How to Make a Blog that (Really) Drives Traffic
We’ve talked a lot over the last year about how important it is to prioritize blogging to maximize its SEO potential. Because a blog is such a simple publishing platform, it gives you an opportunity to develop wide-ranging content that appeals to your core audience. But if your blog isn’t actually optimized for search, you won’t have posts that drive any traffic.
So before you have a blog strategy, you have to know what you can do to ensure it really performs in Google searches. Because as much as Google is all about that semantic search, you can do a lot to make sure that it’s easy for the search engine to index and clearly communicates value to the user actually doing the searches.
There are basic ways to make sure you’re nailing it.
It’s true: keywords are kind of dead. But only kind of. As search has evolved, Google has gotten less and less focused on specific search terms and more on identifying semantic clusters surrounding those searches, creating a larger net that snags a wider range of content that’s still directly relevant to a subject. This means that, honestly, you can write very naturally about a topic and have a large number of relevant search terms via semantic clustering arise pretty much ex nihilo.
But. There’s always a “but.”
The thing is that knowing your long-tail search terms – the very specific terms that surround a topic and in this day and age actually drive a solid majority of searches – helps you know what content to write. These are the specific things people are actually wondering about. So you want to do basic keyword research and start identifying these long-tail opportunities; what ideas and questions cluster around a topic enough to actually start being statistically significant among the trillions of searches conducted every day?
Start focusing on creating blog content around these terms. You’re a lot more likely to earn organic search traffic if you’re putting together content that actually addresses the real-life concerns of your audience – and Google will serve up content that directly answers a specific question rather than something only tangentially related.
Google is smart – but it isn’t actually a person, and sometimes serves up irrelevant material. Hey, it’s machine code; be happy it’s ever right. You can actually make Google about a million times better at its job though by simply making sure you put key search terms in your URL, page title, and headers.
Now, an optimized H1 tag ain’t gonna solve all your problems if you’re putting out bad content; but solid foundational SEO tactics like this are effective at giving Google an easier time of sorting out relevant from irrelevant. Google scans all of this before it ever reads a document, and knows to assign headers, URLS, and titles immeasurably more importance than an offhand comment; by putting relevant long-tail keywords into these places, Google can much more easily prioritize them.
But wait! There’s more!
You know who we always forget when we’re talking about SEO? The person actually doing the clicking.
Yeah, the fella on the other side of the Internet who is googling around for something or other is a lot more likely to click an article that actually lines up with what he searched for. And why is that? Because it’s directly relevant; after all, buddy here is searching because he’s looking for something specific, and if the title straight up promises an answer to his question, well, it seems like an easy decision to make.
Always remember, at the end of the day, you’re not just writing content for people, you’re actually participating in indexing it so that it’s easy to act upon. Reduce that layer of friction – and you’ll have an easier go of getting traffic.
Still true, and still important: mobile is dominating the internet, and Google knows it. Seriously. Mobile accounts for more than half of all searches and over 90% of all mobile experiences begin with a Google search – people need to know stuff on the go! Mostly to settle bar bets – but most websites aren’t actually optimized to deliver content on mobile platforms in a consistent, pleasing way.
And that’s actively hurting them. See, since April 2015, if you aren’t optimized for mobile, Google actually deprioritizes your content for searches conducted on those platforms. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile with either responsive design or a separate mobile site and if your traffic is driven primarily by search – and admit it, you know it is – you can expect a to be missing an enormous amount of potential traffic.
Think of the lost prospects. Think of the lost leads.
So yeah, you might wanna make sure your blog is ready to actually receive all this traffic – while there’s still time. Whatever that ends up meaning – whatever strategy you pursue for optimization – it needs to be something very high on your priority list, or all your precious high-quality blog content will go right down the tube.
And that’s not a threat. That, sir, is a promise.
