Increase your blog's search traffic by doing these five things

SEO is a gradual process and its success isn’t sudden or overnight, you’d have to do a lot of things right and be patient before you can get results on your blog. You should start thinking about optimization as soon as your idea for a post is conceived, the first things to come to mind should include

• Keywords to target

• Target Audience

• How to optimize your pages for the keywords you target

All these factors and some contribute to how much traffic you’ll get from search engines. In this post I’ll take you through certain strategies and processes you can try out to increase your blog’s search traffic.

1) Think hard about the message you want to pass across.

You should determine the purpose of your post. Are you sharing information with your readers or asking a question? Is there any call-to action you plan to direct your reader’s attention to at the end of the post? What do you want your readers to know after reading the post? All these questions should be answered before you even pick up your pen.

2) Identify your target audience

Are you targeting new readers, old loyal fans, influencers in your niche, people who can help you broadcast your message till it goes viral? You might want to catch the attention of a specific group of people with your post.
Create a demographic for the audience you want to reach, write down a list of key-points you can talk about in your post that might attract their attention.

!

Kristen McCormick of Thrivehive wrote a detailed post on how you can identify your target audience

3) 1–2 long-tail keywords is enough

You should optimize your posts for keywords as it is important for SEO, what you shouldn’t do is stuff posts with keywords, nah, that’s bad SEO. By “stuff your posts with keywords” I mean you shouldn’t insert too many of the keywords you are targeting in your posts in order to manipulate search results. This would only get your site penalized and will hurt you in the long run. Your keywords should appear naturally and not in a way that looks shady to readers and search engines.

Focusing on one or two long-tail keywords per post is the best approach, it will narrow your focus on the goals for that post. Long-tail keywords are the way to go, prospective website visitors using search engines usually search for long-tail phrases. These types of keywords are usually intentional and ranking for a keyword with commercial intent is a goldmine, especially if you market products on your blog either as an affiliate or your own personal products.

To know which keywords to use you can check out my previous post on how you can do keyword research using Google Correlate .

4) Have a Mobile-friendly interface

A part of my last post talked about optimizing your website for mobile. The importance of a mobile friendly interface cannot be overstated, not so long ago Google revealed that a higher number of people use the search engine from their mobile phones than on desktop, Google has since improved their user experience by making the first set of displayed search results mobile friendly.

The importance of responsive design used to be limited to user experience, but recently, it has become a priority and criterion for a successful SEO campaign. If you haven’t deemed a mobile-friendly interface as important for your site’s success, you’d better start now, or your search rankings could take a hit.

You can take Google's test to determine how mobile friendly your blog is.

5) Structure your blog posts

Every blog post must be clearly structured. The content of your post should be in this format

• Introduction: Introduce your topic, this section should help your readers grasp the idea behind your topic and the things you’ll talk about in the post. Include the benefits to gain from the information shared in the post.

• Body: The main content of the post should be here, everything you want to talk about should be detailed in here. Use paragraphs to separate different points into sections.

• Conclusion: Summarize the contents of your post, highlight important concepts and new ideas, and add a call to action.

After the post structure has been setup, you can start working on the actual writing.

Ranking high in Google was used to be a matter of knowing which SEO tricks to exploit, but I can guarantee you that it doesn’t work that way anymore. Your content has to be up to par. Content is king, good content coupled with the right approach to optimization and content promotion will get you far up in the rankings. Sure, you can do some tweaking here and there to boost your rankings but the most important tip to remember is Write a very good post.

If you’ve found this write-up to be useful in anyway to your business, kindly show your support by upvoting. Thanks