Learning how to grow your blog traffic is the most important part of any bloggers job. For YEARS we put out creative content that we worked hard on and felt passionate about – and had no idea if the content would be seen by anyone. Some posts took off and some died a lonely death on our site.
It seemed, as far as we knew, that whether a post succeeded or not was based on some sort of magical luck that the universe would give us. But, then we learned the truth… It’s 100% in our control whether a post traffic is amazing or dismal!!!!
DID YOU HEAR THAT?
I learned how to control our blogs traffic and with these 10 traffic hacks, and saw our site traffic increase by 350% in just one year!
And you can do it too, we have full confidence in that.
A killer traffic growth hack for internal blog links
6. Manual post linkage 3/4 of the way down the page.
Lots of people say to get a plugin that shows related posts.
This never really leads to more clicks!
Instead, think about what posts you have on your site that might answer the next question your reader is asking and write it out manually. Anytime you can put in a manual link with a compelling call to action you will inspire your readers to click through. This will increase their dwell time on your site as well as your average page views. And if you didn’t know this already, Google loves this!
Grow Your Blog Traffic with Pinterest
7. Don’t miss doing your SEO research on Pinterest.
Before every pin you should ensure you are aiming at the right types of keywords and phrases to show up in the search results. Never forget that Pinterest is a search engine too! To do this: type your word in the search bar of Pinterest and wait while it populates the results – these are the words you are after! Use them in your pin descriptions to be sure your pin is seen.
8. Create new pins for old content in Canva.
Canva is one of my favorite graphic design hacks. I use it for everything from pins to PFA school newsletters. It is a great weapon to help you win the Pinterest traffic war you are about to embark on.
One of the things we encourage for major traffic growth is to create new pins for your site. Pinterest is giving new pins a much higher chance to be seen, so every new pin you create (even from a very old post), will up your Pinterest traffic. Aim for 5-10 of these a week and see a HUGE difference.
Traffic hacks to grow your blog traffic with SEO
1. Make sure you are posting about something people are searching for!
This was one of the biggest eye openers for us. Posting on topics that readers were actually searching for was such a HUGE shift in the way we were blogging. Once upon a time we came up with blog post ideas by dreaming at 2am (no joke!), it was wonderfully fulfilling, but very bad at bringing traffic to our site.
Now we use SEM Rush for every blog post idea. Now we search for an idea we want to blog about, and find out exactly the kind of questions people have about it. This enables us to find the sweet spot between what we want to write about and what people are searching for.
2. Write for what people want to know to grow your blog traffic
This is the easiest hack to writing relevant content. Begin by typing a topic into Google, then scroll through the front page to where google shows related questions & be sure to answer EVERY ONE OF THOSE in your post!
Another great way to find out what questions people are asking is to put your topic into Answer The Public and take a look at the questions there. By taking a topic we want to write about, and finding what people want to know about the topic, places us in a unique position to be an authority on the topic.
3. Create clickable & compelling titles
I’m sure you’ve heard it before that your title is MORE important that what is in the post… but let’s be honest – how often do you not bother with it?!
Creating compelling post titles that will get clicked on when they are seen in search results is one of the biggest areas you can have immediate traffic growth.
We use the co-schedule title analyzer to tell us how creative and compelling our titles are.
4. Join a community focused on SEO to grow your blog traffic… because the details changes every often.
The best SEO course we recommend is Hashtag Jeff’s SEO course, which comes with a Facebook mastermind where you can ask questions and get quick updates whenever there are shifts in the way Google is working. This has made such a difference to our traffic growth strategy moving forward.
5. Install Yoast premium right now.
There is nothing that beats this plugin for long term SEO success. While the free version is great for the green light check list, the the premium version has an internal linking structure that will ensure none of your site content is left orphaned.
Definition of orphaned content: “Content without any other posts linking to it.”
Orphaned – like it’s not even a part of your blogs family. How sad for that post! And how detrimental for your sites traffic growth.
Blog growth traffic hack for Instagram
9. Make your own link page
Here’s a little something we recently put into place that has skyrocketed our blog traffic from Instagram. We used to have a linkin.profile plugin and we replaced it by putting an Instagram page right on our site.
Here’s a quick breakdown on how to create one yourself.
You can see it in action right here.
Now instead of giving away all that Instagram traffic we can lead our audience to exactly where we want them to go, and they can find what they are searching for even if the photos are a ways down in our feed.
The biggest long term growth hack ever
10. Consistency is the King & Queen & the Royal Baby all wrapped in one
Wrapping up this list with the most important of all these hacks. Be consistent! Pick one, three or nine of these hacks if you are looking to grow your blog traffic. But at the end of the day consistently doing this is what will lead to long term traffic growth.
If you don’t have the time, consider hiring out the work.
If you can cut out maybe 25 minutes a day of mindless Facebook scrolling you could easily pick one of these and begin to prioritize your traffic growth in a consistent and substantial way.
Let’s grow this traffic together!
