Here are the 10 Best Practices to Get More People to Read Your Blog
- Publish High-Quality Content Consistently
- Write a Compelling Headline
- Don’t Forget to Target Long-Tail Keywords
- Optimize Your Blog Posts for the Search Engines
- Make Sure You Have a Fast Loading Blog
- Embed Video Content in Your Posts
- Encourage People to Subscribe
- Respond to Comments on Your Posts & Take Time to Comment on Other People’s Blog Posts
- Approach Relevant Websites for Guest Blogging
- Leverage Social Media
1. Publish High-Quality Content Consistently
People love relevant and useful blog posts-information that will help them in their daily lives, whether at work, school, for business or personal growth, a product or service review, and a lot more. If you commit to writing topics that your various ideal readers will need for a long time, such as how-to blog posts, you can ensure an increase in blog traffic. So, identify the most frequent questions in your niche that people type into the search engines, and answer them comprehensively. You can scour these industry-relevant questions by using free online tools such as Answer The Public, and by leveraging Google’s “People Also Ask”: Remember that once you establish the regularity of your in-depth and high-quality blog posts, people will treat your blog as a trusted source of information, it will serve as their go-to resource when they need to learn or get updates about your niche or their industry of interest. Ideally, publishing at least two blog posts a week is great to keep you ahead of the game. The more blog posts, the better.2. Write a Compelling Headline
Stating the obvious, the headline or blog post title is arguably the most critical component to get people to read your blog-it is the first line that potential readers and the search engine “crawlers” will see. So, your headline must be catchy. It must summarize what the readers will get, especially if it is about something that they are researching about. In other words, your headline must be catchy enough to compel people to click and read your blog. Pro tip: over the years, people tend to get attracted to read a list post because they can quickly scan through the list. So, try to include a number in your headline, suggesting a list blog post, and expand it in your content. For example:- Searching on Google – 10 Useful Life Hacks that Few People Know About
- 9 Actionable Tips to Drive More Traffic from Social Media
- 4 Major SEO Factors Influenced by Your Website Architecture
- Can I Do SEO on My Own or Should I Hire an SEO Agency?
- What to Do When Google Displays Your Website on Wrong Keywords?
- SEO for Businesses – Is It the Same for Different Industries?
3. Don’t Forget to Target Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are specific phrases that contain three to four words-these are the words or terms that your target audience is using to type into the search engines. Often, long-tail keywords are precise terms that can lead people to whatever you are selling or offering. So, it is essential to focus on using them as you write your content. For example, regular keywords may come as “SEO Services”, but long-tail keywords can be “effective link building SEO service”. Now, before writing your blog posts, it is essential to have focus keywords to target and use throughout your content. So, besides searching the most frequent questions that your target audience are typing, you can also use free online keyword research tools such as Ubersuggest and Google Keyword Planner to identify and list your target keywords strategically. Here’s how you do keyword research:- Use a “keyword seed” - the term that you think your target audience will most likely use when typing into the search engines
- Select the keyword with the high monthly average search, but relatively low difficulty or competition, as your focus or primary keyword
- Choose at least three related keywords as your secondary keywords - don’t forget the long-tail keywords
4. Optimize Your Blog Posts for the Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest and best practices you should cultivate in your blog. Without leveraging SEO, your blog posts won’t gain online visibility, especially in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) of Google and other popular browsers. SEO can help you immensely increase blog traffic by putting your blog post on top of the SERPs, so you can get people to read your blog first. Remember that 71.33% of search clicks go to the top 10 results in the SERPs, and the number 1 position gets 33% of the search traffic. So, having an effective SEO strategy can really pay dividends. You see, SEO is an extensive process, and it often requires an experienced team of SEO specialists to help you rank higher in the SERPs. In the meantime, you can start tweaking your blog posts for SEO by doing the following:- Include your target keyword in your blog post URL
- Add your target keywords in your primary and secondary headings only when it’s natural to do so (h1, h2, h3)
- Spread your target keywords methodically throughout your content—avoid keyword stuffing
- Make your content easy to read
- Add keyword-driven alternative texts in your images
- Link to your other blog posts
5. Make Sure You Have a Fast Loading Blog
One study revealed that 47% of website visitors expect your page to load within 2 seconds and 40% will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, the slower your blog is, the lesser your readers. The faster it is, the easier it is for you to increase blog traffic. So, what can you do to make your blog load faster? Follow these steps:- Remove useless templates and plugins
- Clear your blog trash
- Update your old blog posts
- Delete duplicate blog posts
- Optimize images by resizing them
- Set your video file in the fastest format possible
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) if your target audience are located around the globe
- Test your loading speed regularly using PageSpeed Insight by Google and follow the tips given to improve your web page speed