How to Increase Organic Traffic for Blog and Website Using 7 Effective Steps

7 Steps to Increase Organic Traffic for Blog or Website  

How to increase organic traffic to your blog

How to increase traffic to a blog or website? This is the essential question that is circulating in the minds of a newbie or even a professional and experienced blogger. If you have been writing a blog post and publishing it but still, no one is reading it. So the question is, how to write a blog post that actually gets organic/direct traffic? 

The problem is not your article writing. It also does not mean that people do not prefer your blog writing. It just means that your written content s not yet optimized to be found on the web, or in some way you are missing content marketing for the blog. 

So in this article, we will see some key features that answer the important question - 'how to get traffic to a new blog ?’. 

This post will also explore writing an SEO(search engine optimization) blog that drives consistent traffic. So let’s dig into some ways or tricks to increase blog traffic.

Your online blog writing should be such that the blog post -

• People want to read and
• Attract the target audience you need.

Increase organic traffic to the blog

Steps to Increase Your Blog and Website Traffic

Now, instead of focusing on subjective techniques such as writing style, we will see how to build a consistent stream of readers with tactical topic selection and workflows. In order to gain readers, you need to get traffic. The ways of generating blog traffic to your website are variable. The multiple channels of traffic sources are organic search traffic, direct traffic, social traffic, and referral traffic.

Now all the visitors to your web page fall into these different categories in terms of how they discover and consume content on your website. You could be using paid promotional ads or email marketing to send readers to your posts. These are all good options, but paid traffic is only good as long as you are ready to pay the desired amount. 

The same applies to your email list. You send out an email, then the traffic fades to nothing. Then how about social traffic?  You might get some nice rise in traffic, but that will eventually drop back to normality.

These small boosts are nothing but some short hope. When you have used any of these marketing strategies, then you must have experienced that these are mere small boosters but nothing like a concrete solution to your problem. So the natural question comes to mind is how to get traffic to my blog for free? And what should be the content marketing strategy one should follow?

Organic traffic can produce the desired effect as you get free, passive, and growing traffic that doesn’t decline over time. This should be the SEO content strategy to grow your blog or website. This doesn’t mean that you have to stop sending emails to your targeted list or reduce your PPC (pay-per-click) in ad spend.

 

Millions of people are searching for informational content and your blog or website should be able to satisfy the requirements of searchers and evidently get the traffic you deserve. Now if someone asks you, 'How to increase blog traffic fast?' Then it cannot be done overnight but takes time. Let’s see the steps which should help you with this.

STEP 1: Correlate your blog/content with the properly formulated search query 

You have to select the topics systematically that are proven to get traffic. The most common problem found with new bloggers is that they write self-centered posts that are not going to give them any favor in terms of traffic. Nobody bothers about your daily problems or schedule unless it is related to a common query or difficulty and how you frame it or co-relate it with the user's difficulties. 

People go to Google for solutions to their problems. So as you generate topics to write about, you should focus on the readers, rather than yourself. So merely writing blogs is not enough unless you focus on this.

For example, if you have a health blog, and you write something like ‘How do I make or consume green tea?’ What do you think about how many people would search for it unless you are a celebrity? No one! But if you go for something like ‘How to make green tea at home naturally and instantly?’ now this is something very commonly associated with anybody interested in the same topic. So the chances are higher for the people to search for this.

You can get many such topics by doing some advanced search on google.

You can actually find what percentages of people are checking out any keyword using Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. You can also take the help of other free keyword tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to find out keyword difficulty and organic CTR(click-through rate) for your particular keywords. 

You can see the same below for our keyword search titled - ‘How to make green tea at home naturally?’

Using these keyword tools, you can get some great keyword ideas and suggestions. These tools also show search volumes for the respective keywords but the search volume data can be a bit misleading.

For example, some particular keyword in Ahref’s keyword explorer shows 1,000 monthly searches in the US alone. Now, if you click on the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) button there, and look at the traffic column for the top-ranking pages in the same category, you will see that these pages get significantly more traffic than the estimated search volume.

This often happens because these pages are ranking for hundreds or even thousands of keywords. This is why it is critical to look at the total traffic potential of a topic.

Moreover, with these SEO tools, you can generate a lot of content ideas by, 

• Entering a more general topic related to your niche 
• Analyzing the traffic potential of every topic which you may find worth creating the post. 

In addition to this, you have to locate the topics that are generating traffic for your competitors and then create content around those topics too. This gives you an indication that you should not waste time writing content that people don’t care to read. 

STEP 2: Evaluate the search intent

One of the more important parts is to evaluate the search intent. 

• Search intent represents the motivation behind a searcher’s query. 

For example, if someone searches for ‘How to make a Pizza?’, then what does one consider he/she needs to see?. It is, possibly the recipes for making Pizza. Google shows the results in the form of recipes as shown here.

But what if someone searches for the query ‘Induction cooker?’ What is he looking for exactly? Is it for shopping? Or to read the reviews? What if someone likes to see a catalog from eCommerce sites about product specifications? or something entirely different? 

Google shows the results as shown here in the form of e-commerce site products for shopping. 

The search intent is basically easy to identify. As per Ahrefs, when you look for the keyword phrase for which you like to rank in Google searches, the search results reveal the content by 

• Content-type 
• Content format 
• Content angle 

Ahrefs calls these ‘the 3 C’s of search intent’. If you are into online blog writing then it is expected that your blogpost should follow this strictly to boost Google ranking and other search engine rankings. 

The first C, ‘content-type is usually be categorized into product pages, blog posts, landing pages, and category pages. If you observe the top 10 results for 'How to Make a Pizza?' the majority of them are blog posts. 

The second C is ‘content format’ which involves blog posts. Some of the common formats in this are "how-to" guides, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, or opinions related to editorials. 

These are some of the common and effective formats and this could also give you a hint that what you should look out for when you are looking for ‘How to increase blog traffic for WordPress or Blogger’.

The definitive C is ‘content angle’. The angle is typically represented within the title of the post because it gives an advantage to the user which helps him to click and browse the article. 

So like in our earlier example of “How to Make a Pizza?” where the visited webpage is telling about creating "perfect" pizza. Thus this one is depicting the easy pizza-making angle. Some other web-page could be telling about the cost-effective angle of making pizza. 

Hence you have to pay attention to the content angle of the top 10 results on Google for the respective topic. One thing to note here is that,

• The content angles could differ from topic to topic.

Now, just look back to our earlier example of "Induction cooker” You can see that the Google search results for this are dominated by eCommerce category pages. If your website does not fall into this category, then you should not target the keyword related to it. As your possibility of ranking is almost negligible.

STEP 3 - Analyzing the different keywords of top-ranking pages

This step includes the process of a data-driven framework. Any web page does not rank for only one keyword. In fact, Ahrefs research data shows that,

• On average, the number one ranking page for any particular keyword topic also ranks for so many other keywords( approximately up to 1000 other keywords). 

So you should be creating a summary in tabular format to understand and note down all the keywords for which the highest-ranking pages are ranking. This would be helpful in your blog posts as part of your SEO content marketing.

In Ahrefs keywords explorer, you can check for the target keyword for which you would like to rank. Here you will get the 10 highest ranking pages alongside their SEO metrics details. This is helpful because as per Ahrefs, a lot of those top pages are also ranking for thousands of other keywords. You have to click on the given number under the ‘Keywords’ column in the list.

Ahrefs keyword explorer - 'keywords' column  to get keyword details

This will open the organic keywords report in ‘Site Explorer’. You should filter this keywords list to only show keywords that ranking from positions 1 to 10 so that they would be more relevant. This would flush out tons of irrelevant keywords that you don’t need to target.

If you try to use the keywords from the first 10 ranked pages in your post, this could potentially create keyword stuffing in some situations depending on keyword quantity. The best solution is to consider these as your potential subtopics in related categories. 

You may include some related descriptive words for such keywords. Then you could add some bullet points below each of the subtopics to ensure the topic's relevance. Moreover, you can use them to solidify the content angle you want to give for your post. 

As for the content angle, we have already discussed this earlier. These actions make your blog or post a complete SEO blog.

So these types of blogging tips could be an answer to the question i.e. ‘How to write a good blog?’ and generate consistent traffic. But is it enough? Not really, let’s see why, and how? 

STEP 4 - Creating the first draft of the blog/content topic to form an optimized post 

The foremost question that comes to our mind is, ‘How to write a blog post fast?’ .Now here you need to understand that this is not about quick articles or blog writing but it is all about the more structured and optimized form of writing. This requires writing your first draft of your topic. You have to create a detailed outline for this. 

The purpose of this step is not to write a perfect blog post that everyone's going to appreciate. It is about putting your views and thoughts on the screen sequentially through several drafts into a more cohesive and organized post. So this step is all about efficiency and quality work.

STEP 5 - Edit blog post or content draft for grammatical and readability issues

In this step, you need to edit your first draft which you have written on the desired topic. You have to do this in two parts. These are

• The first part is to fix spelling and grammatical issues. This is a very straightforward task and you can take the help of tools like Grammarly.
• The second part is to confirm that your blog post provides value to readers. This is possible when the article or blog on your website is easily readable and in simple language. 

This helps the viewer to associate quite easily with the content that is, the article writing in English or in any other language.  Also, make edits wherever necessary.

One more tool which is recommended here is HemingwayEditor. Just paste your post in there and it will give you a readability grade. Generally, you should aim for a very easy level of readability. This will ensure that your blog posts are easy to read and understand.

STEP 6 - Getting feedback on your blog post draft or content through different channels 

This step is to get honest feedback about your blog posts. It allows us to consistently get positive feedback from various online communities. So this is one of the most critical steps in your content creation process. 

You can get feedback, related questions, and relevant suggestions from your fellow colleagues, friends, and known people from your work circle online or offline. You can also ask them to review your content, so you can consistently produce your best stuff. 

Your main focus should be to write posts that are always providing value to your viewers. You have to make sure that everything written and published by you is of top-notch quality.

STEP 7 - Finalizing and publishing your structured and organized blog post or content

In the last step, you have to create a final draft for your post. All feedback should have been given by this point. Now you have to make the decisions related to this feed backs on what goes in the final version and what is to be omitted.

Go through each trace-point, and once all points have been resolved, you just need to do one final read-through. Then you can upload, publish, and enjoy the success of your hard work. 

These are the simple and upfront essential yet effective steps that need to be followed and implemented in order to generate and increase consistent traffic to the website and blog.   

If interested in Google keyword planner then do check the following link,

How to use Google keyword planner free!

If you want to know effective back-link building strategies then do check the following link,

Effective Link Building Strategies 

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