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There are good reasons why so many marketers use blog posts to achieve their content goals, especially when it comes to learning how to increase your website traffic. For one, businesses that regularly publish a blog may experience more email traffic than businesses that don’t blog. Moreover, publishing a well-written and authoritative blog with “helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people” can improve your company’s search ranking, according to Google's SEO guide. 

Blogging can be good for business, and the more effective your blog, the more business it may bring in. Below are 11 practical ways to potentially increase your blog's readership and boost your site traffic.

1. Double down on SEO.

One of the most important reasons to publish a blog is to help improve your site’s positioning on search engines, which can be crucial when considering how you drive traffic to your website. But the reverse may also true – greater search engine optimization (SEO) can build your blog audience, which in turn may drive more traffic to your website.

Improved SEO may increase your organic search results, meaning the extent to which your target audience’s search activity will unearth your content without relying on paid advertising.

Using SEO research tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Surfer SEO, you can create SEO-savvy blog posts that may more effectively attract your desired readership. For example, these tools can help you identify the keywords that your audience searches for most frequently – especially long-tailed keywords of three or more words that are highly specific to your blog content and site offerings. (Each product is different, so make sure you look for the one with the features you care about.)

2. Make savvy keyword choices.

When your prospects perform their web research, they search for terms or phrases that relate to their interests and needs. Identifying these keywords and incorporating them into your blog content can be one of the best ways of ensuring that your target audience will find and check out your blog.

One way to do this is to hire an SEO service, but free web tools like Ubersuggest, Keyword Generator, and AnswerThePublic are also available to help you discover which keywords are the most relevant for the consumers you are trying to reach. It is important to use widely searched-for terms, but these also need to closely reflect the content of your blog. For instance, a very broad search term like “shoes” may generate millions of hits, but many of these may come from people who fall outside of your target market. A longer and more specific phrase like “running shoes for women” may be searched for less often but is more relevant to your customers and the blog content you are trying to promote.

3. Answer your customers’ burning questions.

There are proven techniques for grabbing your audience’s attention and making your blog stand out from the crowd. One of the best can be to research the most common questions about your blog’s subject matter, which can be easily done with a free SEO tool or by simply using a search engine, and then post blog entries that directly address those questions. Another good practice is to pose the question in the title of the blog.

Your blog’s headline or title is like the subject line of an email; it’s the first thing that people will see and can determine whether they will skip past or click on the link. Effective headlines are short, punchy, and easily understood. This is why so many headlines include an eye-catching number or statistic. It can also help to include your primary keyword in the title, which is beneficial from an SEO standpoint as well.

Other best practices include writing slightly longer blogs that range from 1,500 to 2,500 words, as these may be shared more often and may rank higher on search engines. Also, consider using a clear heading structure that includes multiple subheads, which help break up the article and organize the content for the reader – making it easier for them to quickly find the answers to their questions. It can also be smart to add internal links to other relevant content on your site. This last practice not only benefits the reader, but can also help boost your SEO ranking and drive more traffic to your blog.

4. Make your blog media-friendly.

Another way to bump up your blog traffic can be to create content that is useful to the news media and journalists, who are always on the lookout for information of interest and will often turn to industry blogs to get the expertise they need.

Media-friendly content includes survey and poll results, industry roundups, infographics, and other kinds of authoritative data. When a post gets picked up by a media outlet, a jump in your site visits may follow suit.

5. Become a trusted source.

Beyond numbers and data, your blog traffic can get a lift when you share your expertise with inquiring reporters. The same journalists who are keen for original data are also hunting for reputable experts to quote in their stories. With a reputable, authoritative blog, you can be that source – and you may not even have to hire a PR team to make it happen.

To put yourself out there as a news source, you can consider posting your profile on a site like Connectively, Rolli, or Qwoted, which are used by journalists to find experts in a given field. To get the most traction, follow the journalist’s instructions when replying to a query, and be prepared to offer insights that go beyond what anyone can find by performing a quick search on a search engine.

6. Don’t confuse your blog’s page title with its H1 or meta description.

Your blog’s page title, also known as a meta title or title tag, is what search engines see and what's displayed in search results – and also visible in your browser tab. The H1 is your page’s headline: a short, colorful description of the blog that appears on the actual webpage window. The H1 should be closely related to the page title, but the page title may also include some additional information, like your blog’s name. The page title should be about 50-60 characters to avoid getting truncated in search results, while the H1 can generally be a bit more descriptive or engaging. Meta descriptions are the blurbs that search engines use to describe your blog page when it appears on a search page, and their length shouldn’t exceed 160 characters.

Page titles, headlines, and meta descriptions are used by your intended readers to decide whether or not to click on your blog link, although they function a little bit differently. Ideally, your page title and headline should hit your reader hard with a striking fact, stat, or question; and it should also try to include your most important keyword, which attracts your audience and improves your SEO. Your meta description should accurately characterize your blog’s content, summarize what is unique and important about the content, and include a top keyword.

For example, if you sell kitchenware, you might post a blog with the H1: “How to Bake Sourdough Bread Like a Pro.” The page title might be “How to Bake Sourdough Bread Like a Pro | [Your Brand Name].” And your meta description might read: “Learn to make an awesome loaf of sourdough, using your own sourdough starter, with our simple, step-by-step recipe.”

To get a fix on what content will most effectively draw you target audience in, it helps to perform an SEO competitor analysis.

7. Promote your blog on social media.

If a blog post goes live in the woods and no one's there to share it, does it get traffic? Generally not, which is why promoting your blog on social media is so important.

One of the best ways to start is by identifying the top social networks where your audience lives. Then, create a unique message to be shared for each of those outlets. You may discover that some platforms give you more latitude to share your content than others, and focusing your efforts on those networks can pay dividends when it comes to attracting new readers.

There are many different ways to develop content that will command attention on social media. Some of these include the use of pictures, videos, polls, and quizzes. But it can also important to have an evergreen content strategy. This is content that will remain timely and relevant to your audience for months or even years to come. With long-lived content like this, you can continually expand your content library without having to constantly churn out new posts. More available content that includes plenty of internal links may not only up your SEO standing, but it can also give you plenty of material to post to social platforms to help attract new readers.

8. Leverage LinkedIn.

When promoting your blog, one of the most important social sites you can take advantage of is LinkedIn. This is especially important for B2B companies and professionals looking to promote their services, because of the more serious tone and greater credibility that LinkedIn conveys.

One LinkedIn feature that is an especially powerful promotional tool is its newsletter publishing service. When you launch a newsletter on LinkedIn, subscribers get both a LinkedIn notification and an email flagging each new edition, so it gets heavily promoted. In turn, you can steer your LinkedIn traffic to your own site’s blog by frequently linking to it within the newsletter.

9. Make it easy to subscribe to your blog.

To help secure long-term readership after attracting new visitors, one of the simplest strategies is to ensure that subscribing to your blog is quick and easy. This can be a crucial step in learning how to build blog traffic effectively. Readers should be invited to subscribe simply by entering their email address, and these invitations should appear on the web page that lists all your blog entries as well on each individual blog page.

Many email platforms let you craft custom opt-in messages and thank-you emails to new subscribers, and these too can help boost your blog’s readership. If you share your social links in those messages, you may also help build your social following – which in turn may drive even more traffic to your blog.

Marketing efforts like these can do more than just draw in more blog readers. They can be a key way to increase your customer’s lifetime value – or the total amount of revenue that you earn from that customer over the course of your relationship. Remember, it can be much easier and more profitable to retain an existing customer than it is to find a new one. The same is true for blog readers.

10. Provide an audio version of your blog.

Another way to help increase your blog’s appeal and generate more traffic is to offer an audio version of your blog. Similar to a podcast, an audio blog is read out loud, so that the blog subscriber can listen to it instead of reading it. A sizable portion of consumers prefer getting information this way, and it is very convenient for road warriors and other frequent travelers who want to listen to your blog while they’re on the go.

Converting your blog entries to audio is not hard to do. Inexpensive and free tools like WebsiteVoice, ResponsiveVoice, and Audio Hijack make it simple to record and stream an audio blog.

11. Add a link to your blog in your company’s email signature.

Here's a final tip on how to get traffic to your blog: consider including a link to your latest blog post in your company’s email signatures. As you and your employees communicate with customers and other business associates, this can help promote your blog to an already receptive group of people.

For instance, if you just published a post about a hot topic in your industry, your email signatures could be flagging it while it’s still top of mind for your audience. Routinely updating everyone’s signature blocks will help ensure that every email they send becomes a traffic generation tool.

Converting Blogging Success Into Business Success

By consistently leveraging SEO best practices, publishing quality content, promoting it strategically, and engaging authentically with your audience, your blog can become a cost-effective way to achieve core business goals like expanding your customer base, establishing your brand as a leader, and ultimately driving more revenue. But these tips are just a starting point to get your business blog working for you. Ready to take your blogging efforts to the next level? Read on to learn more about how you can unleash the power of your business’s blog.

A version of this article was originally published on September 02, 2013.

Photo: Getty Images

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