Blog Traffic: Attraction Factor – Part 2

Updated June 1, 2022

Attracting Followers & Filling Your Funnel

Here’s part two on how to gather your crowd for your website and increase blog traffic. In Blog Traffic Attraction Factor Part 1, the first tip talked about why consistently published content is important for SEO rankings and gaining followers. Two is all about encouraging comments while 3 and 4 centered around inbound and outbound links. Tip number 5 focused on guest blogging opportunities. OK, let’s get to the remaining 4 tips:

6. Focus on Quality Content

Human and bots can tell the difference between quality content and crapola. Create content that’s worthy of sharing because anything else will give your reputation a black eye. 90% of onlinriche readers are lurkers – they read and leave. 9% leave occasional comments and 1% are major contributors. Give this 10% plenty of reasons to share your content thus increasing your blog traffic.

By the way, using your blog to sell your wares isn’t quality content. Announcing a new product or releasing a cool new feature? Yes, that’s worthy of a blog post as long as you keep it customer centric. Want to talk about your product’s features and benefits? Leave that to your other marketing materials and sales pitches.

7. Share in Target-Rich Communities

This is where Social Media shines. When you participate in LinkedIn Group discussions, add to Twitter conversions, and share visually interesting images on Pinterest, people will get to know you. Don’t just link to your blog post. That’s the equivalent of going up to strangers and saying “hire me.”

Listen in on conversations and add your opinion. Social media experts say the rule of thumb of sharing links is 90%-10%. Share without an agenda 90% of the time. The remaining 10% you can share links to your content as long as it’s germane to the topic. When you do link, make it easy to share. Sometimes is more about brand awareness — getting the name of your company out there and building a reputation. Simply contributing to the online conversation may trigger folks to search your business name or for you personally. Those who post in shameless self promotion turn off their potential audience. By being interesting and showing interest in others can build genuine and lasting blog traffic.

One last comment about social media: don’t forget about Google +, as it impacts search rankings due to it’s social component.

8. SEO-Friendly Content Drives Blog Traffic

Let’s recap. By now you’re publishing your posts consistently and have written quality content that’s ready for visitors to consume and share. When content is not SEO-friendly, it’s harder for search engines to index it properly. SEO ranking is tricky and ever-changing. We always recommend optimizing it for the human first and the bot second. Overly optimized content — like keyword stuffing — actually hurts your SEO rankings and turns off human readers.

When optimizing content, choose your keyword wisely. A long-tail keyword that has 1,000 searchers a month with less competition may actually get you more results than a general keyword with hundreds of thousands of searchers  a month. A well-rounded SEO strategy takes into account potential search phrases, competition, and your site’s support structure. You need to coordinate all three in order to improve rankings. Even so, make sure the content you publish can be easily indexed. Just because you’ve optimized a blog post for a specific keyword doesn’t mean search engine algorithms will agree with you.

9. Check Web Analytics Data

Assuming that your website isn’t brand new and you’ve installed Google Analytics (or similar tracking system), you have data available that will help you build website visitors and blog traffic. See what keywords that are getting folks to your site now. These are search phrases where your site has already been served upon in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is low-hanging fruit. Add more content and you’ll get more opportunities for new clicks — increasing your blog traffic numbers.

Also pay attention to your bounce rate and how long visitors stick around. These are indications of your website’s site and how interesting and engaging your content. GA has a whole section of Content Analytics to help you find information about how your content’s performance. Search engines pay attention to these stats as well. The longer visitors hang out on your site to consume content is a clue that you’re providing a positive visitor experience.

What other things have you done to get traction? Any other ways to drive blog traffic and engagement?