How to Increase Blog Traffic (2024) — The 10 Key Steps

In this article I’ll show you how to increase blog traffic — below, you’ll find 10 simple steps you can take to generate a much larger readership for your posts.

Let’s start with a very important question: why blog in the first place?

Why blog?

Well, there are three main reasons.

First, blogging can be a lot of fun. It’s a creative activity that lets you express yourself and share your views with a potentially large audience.

(The post you’re reading right now has been read about 38,000 times already!).

Second, blogging can help establish you — or your business — as an authority in your field.

And third, blogging can significantly increase the number of people visiting your website. According to Hubspot, businesses that blog typically see 55% more visits to their sites than those that don’t.

So, if you write well and are blogging about a subject that a significant number of people are interested in, you can end up with a lot more traffic on your website.

And this increased traffic has the potential to generate…

But how do you go about creating a successful blog?

As you might expect, the first step involves finding a good writer.

1. Find the right writer (hint: that might not be you!)

At the heart of getting your blog noticed — and driving lots of traffic to it — is writing superb content.

And that content is going to be all the more ‘superb’ if the person writing it is both knowledgeable and passionate about what they are writing about.

Blog posts that are written from the heart – and not by a content farm – are more likely to be the posts that interest people, and crucially, get shared.

BUT…it might be the case that you personally are not the best person to write the posts for your site.

❌ Perhaps you’re not a great writer.
❌ Perhaps you don’t have time to devote to blogging.

If either of those statements sounds like it might apply to you, consider hiring a writer who is capable of creating truly exceptional blog posts and putting in the hours to do so.

Can you use an AI tool to write blog posts?

Increasingly, yes: tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Jasper AI are getting more sophisticated all the time, and are capable of writing content that can definitely form the basis of blog posts.

And, what’s more, Google is happy to include AI-produced blog posts in search results (so long as they are good).

Some types of blog posts lend themselves better to AI involvement than others, however.

For example, AI-produced introductions to a topic tend to be more usable than AI-generated product reviews (because as things stand, it’s hard for AI tools to test products).

And despite the increasing sophistication of AI writing tools, it’s important to note that the content you produce with them can be:

• a bit sterile
• factually inaccurate.

So, if you are going to use AI tools to create content for you, it’s always a good idea to review the output carefully (with a view to making it more engaging) and to factcheck it carefully before publishing.

One thing that AI tools are definitely useful for when blogging is creating post structures or sparking ideas — if you ask ChatGPT to give you an outline of what a particular post should contain, you will usually get a very comprehensive and useful set of section headings (see screenshot below for an example of some of these).

Now, once you’ve found your writer — AI or human! — it’s time to think about what to write about.

Let’s take a look at that.

2. Use keyword research to identify good topics to blog about

It’s really easy to sit down and write blog posts which cover, in considerable depth, topics that nobody is remotely interested in!

Similarly, it’s easy to write a blog post covering something that people are really interested in — but to give it a title containing words and phrases that nobody ever searches for.

Keyword research is your friend here: it can help you generate good blog post ideas and ensure that there is a sizeable target audience for your content.

By using keyword research tools — like Semrush or Ahrefs — you can discover the number of monthly searches for various keywords — and find out how difficult it is to rank for particular phrases.

The trick with keyword research is to identify phrases that you can use in your blog that generate a reasonable amount of traffic — but for which there isn’t massive competition.

The video below shows you how this is typically done.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you should ensure that your keywords feature in all the right places in your post.

This means adding them to your post’s…

3. Focus on creating long-form content for your blog

Studies show that ‘long-form content’ performs better in search results than short or ‘thin’ posts.

(Important caveat here though: the long-form content has to be good and relevant).

Long-from content refers to posts with high word counts that go into a lot of depth on a particular topic.

Now, there are a few reasons why long-form content can help generate higher positions in search results.

First, longer posts will naturally be more keyword-rich — and therefore more likely to crop up in search results for ‘long tail’ keywords (search queries involving combinations of several words).

Second, the in-depth nature of a long post may be more likely to satisfy readers who come across it — it will be more likely to answer your visitor’s query, or solve their problem. As a result, the post is more likely to get shared on social media or get linked to from other sites, with positive implications for traffic.

And third, longer content can keep people reading longer, thus increasing ‘dwell time‘ on your content. This is the amount of time between the moment a user clicks on a search result and the moment they return to the search engine results, and studies point to a correlation between longer dwell time and higher search rankings.

The video below gives you some tips on how to increase it.

4. Keep your content fresh by updating existing blog posts

If you do any research into blogging or SEO, you’ll come across loads of articles that stress how vital it is to create ‘fresh’ content in order to generate good search results and traffic to your site.

However, I’d caution against interpreting this as an instruction to only produce new posts.

With my own content, I’ve generally found it more useful to focus on quality over quantity — rather than blogging every day just for the sake of it, I invest a lot of my time in keeping my existing content as strong (and as in-depth) as possible.

I do this by continuously reviewing older posts and enhancing them with the most up-to-date information available. This is particularly important when it comes to product reviews — but even ‘evergreen content’ (posts containing facts that don’t change often, if at all) can benefit from being revisited and improved from time to time.

Not only does this send the ‘freshness’ signals to Google that the search engine’s algorithms approve of, but it typically increases the length of posts and helps provide the ‘long-form’ content that often performs better in search results.

That said, there is definitely value in creating new posts periodically — because obviously the more content you have on your site, the more keywords you can theoretically rank for.

But again, only if the content is strong!

5. Accompany your blog posts with great images

It’s important to use good images in any blog posts you publish. There are four main reasons for this.

First, doing so helps readers get a sense of what you are writing about (this is particularly important if you are discussing difficult concepts in your posts – visual aids can really help simplify matters).

Second, the main picture accompanying your post will often show up whenever your visitors share one of your posts on social media — and if this is a dull picture, it’s less likely to generate clickthroughs to your site.

Third, as with text, images can be optimized to help your content appear in search results.

By adding suitable keywords to a picture’s ‘alternative text‘, file name and caption, you can help search engines gain a better understanding of what your post is about (which in turn can help your post appear more often in relevant search results).

And finally, good images help to make your content look authoritative. If you use a great piece of photography instead of a cheap-looking piece of clip art in a blog post, that post is far more likely to be taken seriously — or read in the first place — by people who stumble across it.

6. Optimize your blog posts for search engines

There are a series of technical steps — collectively known as ‘on-page SEO‘ — that you should take to give your blog posts the best chance of performing well in search.

You should always:

For a few more tips on this area, you might like to check out our post on how to make your content visible in Google search results, or watch the video below.

And as mentioned above, Google prefers content that loads really quickly — a few things that can help your blog posts here include:

7. Capture email addresses

Once you’ve attracted visitors to your blog, you should do your best to capture their email addresses.

This allows you to notify visitors via enewsletter about new blog posts — and this can result in significantly more traffic to your posts, along with more social shares.

To capture email addresses effectively, you need to ensure that there is a email list sign-up form on every blog post.

You can do this using a sidebar, pop-up box or a simple text call-to-action to encourage people to join your mailing list.

When creating this sign-up form, remember to spell out the benefits of joining the list — the value that your a site visitor will get out of becoming a subscriber.

For example, rather than using a boring ‘join our mailing list’ call to action, highlight the sort of amazing resources a subscriber can expect to receive, the skills they’ll learn etc.

If you use an email marketing tool (for example GetResponse, AWeber, Mailchimp or Mad Mimi) you can use your RSS feed to power your e-newsletters — meaning that every time you add a new blog post, your subscribers will automatically receive an e-newsletter with a notification about the new content.

8. Encourage social sharing

Actively encourage your readers to share your blog posts — be explicit with your requests for people to post your content on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

If your readers follow these encouragements, not only should you see a rise in traffic to your posts, but you may also be sending subtle ‘signals’ to search engines regarding the popularity and quality of your posts.

(The jury is out on whether social sharing has a direct impact on search results, but there does seem to be a correlation of sorts).

Does the blogging platform matter?

A lot of people wonder if blogging is best done on a particular platform or content management system.

Well, there is absolutely nothing to stop you running a successful blog on popular website builders like Shopify, Squarespace, BigCommerce and Wix— and following the tips in this post can help you increase traffic to (and sales from) sites built on those platforms.

However, if you want to create a full-blown publication, or blog professionally, then there’s a lot to be said for using self-hosted WordPress.

WordPress started life as a blogging tool and provides a host of blogging features that you won’t typically find on hosted website building solutions like Wix or Shopify (for example, advanced content versioning, SEO tools and advanced categorization options).

9. Encourage comments and user engagement

Encourage people to add their own views at the bottom of your posts. There are three reasons why this is beneficial:

However, always make sure you moderate these comments carefully — search engines can penalize sites containing spammy comments, user-generated content or links.

And speaking of links…

10. Build quality backlinks to your posts

At the very simplest level, there are two key ingredients to ensuring a blog post ranks in search:

First, your post has to contain quality content.

Second, it has to have a decent number of quality backlinks — links from other reputable websites — pointing to it.

We’ve covered the ‘quality content’ bit earlier — you need to focus on producing long-form posts that cover the topic you’re writing about clearly, and in considerable depth.

Getting backlinks is usually a much harder task, because it involves reaching out to lots of bloggers and website owners, asking them to include a link to your content on their posts, or letting you publish guest posts.

(It’s like an online PR campaign of sorts.)

This sort of outreach is a time consuming affair, but it’s important, and if you take a thorough approach to it, it can prove very fruitful.

Another option with regard to backlink generation is to hire an agency to do perform link building on your behalf — but you have to be careful here, as hiring an agency or consultant who then goes onto place (or worse, buy) links on low-quality sites can often do more harm than good.

When building links,

And finally on the subject of links, don’t forget internal ones.

If you have an existing blog post that has a lot of backlinks pointing to it, you can leverage the power of these by creating links on it that point to other posts on your site. Internal links pass some of a page’s ‘link juice’ onto other pieces of content, and can help them climb up the search rankings.

Good luck with getting more blog traffic, and if you have any questions about the topic, do feel free to leave them in the comments below.