How To Drive Website Traffic With Blogs

What is Business Blogging?

Blogging offers many benefits:

• Drives relevant organic traffic to your website (people who actually have an interest in your product or service).
• Helps build website authority (Aka Domain Authority), a metric that predicts how likely your website is to appear on the SERPs.
• Helps create authority in your field, build trust, and generate leads. By sharing relevant, helpful, humorous, etc., information related to your product or service, people can see that you know what you’re talking about and begin to trust you more, which may make them more likely to purchase your product or service.

Research supports these claims:

• 34% of buyers will make an unplanned purchase after reading quality content.
• 46% of people take recommendations from bloggers/vloggers into account.
• Bloggers who utilize blogging for marketing purposes see 13 times the ROI of businesses that don’t.
• On average, companies who blog produce 67% more leads per month.
• Updating blog posts can increase traffic by 106%.

10 Blogging Tips to Drive Relevant Website Traffic 

Write For Your Target Audience

First, you need to know and understand your target audience. You need to understand:

• What are they interested in?
• What do they want to read about?
• What are their pain points?
• Where do they spend their time online?

Then, keep them in mind constantly as you strategize and write your content.

Write Great Content

What constitutes great content depends – in part – on who your target market is. However, there are a few tips that generally work on most blogs.

• Write like you talk
• Don’t try to impress with big words or jargon
• Hook readers with a great opening line
• Include the most critical information at the top – especially if it’s a long blog
• Make it scannable by using shorter paragraphs, subheadings, and bullet points. 43% of people admit to skimming blog posts.
• Include a compelling call to action (CTA) to let them know what they should do next (i.e., Subscribe, call you, make a purchase, etc.)
• Pay attention to grammar to make it easier for people to read and understand. Grammarly is a great app to use.
• Do your research and be accurate

Write Compelling Titles

Some experts believe the title you chose is more important than the actual content. Titles help people decide if they’re going to click on your blog or not, so you need to compel or entice them with promises or solutions. You may want to try different titles for the same blog to see what gets the most engagement. Hubspot offers tips for creating catchy headlines.

Include Images

They say, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Humans are visual creatures, and more than half of us are visual learners. You can take advantage of that information by including images (photos, infographics, etc.) in your blog. Plus, Optinmonster reports:

• Articles with images get 94% more views than those with no visuals.
• Using photos of real people instead of stock photos can result in a 35% conversion increase.

Add Video

HubSpot’s State of Video Marketing report tells it all:

• “People are watching more video online than ever before – in fact, the amount of online video they watch has almost doubled since 2018.”
• “Marketers feel more positive about the return on investment offered by video than ever, as it continues to strongly influence traffic, leads, sales, and audience understanding.”
• “Consumers continue to use video as an integral part of their journey with brands and are excited to see even more video content in the year ahead.”

Here are some video marketing tips to Generate Leads, Increase Conversions, and More.

Incorporate Keywords

Keywords are still a vital part of any SEO strategy. Determine what keywords resonate with your target audience and use them in strategic places. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no, so you want to incorporate keywords naturally into your content. Try to use keywords or phrases in the following places when it makes sense:

• Meta Page Title
• Article Title
• Headings and Subheadings
• In your Introduction
• Throughout the Article
• Meta Description
• Image file names
• Alt Text

Include Links

You’ll see a lot of links in this blog. If I quote a statistic or provide information found on another website, I include a link to that website. They’re called backlinks or inbound links, and they can help your website rank higher on SERPs. The more authority a webpage that you are linking to, the better.

Add Social Sharing Buttons

If someone likes what they’ve read and wants to share it with their friends, make it easy for them by including social sharing buttons at the top and bottom of your blog posts.

Promote Your Blog

You need to let people know that your blog exists. Do this by sharing posts on your social media platforms, emailing posts to your contact list, and including a link to your blog in your email signature. You may even want to consider investing a few dollars in paid advertising to get the word out there.

Write Guest Posts

If you write blog posts for other websites with a substantial audience within your target market, you can reach a much wider audience. And, if readers like your post, they may subscribe to your blog. If you’re posting on well-respected websites, guest blogging can also build trust and showcase you as an authority in your field. Include a link back to your blog so that they can engage directly with you. 

Where to Start With SEO

If you want to get found, impress, engage, and convert, blogging (a type of content marketing) should be an important component of your SEO strategy.

Unfortunately, many small to medium-sized businesses don’t have the resources or expertise to develop and execute a comprehensive SEO strategy.

PMI can help with all of your digital marketing needs – strategy, web design, SEO, social media, paid advertising, email marketing, branding, and content marketing. Give us a call at 484-297-6395, or contact us online.