The number one way you will get people to visit your website is via search traffic, meaning people will discover your website when they perform a web search for topics covered on your blog. The first result in Google’s search results gets an average of 31.7% of the clicks, while less than 1% of searchers will click on a result on the second page. Getting more visitors to your site means you need more clicks, and you need more clicks to get more visitors. Read more for how to get traffic to your blog.
Developing a Content Strategy
The only way to make it as a blogger, at least in the long run, is to publish unique and awesome content that actually benefits your audience. As mentioned previously, the purpose of a search engine is to show helpful, relevant, and good-quality information to users.
However, if you’re writing about topics that no one is interested in, it doesn’t matter how high the quality of your content is, which is why you need a content strategy.
If you want traffic to your site then you need to keep your content fresh and consistent.
At the core of any strategy is a clear definition of what you what to achieve, and you need to be specific. Simply thinking “I want lots of visitors” is not a strategy or even a particularly clear goal; “I want to target first-time home buyers in the United States and guide them to buying their first property” is a clear objective.
Now you have an objective, you can start thinking about how you will get there. Creating a content strategy at the beginning is tough because you don’t have any data to indicate what interests your audience, what works and what doesn’t.
At least you have defined your audience and the potential products you’ll discuss. First-time home buyers will be interested in improving their credit score, mortgages, life insurance and home insurance.
From here, you can start thinking about topic ideas, for example:
- Everything You Need to Know About Insurance Costs in [Year]
- Life Insurance for Homeowners: Pros and Cons They Don’t Tell You
- How Does [Option A] Home Insurance Stack Up Against [Competitor]?
- How Much Should I Budget for Life Insurance?
If you’re stuck with title ideas, try these neat free tools that generate title ideas based on your keyword: Blog Title Generator | BlogAbout by IMPACT AnswerThePublic |
Keyword research
Keyword research is the cornerstone of content planning and helps you identify topics worth covering. The objective is to find topics with keywords or search terms that have enough traffic but not too much competition.
Many bloggers target long-tail keywords, which reduces the competition level, so instead of focusing the content on the keyword “bank accounts”, which has a difficulty level of 99%, you could focus on the phrase “bank accounts in Florida”, which has a difficulty level of 59%. Or another variation is “best bank for savings account in Florida”, which has a keyword difficulty of 41%.
The next thing to consider is search volume. Sometimes, a keyword with low difficulty has low search volume. In this case, you may rank high on the search results, but if few people search that phrase, you won’t acquire much traffic.
Suppose you write an article on “best bank accounts in the United States”, and you’ll potentially be competing against 3.5 billion other search results. If you narrow down the topic by the type of account and location, you’ll reduce the competition. For example, if you write an article on “Best savings accounts in Oregon”, you compete against 19.5 million search results.
Finding the right volume-to-difficulty ratio is a recipe you’ll need to figure out yourself. Rank positions are not solely based on competition but also other factors, such as content quality and backlinks.
There are several freemium and premium keyword planning tools available. While the premium tools are comprehensive, they cost around $100 per month, while the freemium versions are limited and annoying to use. I recommend signing up for a free trial with one of these search engine marketing platforms: SEMrush Ahrefs Moz |
Backlinks
Backlinks are links on other websites that point back to your website. When other websites link you to yours, it’s a sign of trust. It’s widely understood that backlinks contribute to determining a website’s domain authority, which is a search engine ranking score.
Domain authority is a valuable asset. As a general rule, the higher the domain authority, the higher the site will be featured in search engine results.
The table below shows examples of different sites, and their domain authority scores, plus the number of unique referring domains and the total number of backlinks. Unsurprisingly, Google has a score of 99.
Domain | Authority Score | Referring Domains | Backlinks |
99 | 41.6M | 69.1B | |
The Guardian | 88 | 1M | 1.5B |
Forbes | 86 | 1.3M | 436M |
NerdWallet | 75 | 149K | 15.9M |
CreditCards.com | 70 | 4.2M | |
Finder.com | 69 | 45.2K | 3.4M |
Money Under 30 | 66 | 41.1K | 1.9M |
Financing Sarah | 11 | 72 | 314 |
To build your domain authority, you need to collect backlinks from other sites. Growing your domain authority score isn’t just about collecting as many links as possible but collecting good quality links. The higher the authority score of the site that refers to yours, the more weight you get from the backlink. In some cases, search engines may penalize you for having low-quality backlinks, known as toxic backlinks.
While we know that search engines put a lot of weight on backlinks, we don’t know how they weigh them; is it better to have one link with an authority score of 60 or two links with a score of 30; we don’t know.
Get a clear plan and start working on it, it’s important to watch your metrics, or hire a team to monitor them. That way you know what’s working and what’s not. Spend the extra money building the right strategy now so that you’re getting the search traffic as soon as possible. This will get you the best results as fast as possible. Subscribe for more business, sales and investing posts. Now go make it happen.