Everyone wants more traffic. The more pairs of eyes you can get on your blog, the more traction your brand will gain.

 

In turn, more engagement means better Google rank, more articles being shared, and more conversions. In other words, traffic begets traffic.

 

Plus, the more traffic you have, the more visitors you can convert into leads and eventually customers. So traffic begets revenue, too.

 

Generate Blog Traffic (and Leads) with These 5 Tactics

 

The first step is to get the ball rolling. The second step is to keep pushing that ball. The ball is blog traffic, by the way.

 

Okay, on closer inspection, that analogy wasn’t great, but the point is that if you want to keep scaling up your blog traffic, you need to do more than just throw together an article, post it, then forget about it.

 

Write Valuable Articles, Not Fluff

Here’s a surefire way to make your article resonate with your target audience: pick a topic that they need to get better at. Choose a pain point you know they have, and then help them with it.

 

For example, if you’re aiming to write something that appeals to digital marketers, identify a common challenge they have – like generating more blog traffic – and write about how they can get better at it.

 

If you know who you’re targeting, it’s easy to figure out what they’ll be looking for. So if you write it, they will come, right?

 

Not exactly.

 

Don’t Take On The Heavyweights

Once you’ve picked a pain point to address, go see what searches people are using to try and find solutions for that problem. The phrases they’re putting into Google, called “keywords”, are a central pillar of your strategy.

 

Unfortunately, all the really juicy keywords – the ones that have tens of thousands of searches every day and are exactly what you’re writing about – tend to already be fairly saturated.

 

The heavy hitters in your industry will very likely already be crowding the front page of search results for super-competitive keywords. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to dethrone them right off the bat.

 

Don’t worry, that’s not to say that you can’t go after those terms. You just need to be more specific. Go after longer tail keywords instead.

 

For example, instead of writing an article and trying to rank for “create WordPress website”, go more specific with something like “create e-commerce WordPress website”. Or even more: “set up e-commerce shop in WordPress”. Get really granular.

 

The more narrow and specific your topic, the more likely it is you’ll be able to rank for it. Plus, you might not be getting as much traffic as with a broader topic, but the people who do read your blog are much more likely to get value from it.

 

 

Get Technical with Optimization

Search engine optimization is a big, important factor. It means optimizing your blog posts for what Google’s crawlers like to see, in order to establish your post as important, relevant and valuable enough to be placed on the front page.

 

The best way to do that is to write valuable, focused, relevant content, just like we said a minute ago. That said, there are ways you can stack the deck a little in your favor.

 

Have your keyword (or phrases closely related to your keyword) in your article as much as you can without sounding unnatural.

 

Cramming it in there as much as possible in an effort to seem more relevant is called “keyword stuffing” and it will actually reduce your rank, not improve it.

 

Have a single H1 in your post (this will usually be your title), and make sure your keyword is in it. Try to get your keyword in an H2 if you can, but again, don’t force it if it doesn’t sound natural.

 

Another thing to do is have your keyword in the alt text of at least one image in your blog. Alt text is important, and tagging your images appropriately is a strong SEO tactic.

 

Market Your Blog

People finding you on Google is awesome, but don’t forget to push your blog out to your subscribers and followers.

 

If you’re posting a weekly blog, send a weekly “what’s new on my blog” newsletter to your subscribers. Post your new articles on your social media.

 

Encourage people to share it, too. Get creative – have a small contest where everyone who shares your post gets a chance to win something, a discount code or something like that. Social media is a great way to get your message out there and bring in more traffic.

 

Turn Your Blog Traffic Into Leads

Don’t forget to have a way for people to sign up for your newsletter, and include Calls-to-Action in your blog post, too.

 

That’s pretty run-of-the-mill, though. Here’s another way you can capture a much greater volume of high-value B2B leads from your blog (and anywhere else on your website).

 

Clickback WEB is a tool that identifies companies that visit your site – even if they didn’t convert – and gives you accurate contact data for key leads at those companies.

 

It also has an in-depth lead scoring system built in, and notifies you when key companies return to your site.

 

In other words, you can cherry-pick the best leads from your website traffic and add them to your funnel even if they didn’t convert.

 

Get a 14-day free trial and see it in action for yourself.