With so much content available online, how do you ensure your blog posts stand out? Here are four tactics to increase your blog readership and website traffic.
Focus on education
While your content should be relevant to your brand, think about how it will benefit your prospects and customers. What do they care about? What do they need to know? Rather than focusing on selling your services, give your customer valuable, meaningful blog content that they want to read.
Optimize your posts
Simple SEO tactics can go a long way to help your content show up higher in search rankings and improve your blog readership.
Keyword research: Use a tool like Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush to discover relevant search terms with higher volume and lower competition. Make a list of these keywords and incorporate them into your blog content planning.
On-page SEO: Incorporate these keywords into your content — but do not keyword stuff. In addition, optimize your tags and meta-tags, including title, head, meta description, and image alt tags. In addition, optimize your post urls by ensuring they are simple, relevant, compelling and accurate.
Schema markup: Schema markup, or structured data, adds code to your page that tells search engines what the content on that page is about. For example, you can add structured data telling Google who the author is and that it is an article or blog post.
Off-site SEO: Start building high quality links back to your site. Create a media list and pitch your content to industry publications and blogs. If you are a local business, use a tool like Moz to create and update your directory listings. Each of these tactics will help people find your website and content more easily.
Leverage email
Email is a powerful way to build and engage a loyal blog following. Using a tool such as HubSpot, you can set up blog subscription options for your readers, including the ability to subscribe to content daily, weekly or monthly or even subscribe to content on specific topics. These automated emails will pull in your blog posts automatically using an RSS feed, so you can set them up and then let them run. In addition, you can set up a monthly newsletter that highlights your top blog posts.
Share on social media
Post your blogs on social media each time you publish to share with your followers. On Facebook, you may also want to boost the post to increase your blog readership since Facebook continues to tweak its algorithm to make it harder for businesses to reach users without advertising. On LinkedIn, share the post in relevant groups for additional exposure and set up a sponsored content ad campaign. In addition, ensure your posts have social sharing options for readers to send the post out to their networks.
