How to get traffic to your blog
Blogging is one of the best activities you can do to increase blog traffic into your site, because of this, it’s important to keep track of how your blog posts are performing. By understanding what post are already performing, you can make strategic changes that allow you to squeeze even more traffic out of those blog post.
In this blog post, I’m going to share with you how to get website traffic via your existing blog post. Additionally I’ll teach you how to audit your blog post to find for better rankings and traffic. Then I’ll also share a few tips around how to promote your blog so that they gain more traffic and higher rankings.
Finding your most popular blog content using Google Analytics.
How to audit your popular blog post?
Let’s first define what it means to have a blog post that is popular. There are different ways you can define and determine what makes a blog post popular; you could measure this by social shares, or by looking at rankings and traffic.
For the sake of this post we are going to focus on measuring your blog posts popularity by accessing its traffic.
Setting Up Your Time Frame
We want enough data to work with so I suggest getting a full year worth of metrics.
To do this we want to change the time frame in Google Analytics to reflect a full year. We set the start date at Aug/1/2016 and our end date to the Aug, 1 2017.
Reviewing Your Blog Traffic
Now we want to review the pages on our site to determine the posts that received the most traffic. To do this you expand the Behavior section then click on Site Content and then All Pages.
If your blog resides in a subdirectory Ex. http://www.site.com/blog then you can isolate that content by putting blog into the search filter. This will leave you with only blog post and ignore other the other pages of your site.
This report shows you a list of your blog content and the corresponding page views each post has received.
A Page view is a single instance of a page being loaded in a web browser. If a page has a lot of page views it likely it’s a popular blog post and this list view is a good way to determine which of your post are the most popular.
Your report should look something like the post below
With this list in hand we now want to look for some opportunities to improve individual post for higher rankings and traffic. I’m going to focus on this post /blog-best-seattle-sushi
Hopefully if you built your blogpost with a keyword in mind and already have some ideas of what that post should be ranking for.
For more info on how to see what keywords are driving traffic into your site see our post titled How to Audit Meta Data.
Checking Your Blog Posts Ranking
To check where your blog post ranks I recommend that you use SEMrush. (14 Day Free Trial )
In SEMrush go to Keyword Analytics then Overview then place in the keyword associated with your blog post into the search field.
Then scroll down to the Organic Search Results section of SEMrush then tab through the top 1—100 results to see of your page is ranking within the top 100
In our case we see that our post is rankings 24. Certainly there is room for improvement here but the fact that it’s ranking and already gets some traffic is a good sign that this is a great target post to boost.
Ways to Improve Your Blog Post Traffic and Rankings
Building Links Into Your Blog Post
One of the first things you can do to increase traffic to your blog post and your site is build backlinks links into blog post that are already ranking in the search engines.
In a recent video titled 7 Neat SEO Tricks for SEO Niel Patel and Eric Slu explain one tactic for generating more traffic to your site. This tactic involves generating 10 or more links to blog post that already rank for a terms with high keyword volume (2-3k)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sVIlteU9ns
We won’t cover link building in this post but here is a few good reference to get you started. https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
Incorporating Outbound Links in You Blog 
When you mention another pages or resources in your blog post, it’s always a good idea to link to those reference. Not only do the search engines like to see outbound links, but linking to 3rd party sites often encourages reciprocal links or social mentions.
Promote You Blog via Social Media
It’s a good idea to share your blog post across your social media networks. Don’t just do this when it first goes live but also periodically throughout the year. If you spend time building up you social network and share your content with the right audiences you might just find that social media becomes on of your top traffic channels.
Write Great Blog Post Titles
As strange as it may sound your blog titles are almost as important as your entire blog post. After all if your title does not attract people to click on through to your post then the time you took to develop that post is in vein.
Pro Tip, When searching for a great titles find and study existing Google Adwords copy that relates to the topic of your post, then mirror the words or phrases that you see appear across those ads.
Pro Tip, When searching for a great titles find and study existing Google Adwords copy that relates to the topic of your post, then mirror the words or phrases that you see appear across those ads.
Include Keywords in Your Blog Post
Keywords are the heart of SEO, Before you ever start to write a blog post you should spend a good amount of time doing keyword research related to the blog post topic you wish to write about. When done correctly you can ensure that your content will see plenty of engagement. For more info how to conduct Keyword Research, check out our post titled How To Do Keyword Research Like a Pro
Add Video to your Blog Post
Supplementing your blog post with video is a great way to keep users on your page longer. Additionally, video is great a great way to attach more readers and followers to your blog post as it is easily shared and uploaded to sites like Facebook and Youtube
Keeping track of your blog post is a great routine we recommend to all of our clients because knowing where you are succeeding and knowing what to do to improve your blog post even further is the key to gaining new traffic and customers.
If you are in need of more traffic or leads our Spokane web development firm Enleaf can help provide an in-depth audit of your traffic and help develop a growth strategy that is perfect for your business. Contact us today for a free consultation.