When I first started my site, I remember reading that the majority of people would quit their within the first year (Building an Online Cash Cow book). If this is you right now, and you’re getting frustrated because you feel like it’s been ages and no one’s coming to visit, stay with me.
This article is for those of you who have just started a blog, or you’re perhaps in the first year, and you’re wondering how you will ever get more traffic to your lone island. This post is everything I’ve learnt over the last six years of having Thought Brick condensed into bite size bits that I hope will be of some use.
While I am not an expert on SEO, I do rank quite high in Google for some of my articles, and through this post I hope to show you how to do the same. It’s more intuitive than you might think! Therefore, the focus of this article will be on what I am most familiar with — building your blog’s traffic naturally through Google.
If you’re committed and keen to build traffic, I’m confident that you too with time, could also reach over 20,000 unique visitors a month, which is what I set as an initial goal for my blog.
Why am I so confident and why do I feel so strongly now in helping others to fulfil their blogging and online goals? Because, some of my articles were so bad when I started, it makes me cringe to think about it. I know if you’re determined, you can absolutely make your blog a success whatever that means to you — supplementing your income through your website, getting X amount of visitors monthly, or funding a round the world trip through your blog.
I started my blog in one of the most saturated niches — self improvement — and then tried to write ‘authoritative’ sounding articles because it’s what I thought I should be doing.
I actually think a lot of people probably felt sorry for me because after a year while my traffic had increased, there were over a hundred articles that just weren’t read by anyone. I remember someone saying ‘that’s a lot of work’ then a long pause, which in an ideal world, would have been followed up with and what you write about is great! But the truth is that a lot of what I’d put up on the site just wasn’t good.
The traffic building strategy we’re going to follow in this article
Your future readers, traffic, lost stragglers of the ocean desperate to find your island…will do a Google search for something specific that you’ve written about, such as how to make the perfect turmeric and coriander smoothie for example. Your article will appear in the number one place on a natural unpaid Google search or at least on the first page.
Your title and the sentence underneath the title will be catchy enough to draw them in. Your article will be infused with love, heart and passion, they will want to read to the end, and then share it by either linking to it on their own blog or via social media as an additional extra because they loved it so much and it helped them solve a problem.
This article is is how to achieve the above. I can’t give you an exact time frame but be patient. I’m sure there are some overnight successes, but for many of us it can take a year or longer of consistent effort to build your blog’s traffic.
Natural traffic building strategies for ranking in Google
The most important thing is this…Know why you’re writing and do it with heart
I’m going to start with this point because if you get clear on this, you’ll be less likely to quit and therefore be giving yourself the best chance of drawing all the traffic you deserve to your site.
In a previous article How to find the best niche for your unique blog and be authentic I talk quite a bit about finding your niche and why it’s so important to know specifically why you’re writing or putting any content out there in the first place.
This isn’t often something we’ve been taught to question in traditional education. Everything I did in the past was about getting the best possible grade (in the subjects I liked) and while this mentality might work in getting you grades, I think it can also rob us of our authenticity, our ability, to operate from the heart, and in the long run we might struggle to find meaningful work. This, however, is just a thought.
The takeaway — don’t try to pretend to be anything you’re not. Write from your heart, be colloquial, be serious — whatever your natural tone of voice is. It matters more than ever to read authentic voices.
I hope this actually comes as good news. If you know who you’re writing for when you sit down to write each article, and put your ego aside, I promise you that this will take you so much further. This doesn’t mean that this is all there is to it, but this is the essence behind what you do.
To help you with this one, think about your blog’s overall mission or purpose and infuse everything you write with love, asking the question how can this really provide value to people in the best possible way.
How to write blog posts and articles for the internet
There are whole books out there focusing just on the art of headlines, so I’ll do my best to cover as much relevant information as possible here. The first thing to realise is that writing for the web is different in that people have much shorter attention spans.
However, you have the potential of reaching a global audience and ranking higher in a Google search than a company employing loads of staff writers. Yes, that’s right — and contrary to what you might think — money does not come into it, which means if you have something to say and it’s well written, your voice can potentially be heard above a multinational company, which is an empowering thought. I’ll be writing more on why and how this is possible further on in this article.
We’ve covered heart, authenticity and having a strong purpose for writing your articles, I’m now going to go into some tips for writing online.
Think carefully about your titles
Creative titles might not work so well if you have to think about what the article is actually about. Remember, when someone is searching for specific information, and they see a list of titles on a Google search, they need to know instantly what they might expect to read from your title. Be specific enough to draw readers in without being overly wordy or resorting to the empty promises of clickbait. How to, questions and list style articles starting with a number work well but again, there’s no number one rule here, just put some thought into your titles. For inspiration, you might find Jon Morrow’s Headline Hacks useful.
I’m also a big fan of the Headline Analyzer. You basically copy your headline into the search tab and this free programme analyses your headline and scores it. You don’t need to religiously stick by this, but it’s something I enjoy doing and find useful. I’ve never made it past the 80’s for my headline scores though, so let me know if you ever get a perfectly graded headline!
Be specific in your writing
While it’s clearly possible to reach number one in a Google search for vague articles like How to garden, to begin with, focus on being more specific in the content of what you write without compromising on authenticity. What specifically are you helping people with if you are writing a gardening post? Who is the article for? What kind of garden? What are you teaching them to grow? What search terms might your ideal reader be searching for?
At this stage, I encourage you to think naturally about the kinds of posts you’d like to write. There are SEO tools you can get and also pay for to see what people are searching for, plus suggestions for related terms, but at the start as an individual blogger, and actually, if at all, you’ll be able to get by fine without them.
The key is to be as specific as you can but not so obscure that no one is interested or will ever search for what you’ve written about. That being said — the world’s got bigger and smaller. It means you can get super niche and there will probably be others around the world who also share your interest.
Examples of specific search terms which lead to something I’ve written include
How to do Wim Hof breathing or Wim Hof breathing. One of these searches will lead a potential reader to one of my articles which ranks high in Google.
Similarly a search term such as which yoga teacher training should I do will also lead them to something I’ve written. While I’m not necessarily No 1, I rank on the first page, which is our goal here.
Make your article readable
Just because people have shorter attention spans doesn’t mean people don’t want to read long articles. Some of my posts are over 2,000 words and people still read them. The key is to know your audience. You don’t need to dumb down your words but there are some things you can do to help make the article more readable.
- Break up large blocks of texts so your paragraphs are shorter — no longer than around six to seven lines.
- Make use of sub headings, bullet points and numbers so your article is scannable.
- Pictures, videos and podcasts can also help to illustrate your written words and break up large amounts of text. Relevant media can also help to keep people on your article. Use your own or other people’s videos to liven up your text.
How often do I need to write?
The short answer to this is that I’m not entirely sure. When I started my blog, the advice was to write an article — if not two — a day. However, although I’m happy with the traffic to my site now, adopting this strategy of just churning out articles, did result in me deleting a lot because they just weren’t quality and a lot of them felt inauthentic.
I would say for this one — write as often as you can without compromising on quality. This must come first. If you’re ever stuck for ideas, kee a notebook with you and jot down article ideas when you get them and possible headlines. This way you’ll have something to fall back on if you’re ever short of ideas.
Let’s talk about keywords, keyword phrases and relevant language
You might have heard people mention keywords and how you must include relevant keywords or keyword phrases in your articles otherwise people won’t have a clue how to find you.
The good news is that this is no longer relevant. When I started blogging, I used to carefully select my keyword phrase which would be whatever I thought someone might search for, and then carefully place them throughout my article three times and in the headline. There were times when people used to spam their articles with specific keyword phrases as a way of ranking in Google, and they did, regardless of how good the article actually was.
While it’s always useful to have an idea of what people might search for in order to get to one of your articles, you do not need to spam or ruin the content of what you write with keyword phrases any more.
Rather than analysing keywords or keyword phrases, Google instead will analyse the kind of language you’re using in your article and judge whether or not this is relevant to the subject matter of the article. You basically just need to write naturally and if you know about and love the subject of your article, you will naturally be using language associated with the topic you’re writing about without having to think about it.
How long people spend reading the article
In the ancient days of SEO, it used to be that you could rank high even if lots of people just went on your article and then clicked off it again. Thankfully, this is no longer the case! You just need to write articles that people actually want to read. You can check your stats by making sure you have something called Google analytics which will tell you how many unique visitors you’re getting, which articles are being read and for how long, how people get to your site, and so much more.
Do you know your stuff?
If for example, you’re a GP and you’re writing some in depth medical related articles and you’ve also contributed (guest writing) to medical sites, then you are likely to be ranked higher in a Google search if your niche is within the medical sector because it’s clear you’re qualified. I, with no medical background, regardless of how great my site might be or how well written my articles are, wouldn’t rank in a Google search for anything medical related and that’s a great thing! It means, that on the whole, you can be sure you’re getting quality articles when you do a search.
Guest write on other blogs
Guest writing on blogs relevant to your own is a brilliant way of getting to know more people in your niche and providing value to the readers of the blog you’ve written for. Quite often the owner of the blog will then link back to your blog in your bio and if people like what you’ve written, they will want to know more about you and what you have to offer.
How do I know this? I’ve had quite a lot of SEO and digital marketing companies get in touch over the years asking to write relevant content on my site with links in the articles. Originally, I did say yes to a few.
However, despite these articles being professionally written, they were never read, they didn’t rank high and they lacked any soul. I’ve also been the person employed to write such articles and let’s just say, I wouldn’t do it again. It’s very difficult to fake authenticity, no matter how well an article is written.
Domain authority
I’ve noticed that the longer I have my site, I feel like I’m naturally being rewarded with more traffic. This is called domain authority — the longer you’ve had your site, there’s more chance of you ranking higher in a Google search. This makes sense intuitively. Google doesn’t want to rank loads of articles on the first page, if you’re just going to close your site down in a few months time and give up. Commitment, consistency and persistence work in your favour here.
Get backlinks naturally
A backlink is a link from another site that points to yours. To simplify this — Google see a backlink as a kind of vote for your site. If people are linking to something then it must be good. But here’s the catch, pre 2012, it used to be common practice to spam the web with backlinks — writing boring content that no would read with the only intention of it providing links.
People would spam online directories (often completely irrelevant to the subject of the article’s niche) with links, writing useless spammy comments on posts with links… How do know this? I observed it happening first hand for a company I used to write for, then saw their ranking drop massively when Google updated their algorithms.
Also, never offer any payment for backlinks. I often get asked how much I charge for an article and the answer is I don’t. I’m open to guest bloggers who really have something authentic to share and I don’t charge for this — but I’m not open for any amount of money for people who only want a backlink. I tried this once, and it didn’t feel right.
Useful tools and summary of what’s been said
The following two free tools will allow you to see stats for your site such as how many unique visitors you’re getting, what people are searching for to get to your site, links to your blog…
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
I thought it might also be useful to have a quick checklist of suggestions for building your traffic through a Google search
- Focus on producing great content that you’ve enjoyed writing and that helps provide value for people or solves a problem in some way
- Break up large chunks of text with bullet points, numbers and videos
- Write great guest posts for other bloggers
- Be specific in your articles so there’s less competition in what you write about.
- Be patient and persistent.
Final thoughts
In many ways, Google don’t want you to think about SEO.They are continuously creating more and more sophisticated algorithms making it harder to outsmart the system. So if you do adopt any back hat SEO tactics you will get caught. Thankfully I’m not smart enough to even try and outsmart the system and it’s worked in my favour.
The biggest thing I want you to take away from this article is to be natural in what you write about and why you’re doing it. Google want the whole search process for information to be intuitive and don’t we all. It doesn’t make any sense for a website or article to rank highly if people don’t enjoy reading it, and it would be annoying for us all, to search for things and not expect quality on the first page. Put this at the heart of what you do, and you’ll be off to a great start.
I hope you’ve found some of this useful and there are things you can take away right now and implement. It’s a vast subject and building traffic through a Google search is just one strategy. Keep learning, stay positive about your blog — it will work! And love what you do.
Finally, if you have any suggestions, tips or advice on this subject, please share your thoughts below.
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