Content Optimization: Increase Blog Traffic for Free

Locate Your Audience Online

Once you’ve gotten a piece of content that provides a clear and effective solution to your target customer’s problem, you’ll need to push it out on the appropriate channels. Find out which websites and social media platforms your target reader spends the most time on. You should maintain a consistent presence across a variety of media, but narrowing down the list to two or three central locations can prevent wasted effort on your part and content fatigue on the part of your reader.

Google Analytics is key to this process. This free tool can help you learn which sites are driving the most referral traffic. Once you’ve located the most effective channels through which to deliver your content, use strategies like A/B testing to find out which types of post perform best at which times. You’ll need to be patient, but this process will save you time and energy in the long-term and improve your ability to increase your blog traffic.

Once you’ve located which social media channels your prospects are consistently using, make sure to push your content from both your company and personal pages. It is important to provide a variety of access points to your blog content to keep your presentation fresh and enticing.

Email is another avenue by which you can reliably reach your target audience. Be sure to include links to your blogs in your email campaigns to drive traffic to your posts. Your goal should be to capitalize on every opportunity to share your blog content, and email is a direct, personalized channel you’ve already opened between your company and your contacts.

Maintain Proper SEO Practices

Always be sure to follow SEO best practices when creating your content. Pushing your content out on social media is a useful strategy, but securing a high rank on search engine results is vital to increasing blog traffic. Your target customer is most likely looking for a solution to their problem on a search engine, and you want them to access your solution as easily as possible, and, frankly, that means catching their attention before someone else does.

• Keywords
• Title
• Meta Description
• Internal Linking

Keywords

Structure your content around certain keywords and phrases that your target customer will use in their search. These keywords should appear in your opening paragraph and throughout your blog post. Free keyword tools like Keywords Everywhere can help you hone in on target phrases for which you can try and rank in search results.

Title

The title is arguably the most important component to a successful blog post. An effective title could mean the difference between a prospect on your blog over a competitor’s. In addition to clearly presenting your post as the solution to your reader’s problem, your title should contain the relevant keywords for which you’re trying to rank. Search engines like Google will truncate titles longer than seventy characters, so be sure to come in under that number if you want to increase blog traffic.

Meta description

This snapshot of the content a reader can expect to find in your post may be the difference between your target audience clicking it, and increasing blog traffic, or scrolling on to your competitor. You should include keywords, but your goal should be to create the most compelling synopsis of your blog possible, as this preview is likely what will entice the reader to click your blog over the next one in the list. Aim for around 150 characters to ensure the description is not cut short by the search engine.

Internal linking

Your goal should be to create a catalogue of useful, repurposable information for your target audience to explore. Keep your previous blogs in mind when creating new content, and link back to posts that contain the same keywords or that will be generally helpful to your reader. This interlinking serves the dual function of providing additional resources for your reader and boosting your credibility to search engines. Be sure to update your archived content regularly to keep it fresh and relevant in the face of changes in your industry.

Generating great blog ideas is only half the battle. Your goal from the outset should be to make sure that content is easily accessible to your target audience. Using these content optimization tips and tools will make increasing blog traffic easier than ever, help you attract the right traffic to your blog, increase engagement with your featured call to action, and convert leads to loyal customers.