If you have been blogging for, at least, a couple of months, you may be wondering why your blog isn’t getting enough traffic even after you have nailed down the basics. That’s the #1 complaint of most of the new bloggers. Most of them get discouraged, burned out, and finally quit. If you are a blogger who is about to quit because you are not getting enough traffic, this post is for you. This article highlights 5 proven strategies to increase your blog traffic.
Your blog doesn’t simply need traffic but the right kind of traffic. Why does a business start a blog in the first place? A blog is not started for the sole purpose of publishing more content. Most of the time, a business starts a blog to serve a higher purpose. Brand visibility, marketing, higher conversions, and more clients are the purposes served by starting a blog.
Traffic is simply an indication whether your blog is achieving these purposes successfully. For this, you don’t need just any traffic but traffic that is converting well. What if you get traffic from the wrong sources? Your traffic will not convert, and you will not be able to achieve your business goals. If the traffic is not going to convert, your blog becomes useless. Instead of frantically grasping for any kind of traffic, you need to focus on getting the right kind of traffic. Here are the answers to your question of why isn’t my new blog getting any traffic?
1. Your Content Is Not Good Enough
Back in the good old days, you could trick the search engines by sending a ton of spammy backlinks to your content and get higher rankings. But this is not the case today. The search engine algorithms are smart enough to recognize quality content. If your content is not up to the mark, your chances of ranking high in the SERPs are minimized.
Don’t forget the readers of your content. In fact, they will not tolerate crappy content like in the past. Crappy content is unlikely to do well on various social media channels. Let’s not forget about the influence of social media when it comes to traffic and rankings. Get your house in order and provide high-quality content to your readers, and you will eventually attract the right traffic to your blog. If you do not have time to write your own content, order from a high quality provider like nostop.net.
Your content should have the following characteristics to attract the right kind of visitors to your blog: They should satisfy all SEO copywriting tips that are supposed to work after the Google Penguin and Panda updates, the content should be well-researched and unbiased, it should be original and describe both sides of the story, and the content should be fresh and up-to-date at all times.
2. Your Keywords Are Too Competitive
More often than not, a blogger starts by assembling an editorial calendar. He or she prepares a list of blog articles with dates, and these articles are selected because he or she finds them interesting or perceived to be relevant to the target audience. This is the mistake that most bloggers make. In fact, content marketing doesn’t start with articles but proper keyword research. You need to research your customer and understand what they are looking for.
What is the intent behind their queries? What are the keywords that you need to focus on to gain traffic from these queries? These are important things to consider before writing your articles. At this point, you will be able to develop a list of long-tail keywords. Create your articles using these long-tail keywords. Each long-tail keyword should be included in your blog title, article title and at least twice in the article body. Don’t overdo it since it tantamount to keyword stuffing.
Once you develop a list of keywords (long-tail and exact matches) you can use them in link building. This post does a great job of detailing the different percentages of anchor text that you should be focusing on: Anchor Text Guide for 2018
3. You Have A Horrible Blog Design
The way your blog looks feels, and functions have a lot to do with how the user engages with it. It boils down to user experience which is an important metrics in Google’s algorithm. The user will not engage with your blog if it has an awful design. Here are some characteristics of a great blog design which will engage your users.
Your website should be responsive. If it is not mobile optimized, your blog will not feature in the mobile search results. Blog snippets are important to give the reader a chance to skim through your article. Feature blog snippets on the home page of your blog. Place your main content on the left side of your blog where users are most likely to look first. Use social buttons to encourage your reader to share the article. Maintain a dark colored text on a light colored background for your blog. Use images and videos that are relevant to your content. Use short paragraphs and break up your content, and use bullet points whenever feasible. These tips will help create a great blog design for your blog.
4. You Are Not Sharing Your Content Socially
The internet is an instrument of social interaction and collaboration. Even the latest research supports this argument. In fact, more than 74% of all adults in the United States use a social networking site. Today, we have come to the era of the social web. So if you are not taking advantage of this trend, you are losing a heck of a lot. For example, a person doesn’t stop by just reading an article, they share it, tweet it, comment on it, etc.
The solution to this is to promote your content on social networking sites. Writing content is only half of content marketing. The other half involves spreading or promoting the written content. Here are important tips to do it – add sharing buttons to your articles, share your content more than once on each social media site, share the content at peak times when your audience is socially active, and make sure you participate in the conversation as your content circulates on social media platforms. This will help you attract the right kind of traffic to your blog.
5. Your Blog Is Loading Too Slow
You already know that page speed is a ranking factor, and several studies show that readers are likely to patronize blogs that load fast. In fact, research reveals that visitors are likely to exit a blog if it doesn’t load within 7-8 seconds. Even if your website ranks well and gets traffic from the search engines, your visitors will leave the blog as soon as they land on a slow loading page. Improving your page loading times will help increase the traffic.
You need to make some improvements to your blog if you want to achieve your long-term marketing goals. Your blog may not be getting the required traffic due to pretty simple reasons. Thankfully, the solutions are also relatively simple. The above article provides information on 5 proven strategies to increase your blog traffic.