few days? I may be surprised at the end of the month as my organic searches will be way up, thanks to this SEO tip.

Here’s the step by step process to increase blog traffic (SEO Tip)

This is so simple. A beginner can and should do this with their underperforming content to get an increase in your blog traffic.

Remember to be patient, increases in web traffic doesn’t happen overnight…it takes time to build.

Step 1: Locate your underperforming content

Log into your google analytics account and to the following to review your content

1. Click on Behavior
2. Click on Site content.
3. Then click on All Pages – from there you’ll be able to find your low to mid performing content by scrolling through the pages

Make a list using a spreadsheet so you can keep track of your research and next action steps

Take a look at your posts and ask yourself these simple questions:

1. Is my content serving the readers who click and come to my blog?
2. Based on this intent, is my metadata copy getting them to click?
3. Does my content give them the information my readers need to solve a problem they are having

Step 2: Use the search console

Okay, let’s head over to the search console in google analytics and see what is going on with your content:

1. Click on Acquisition
2. Click on search console
3. Then on landing pages

Get a better read on what’s happening, change your date range to at least 60+ days.

Look at these numbers to get a handle on where you can improve your copy and increase your blog traffic

1. Impressions – this is the number of times your post appeared on a search engine results page, and how many times it was viewed.
2.  Clicks – this is the number of times that a reader clicked on your blog post from that search and came to your blog to read it.
3.  Average position – this shows you where your post ranks on google for your keyword. The aim is to get them close to #1 but avoid focus too much on this.
4. CTR – this means click-through rate which is the number of clicks per impressions 

Clicks/Impressions * 100

You’ll want to shoot for a 50% click-through rate.

Go through your content that you gathered in the first part of the exercise and gather the information items 1-4 here:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Average Position
• CTR

Step 3: Improve your content

This is a lot of valuable information that you can use to improve your organic traffic…so how do you make sense of it and apply it to your content?

Another SEO Tip: Simple content fixes to help increase blog traffic 

1. Work on your title and meta description – the description they see in the search results isn’t compelling.  Most people don’t even address this – they just let their SEO plugin grab the content from their blog. 

Go into your post and look at your title and meta description.  I like to look a the search results for my keyword and see what the competition is doing  – especially the paid ads for the keyword and use that to improve my copy.

2.   Add links to improve your content, to give it a little more SEO juice.  

Link to other content that may be of benefit to your reader and also link from that content back to the article you’re working on.

3.  Make your post longer and more in depth, find a video out on YouTube (it doesn’t have to be yours!) and embed it into your post.

4.  Make sure you are continually re-sharing your content out on social media platforms – don’t share it just once.  

Use a tool like Social Oomph to schedule your content out on social media and keep it continually rotating.

5.  Add a call to action to share inside of your content.  

I like Click to Tweet – it’s super simple to set up and even more effective when you embed this simple call to action inside of your post, Google rewards for social sharing so you want to set this up for your readers to do it easily.

I know this process may seem difficult at first but in the long run, it is well worth the effort! Start small and work through a couple of posts or even just once a week. And you’ll start to see an increase in blog traffic from organic searches.

I also suggest that you read the following articles to help you get a better handle on how to figure out what keywords you should be using and how to use the keyword planner:

• Traffic Tip: Get 50% More Traffic with Simple 10 Minute SEO – this simplifies the on page SEO process for your blogs in a simple tutorial
• 7 Timeless SEO Strategies   – this walks you through the basics of SEO that are simple and timeless strategies
• Traffic Tip:  Increase Website Traffic with this simple SEO strategy – this will walk you through step by step on how to use the keyword planner

Got a question? Leave me a comment and I’ll be sure help you out.