So you finally embraced inbound marketing as the best method of generating leads for your business. You redesigned your website, put together some great content offers, started writing a blog and waited for the leads to start pouring in. But as the days and weeks went by, you discovered that your traffic was meager. You put all of that hard work into your blog, yet nobody is reading it. What went wrong?
If this describes your situation, that’s a shame. But fortunately, it’s very salvageable. There’s no secret method of gaming Google’s search algorithms and guaranteeing great SEO (and therefore higher traffic); if there was, someone would have certainly discovered it by now and you’d be reading their blog instead of ours. But there are plenty of steps you can take to improve your blog’s SEO, and therefore get many more people to read your posts.
Here are the things you should try to increase traffic on your blog:
Understand how Google controls your marketing strategy
If you know anything about inbound marketing, you know that it’s heavily reliant on Google: we even wrote a blog article saying exactly that. Most people are going to come across your site organically, when your blog appears in their results for a search related to your field. But it’s not enough to just appear in the results; you’ve got to try to rank near the top of the very first page of results. The top three results for a Google search get an overwhelming amount of the traffic, and the numbers drop precipitously from there.
Keyword utilization
So how do you rank highly in the search results? One excellent method is the proper utilization of keywords. Through research and your own expertise in your field, you need to determine what keywords are used most often in searches related to your field. Once you discover what these keywords are, you need to use them liberally. Endeavor to include 1-2 keywords in the headline of every article, then sprinkle them throughout the body of the article as well. Just ensure your usage of keywords makes sense in the context of the article. If you just start copying and pasting keywords willy-nilly, you’re trying to cheat the system and Google will not respond kindly: it will mark your site as spam, which would be devastating for your business’ success.
Writing about topics that matter
Since Google searches are going to lead visitors to your site, you need to make sure you’re writing about things potential customers care about. What do your current customers talk to you about most often? What is a common problem that your products/services can solve? These are the topics your blog articles should focus on.
Updating frequently
If you’re only posting new blogs once a week (or less), it’s really hard for your site to build up relevance in Google’s eyes. When you post blogs more frequently, you not only increase the size of your online footprint, you also increase the chances of one of your blog articles relating to someone’s search terms (and therefore appearing high in the results).
Aim to post new blog articles three times a week, and be sure to include links in every article. Google uses a web crawler to travel the internet and index everything, and the crawler uses links to travel from site to site. Therefore, more links means more times the crawler will pass through your site – which in turn will elevate your relevance.
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