How to Get Traffic to Your Blog Post

You are a content writer and you decided to run a blog. How to get traffic to your blog post? Your expectation is to get visitors landing on your stunning content. But it’s not working out! Why? Here a common problem: you write a post that looks stunning to you, you hit the publish button and what’s next? Nobody is going to read it!

How can it be possible? The problem is not your writing skill. Either it would not that your visitors don’t like your blog or you! What should be the problem? Your content is not optimized for searchers and potential visitors. Nobody can find your content!

In the next chapters, we are going to explain how to write a blog post to get traffic and readers. Follow our tips to make your next blog post viral, either to optimize your previous ones.

We are going to drive you to a traffic boost with some search engine optimisation tips! How?

Teaching you how to get traffic to your blog post that you deserve. In a while, you will forget about the concern “Why nobody reads my articles/pages on my website/blog?”.

Let’s get to it!

Attract Your Readers

From now on, you will only write epic posts that people really want to read. You will be able to attract the niche audience you want to target. Visitors will spend more time on your website.

For a moment, we are going to forget about writing style, focusing more on the topic of the content. The topic needs to have a strategy behind! Optimize the workflow to get to the goal.

What’s the goal? Getting visitors, building a stream of readers!

Dominate Your Niche

Your goal is to dominate your niche. How? Gaining readers! How can you get readers to your blog/website? Getting traffic! There are several ways to get traffic.

With Google Analytics you can have an idea about the traffic source channels.

• Direct
• Social
• Organic Search
• Referral

They represent different people that find your content using different ways. They get into your funnel through several buckets. Direct, social, organic search, referral are not the only channels.

You can also run paid ads and sending email through your CRM marketing cloud to get traffic. Sharing your URLs and driving users to your content.

There is something more to consider! Paid traffic is a good source if you have a budget included in a long term plan! What about your email campaign? It can be a digest with the last posts preview! Is it bringing result? It is bringing a boost of traffic after that you sent it out, for 1 day or a few hours. After that, traffic fades!

What about social? A spike of traffic when you share a new post, and then your traffic goes back to the average. We can define this digital marketing situation in a sentence: “spike of hope“! You can understand why. Your traffic seems to go up according to your campaigns.

There is a “but” though. Your traffic doesn’t continue to grow as you hope. It goes down to the normality, down to the “flatline of nope”. That’s another popular marketing definition.

That’s what we also experience on the Marketing Predictor blog. So, no worries!

Organic Traffic Lasts Forever

Organic search is the traffic coming from search engines, that we don’t want to fade. Organic traffic can produce an important business boost. You don’t have to spend any money to accomplish this goal. From now on, you can forget about your best friends called spike of hope and flatline of nope.

We are going to review a primary strategy that will work for you, as it worked for us on this blog. You will have a constant growth in organic keywords you should rank for. Organic keywords traffic directly affects your webpages organic traffic growth.

How our posts optimization is going on the Marketing Predictor blog? Review the following screenshot! Step by step we are getting there, and still growing the “organic keywords” traffic:

We are not telling you to stop working on other marketing channels! Email campaigns or PPC campaigns might bring you traffic as well. We are just telling you that searchers in 2019 are looking for informational content!

Here you have an example of the tool Answer the Public. It’s generating ideas starting from a seed keyword. You can see what searchers are looking for “asking” in search engines.

Do you have a blog? Make your blog posts with the aim to give searchers what they need and what they are searching for. Doing this way, you will get the traffic that you finally deserve.

Content to Generate Traffic

When we wrote our first blog post we did not get any organic result. Why? It was a post not good enough to satisfy searchers intent! Maybe you are experiencing the same: it’s blogger life sooner or later. It’s important how to frame your content.

It’s not a problem if you like to write about your favorite shoes to wear when you go running. It’s about how you frame your topic though! It’s an important step on how to get traffic to your blog post. Searchers are searching for “what shoes are Tom wearing for running today?” or for a specific solution to their problems typing a query in Google? We are sure they are going for the second type of search! What can you get from this tip? Focus on your audience, and on readers/searchers intent rather than yourself.

Let’s have an example!

Rather than writing a blog post “I bought the best Nike shoes to my son”, use a different approach: “how to choose the best Nike shoes that your son will love”. This choice is based on what (we suppose) searchers are looking for.

It’s just a prediction that can make the difference.

You can confirm your guess, exploring data! This way you will have the right approach for any new blog post. Check how many people are searching for a specific keyword. Use the keywords explorer feature available in tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest.

Here we searched for the keyword “make pizza” using the feature in Ahrefs:

Starting from that, you can have important insights. How? Let’s focus on it in the next chapter, finding out on more than one longtail keyword tool free.

Keyword Volume Search

Let’s go back to our “shoes” example. Using Ubersugest you can analyze the keyword “shoes” to find keyword related ideas. What searchers are looking for when they search for shoes? Here you have the answer! As you can see from the screenshot, the first 3 keywords get around 1,000,000 searches per month in the USA.

Using Ahrefs you can have other information. In the section “questions”, you can see the questions that searchers are typing on search engines. Including the keyword “shoes” in their queries.

For every keyword, you can check the SERP. Doing that, you can see the websites that write about that topic/keyword. You can consider the traffic volume the websites get from that keyword strategy.

The volume traffic per keyword is higher than the specific keyword global volume traffic! Do you know why? Because those webpages rank for thousands of keywords, not just for a few keywords.

Let’s check better all keywords ideas now:

Analyzing the SERP related to one of the keywords (boots) in the list “all keyword ideas“, you can see the volume traffic that the top pages get.

The total volume of traffic that keyword search can generate:

That traffic amount is a small percentage compared to the main keyword search volume. Here is the point: it’s important to look at the total potential traffic a topic can generate! How to get traffic to your blog post? Searching for keywords opportunity would be the next step.

Keywords Opportunity

Starting from that, you can create a complete list of content just analyzing topics/keywords related to your niche! Like we did using Ahrefs for the topic “shoes”, that can give back 3,907,073 keywords containing the word “shoes“. How can you check it? Just using the feature “Phrase match”.

What next? Use the filters, sorting the keywords by low-competition and high search volume. You can set KD from 0 up to 15, for example, and volume 1,000 and more, indicating the monthly amount of searches.

Doing that, you will have a list of keywords opportunity: gold for your blog! Don’t forget to check the SERP related to the keyword you picked. You will be able to analyze the competition and the potential traffic you can generate on your website writing about that keyword/topic.

We saw that search volume data can be misleading sometimes. That’s why you should analyze the opportunity that a keyword might give you considering the potential traffic. Be sure to check another keyword metric beside search volume: difficulty! A metric number, from 1 to 100, that indicates how rank would be difficult using a specific keyword.

Search Competitors Topics

Your competitors are generating tons of traffic from some specific topics? Find those topics and create content related to those topics too! How can you find topics that get traffic? Let’s analyze how using some startup marketing hacks can be important. Even if you are starting a new blog now!

For example, the website www.dsw.com: how is it doing?

They get 4.5M visitors per month according to Ahrefs: an incredible amount! What’s next? Let’s see their top pages in order to check on which pages the get more visitors. Doing that we can have the following insights.

Apart from “dsw”, that is the keyword that identifies the brand and we don’t want to rank for that, the first page that is generating more traffic is related to the keyword “birkenstock”.

It’s a good idea to consider for our new topic if we want to “steal” and generate traffic on our website challenging the competitor DSW.

What’s the meaning of that research? We will focus our new blog post on what people care to search. Make sure you consider the total potential traffic behind the topic you choose. Don’t waste time writing content that searchers don’t care to read!

How to Get Traffic to Your Blog Post: Search Intent

Why is a searcher making a query in search engines? Search intent is the answer to that question! Let’s get into it with a clear example. If users are searching for “how to make a pizza” in Google, what do they expect to see in the results? Probably some pizza recipes.

What about users that are typing “oven”? What is their search intent? Recipes, reviews, prices, shops or something not included in the short list I mentioned? No worries: search intent is not really hard to identify!

How to start? Search for the keyword sentence you want to rank in Google, and analyze what the search results of your query are. You will have results that identify 3 content categories for search intent:

• Content Type
• Content Format
• Content Angle

Considering those 3 “C”, you are 100% sure to create and frame content that can make every searcher satisfied. The information you provide them, fully cover the search intent. After that Google RankBrain component was added to Google algorithm something changed. You should focus on search intent more than before when you write about a new topic!

It’s important knowing what type of content you can review in Google, in order to make a better strategy focusing on users first!

Traffic Growth: Content Type

As we already mentioned, every person uses Google to have answers to questions. When you are looking for something on search engines, what kind of content type comes first in the SERP? We can categorize content in 4 specific types:

• Blog Posts
• Landing Pages
• Category Pages
• Product Pages

When you make a query in Google you will see, just from the titles, that the first results are related to blog posts. Other results can be related to landing pages that propose visitors to buy a service/product. Either landing pages to subscribe email lists or giveaways in exchange for your contact information.

You can also review product pages that describe a product, focusing on its characteristics. Every blog is comprised of categories that are indexed in Google. You can review content like that as well!

Also, categories that include different webpages for the same topic/query.

Epic Post: Content Format

We are talking about blog posts and when it comes to being an article, or a page, a few common formats will be shown up in Google. Are you wondering which ones?

• “How to” Guidelines
• Tutorials
• Opinions
• List of Posts

Those are the main ones, just to give you an idea of what you can find. We are sure that if you are looking for our recipe to make pizza, the first results will be blog posts with the format “how to make a pizza”.

You can find other formats of course, but basically, they will be informative blog posts on “how to do”. Related on what searchers are looking to do, in a better and great way! Don’t forget that you are running a business/blog online to solve customers problems.

You are improving the customers journey map with your content, giving visitors a solution to their needs. What is CTA? Be sure also to implement this marketing strategy when you write your post. It is important to convert users.

Get Traffic: Content Angle

This is probably the most important step. That’s why we want you to fully understand the “angle” approach. You can take advantage of this concept creating content that stands out from your competitors.

Every blog post has a content angle! What’s the content angle of every search result in Google? Basically, it’s often depicted in the SEO title included in the SERP.

It’s a kind of benefit that represents the reason why a searcher should click on the SEO title, in order to read the article.

Let’s have some example. If we search for our pizza recipe, typing “how to make a pizza”, we can have different results that focus their strategy on different catchy angles.

This article is talking about making a pizza that is “better than takeout”. The angle grabs the attention of readers that think that takeout pizza is the best.

Reading the article anyone will be able to make the same takeout pizza, even better actually.

Another one of the results is pushing the “basic pizza dough” angle. Who is going to read this article? Users that want to make a basic pizza starting from the dough. Those are people that consider the dough the first important thing to make the best pizza.

Supposedly, answering the query related to how to make a pizza, some blogger can push the “for beginners” angle. Some readers would like to make a pizza from scratch, maybe for the first time in its life. This angle might grab the attention of users that want to learn how to make a pizza without any experience.

What insights can you get from those examples? Basically, those type of posts is coming out from the first 10 results in the search results. Don’t stray too far from the angle that the top 10 results in Google are taking!

Make sure you evaluate the type of topic as well! Analyze the content angle properly: the angle might vary from topic to topic!

Let’s analyze how the content angle step is important for your new blog post strategy. Typing in Google “pizza oven”, for example, you will notice that the first results are related to e-commerce category.

If you don’t have a similar page on your website, targeting that keyword wouldn’t be the best idea.

You won’t have any chance to rank, because you are not marketing that niche/audience! Keyword research and search intent come before anything else.

Consider those 2 strategies before approaching any keyword target.

Write a Data-Driven Outline

It looks like a weird and difficult concept but it’s not. What is a data-driven outline? As we analyzed, a page doesn’t rank just for one keyword, but for several keywords.

According to statistics, the number 1 ranking page in Google, also ranks for at least 1,000 other keywords. How can we consider this data for our plan? When you create a new outline, you should find out which keywords the top ranking pages are ranking for. Getting the best results with your new blog post.

How can you know that? For example, using the feature “Keyword explorer” on Ahrefs, you can analyze the target keyword you want to rank for. Let’s type “make pizza“.

Scrolling to the bottom of the results page, you can see the top 10 ranking pages in the Google SERP with several metrics related to SEO.

According to what we expected, some of those pages rank for thousands of keywords. We can see what are the keywords just clicking on the number of keywords. For example, we can analyze the keywords the page at the first position ranks for, filtering for keywords that rank from position 1 to 10.

We are going to have a list of irrelevant keywords. Some keywords we don’t want to target. We will have some interesting words to consider though! “homemade”, “recipes“, “ingredients” are the ones that stand out from the analysis.

What can you do now? Don’t try to stuff those 3 keywords your new blog post! Go for another strategy! Consider those keywords as subtopics, solidifying the angle you want to give to your blog post.

Here an example of the blog post structure:

What did we do? We make the angle of making a homemade pizza. As for the subtopics, we would like to have a section on “pizza recipes“. Under the subheading, we can include some descriptive keywords we saw people are searching for:

• Better than takeout
• Basic pizza dough
• For beginners

We can also include some homemade pizza alternatives based on our content research.

• How to make a pizza without dough
• How to make a pizza if you are an expert
• How to make a pizza ordering a pizza dough from takeout

Be sure to include some bullet points under every one of those subheadings, without forgetting to stay on topic.

Write the First Draft

It’s time to write! You should start with a first draft. How? You don’t have to write the best stunning blog post during this step, something completely different though. Elaborate your thoughts and compose some sentences! Starting from the document with bullet points you previously created!

Make a flow that connects all the points planned using some tricks:

• Pomodoro Technique

What is that? To make in place this technique you need to set a 25 minutes timer, planning the goal to accomplish in that specific time. Considering your typing speed comprised of words per minute, for example, 100 per minute, you should be able to write 2,500 words. Writing a blog post is not a typing test and it not easy, so you can set a reachable goal comprised of 500 words.

What’s next? Start writing without pressing the back button and thinking about changing your sentences. Don’t fix spelling mistakes during this step: just go ahead and write for 25 minutes! After that, take a break and go back to work.

You don’t have to stop: that’s the concept behind this step, working on efficiency! You wrote everything you planned to write. And now?

Now it’s time to edit your draft after another break. First of all, fix spelling and grammatical issues: use Grammarly to do it! After that, be sure that your new blog post flows and provide an important value to visitors.

Write as you speak! What do you think about this concept?

Read your post and if it sounds not natural, like a kind of robot wrote it, edit and fix it properly. Remove everything that can make your words and sentences heavy and difficult to understand and read! Also, a plugin like Yoast for WordPress can help you with that.

I suggest another tool as well: Hemingway Editor!

It can give you advice about the reading level of your content, giving some on-site optimization hints. This tool is assigning a readability grade: 6 would be good, signal that your post is easy to read and understand!

Get Feedbacks and Create the Final Draft

It’s a critical step in all the content creation process. Getting positive and negative feedbacks from the online communities! How to get customer feedback would be something important to know in order to optimize this step. Share your content with people around you, in order to have honest opinions.

Ask your friends and colleagues to review your content! You are going to have a feedback that is a gold tip for your new post and your next posts.  

Now you can make the final draft, fixing it considering the feedback you got! Go through every step needs to be fixed, and once each of those steps has been resolved, you just need to take a breath and make one final content read!

Hit the publish button now and get the results of your great job, sharing your new content using an onlinebot as well.

How to get traffic to your blog post? You have the answer now! Do you remember the first paragraph of this article? “You write a post that looks stunning to you, you click the publish button and what’s next? Nobody is going to read it!”, not at all: everyone is going to love it!

Recap: How to write the best blog post

Define your goal

• Organic traffic growth to get a stream of readers
• Be a trustable source for your audience

Find your topic

• LSI Keyword research
• Competitors study
• Search intent evaluation

Frame Your Topic

• Content type
• Content format
• Content angle

Content type

• Blog post on your website
• Landing page related to a product/service
• Category page related to your niche/topic
• Product page regarding what you sell

Content format

• You can go for a “how to”, in order to provide some guidelines
• You can explain the topic through a tutorial
• You can review a topic sharing opinions about it
• You can create a list of posts related to a topic

Content angle

• Decide the angle of your post in order to be catchy for searchers
• Include the angle/keywords in the SEO title

Publish your post

• Write a final draft
• Get feedback about it
• Upload and post it