Whether you have a new blog or one that you’ve been working on for a while, we all know the value of increasing traffic to a blog: the more targeted traffic, the more you can earn through ads, affiliate offers, sponsored posts, or whatever your method of monetization may be.
Having recently tested and revamped my whole process for increasing traffic, I thought I would show you the exact strategies I have used on clients’ blogs as well as my own to double traffic in 90 days; these strategies have resulted in blogs being flipped for six-figure sums, doubling or tripling revenue, as well as growing one of my blogs to over $5,000/m.
Ready to get started? Let’s delve into the specifics but first, grab your drink, a snack of choice, and a pen and paper.
Strategy #1: Understand the Level Your Blog is at
The first part of this process is to understand how authoritative (or not) your blog is before you can determine how to go about increasing traffic for it. In layman’s terms, what level is your blog at when it comes to ranking keywords. For instance, a new blog that’s under 6 months old will barely rank for low competition, long-tail keywords whereas a blog that has been in existence for 3-4 years may have an easier time ranking medium competition keywords. Let’s discuss this a bit further.
With this step, you’re assessing which kind of keywords your blog can rank super well for:
- 0-250 searches/month
- 250-880 searches/month
- 880-1500 searches/month
…and onwards.
Determine the range of keywords that your blog is doing well for and give it more of what it can do well with.
So, if your blog is ranking well for several keywords that fall in the range of 250-880 searches per month, now you can choose keywords from 0-1,500 searches per month and expect them to rank well in due time.
Keep in mind that this isn’t an exact science but you want to assess how your blog is doing for majority of the keywords based on the data right in front of you.
Strategy #2: Updating Old Content With New Keywords
If you see a lot of content that isn’t ranking for its primary content, it’s worth it to check out if you were targeting competitive keywords that your blog is too young (and lacking authority) to rank for. Unless you are ranking on pages 1 or 2, take a look at some of your posts and jot down the monthly search volume for the primary keywords you were targeting at the time of publishing.
If it becomes clear that you’ve been targeting keywords that are way higher in search volume and hence high in competition, you can do better keyword research and find variations of the existing keywords that are long-tail keywords (and are much easier to rank for). Let’s take a look at an example:
Example:
- litter training a cat – 720 searches/month
- how do you litter train a cat – 90 searches/month
The first keyword is guaranteed to have a lot more competition. It receives hundreds of searches per month and a lot of big sites in the cat/pet niches as well as blogs are aiming for it.
The second keyword is a longer long-tail keyword (HA!) that is probably still very much targeted by a lot of blogs.
You can go further down the list and explore a close variation of this keyword that no one is targeting or something with even more specific intent like “how to litter train a senior cat” or “how to litter train a feral cat”.
As a smaller blog, I can aim for keywords that are the same in intent and I have a much higher chance in competition.
I want to taste the traffic as fast as possible!
It is also worth mentioning that even if you aim for the long-tail keywords that receive a small number of searches per month, your article could rank for another close variation and bring in additional traffic.
Now that you know you can choose keywords that your blog can actually rank for, you can update your older content, make it as awesome as possible, and optimize it for the new keyword that it has much higher chance to rank for.
Strategy #3: Round Out the Topical Cluster to Cover the Topical Map
Now that you’ve picked your keywords, you need to assess if you can go deeper with the main topics or any subtopics.
For example, if you’re writing about training cats to use a litter box on your blog that’s about cats, are there other training keywords you can find regarding cats?
The more you cover a tight cluster of topics, the better results you’ll see with your content efforts.
I’m going to dig deeper and try to find topic clusters.
Example:
- how do you litter train a cat
- training a cat to use a toilet
- training a cat on a harness
- training a cat to walk on a leash
- training a cat to do tricks
- training a cat to fetch
In the above example, we see that the keyword research tool showed us all types of training keywords for cats.
From this point on, I would do my due diligence to dig deeper into litter training, toilet training, leash training, and tricks training to see what type of content clusters I can dig up under each topic (loosely speaking).
That’s a surefire way to double your traffic: choose keywords that your blog can do well with and then create topical clusters as in-depth as possible.
Strategy #4: Updating Old Content
When looking at old content, a lot of bloggers can feel overwhelmed.
What exactly are they supposed to update? Is it the images? Is the the title? Does the content need to be rewritten entirely?
Also, they may have a blog with hundreds or thousands of articles that need to be updated or pruned.
From the way the whole article reads, to including better and optimized images, to updating the article, and adding more sections to making sure the internal and external linking is on point, updating my own blog was a massively dull project.
But once Google recognized the changes and rewarded the blog, the results were pretty amazing.
While updating old content may not result in the instant dopamine hits that new content can bring upon hitting the publish button, sometimes it’s a great idea to focus on existing content and make sure it’s sparkling along with the newly published content.
Strategy #5: Create an Effective Internal Linking Silo Structure
Years ago, when I started testing internal linking and various silo structures and seeing how beneficial the results were for rankings, I instantly fell in love with it!
I have given presentations on it at industry events and deem internal links as powerful as external backlinks.
Internal linking is an important part of on-page SEO so make sure to take time out and do it with a strategy in mind..
Make sure your internal linking is on point and that your most important pages are linked with keyword-rich yet diversified anchor text.
Strategy #6: Fix Issues in Google Search Console
Google Search Console shows you any technical issues that Google is experiencing with your blog.
Many people overlook the importance of issues indicated by Google Search Console but I have seen sites skyrocket after fixing indexing issues as well as schema issues and more.
All of these are indicated in Google Search Console for free!
Strategy #7: Publish Content on a Schedule
Whether you have a new or an established blog, publishing content on a schedule has its benefits.
If you set a publishing schedule, it trains the Google bots to come back and check for new content regularly.
Also, if you slow down and observe how bigger media sites publish content, you’ll realize it’s done on a schedule.
This also has the awesome benefit of making it a habit to produce content on a schedule and to keep things in a flow state for your blog.
Another note regarding content is that without enough content on a blog, targeting the right keywords, and proper on-page SEO, you won’t see much traction.
If you think publishing a dozen articles will bring you tons of success, you may as well not start a blog.
Publishing is the bottleneck that most bloggers feel but all you need to do is set aside 1-2 hours a day and create content.
Publish, publish, publish.
Strategy #8: Use Google Search Console to Find New Keywords to Optimize Old Content
Google Search Console is one of the most invaluable and free tools available to bloggers and niche site owners. If you click on Performance and then go under Pages and select one of your top pages, you can view which queries that page or post is getting clicks and impressions for.
Some of these queries will be unexpected queries that you never optimized the post for!
Make a note of them and go ahead and lightly optimize your post for those keywords.
You’re welcome!
Strategy #9: Use Google Search Console to Find New Keywords to Create New Content
Applying the same steps in Google Search Console, go ahead and gather the queries your top pages have impressions for but not any clicks.
Google Search Console data shows that its favouring your content to possibly rank for those terms but your existing page isn’t optimized for it.
Go ahead and make a list of all of these keywords; make sure that you cluster the keywords properly.
Now, you should create your content plan and prioritize content targeted these keywords and watch the content land in the top 3 spots in Google easily.
I know this works super well because I did this for dozens of my pages last summer and took top spots in Google.
In Conclusion
As you can see above, whether you have a new or an established blog, there are so many ways to increase your traffic in 90 days!
You can take the most suitable strategy and go all in or combine 2-3 of them over a year-long strategy for amazing results.
If you’re not sure what you should be doing for your blog or a clients’ site, feel free to see if I’m open to for consultation.