I have been running my blog for a little over a year now and after getting over the fear of writing content, the next biggest challenge I ran into was driving traffic to it. It seems I did something right with one of my posts that brings in one or two organic visitors a day but I’m not entirely sure what I did to achieve that. For the rest of my content, I noticed the amount of traffic coming in is equal to the amount of effort I put into promoting it. I wanted to see if there was a more sustainable way of growing traffic for my blog so I reached out to some experts in the field to see what they had to say.
Luca Sartoni
Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic, he’s my go-to reference for everything a/b test related and as of now also SEO/SEM. When I asked Luca what I should do to get more traffic to my site he responded with the advice he gives everyone that asks the same question:
It’s all about consistency, differentiation of channels, and concertation.
Consistency: A piece of content should be consistently promoted across all your channels. Images and headlines are important for grabbing attention so make sure to use something that works well everywhere keeping in mind that images still need to be formatted appropriately for each channel. Luca suggests that you can’t go wrong with a title under 120 characters.
Differentiation of channels: For maximum impact, a piece of content should be distributed on all channels. Every channel has a different cost and reach so your overall distribution will be impacted by the amount of money or time you spend on it.
Luca finds that paid channels always out perform organic ones. Although organic channels are free, they end up being more expensive when you look at the time and resources you put into getting it right. It’s is hard to measure your efforts and can take a long time to see the results come through. Alternatively, with paid channels you can buy traffic and optimize your output in real time.
Concertation: Channels are not only interdependent on each other but also complimentary. It’s important to keep in mind how they all play off each other. Social media channels like Facebook also operate as search engines. For this reason, your efforts for picking the best keywords are not only important for search engines but also on social media channels. Another good example is how traffic coming to your site through an organic search can drive traffic to your social channels which would increase your ability to engage with these people.
Luca stresses that focusing on a single channel won’t get you the results you need. You shouldn’t be thinking of search engine optimization OR search engine advertising, it should be search engine optimization AND search engine advertising.
Simon Heaton
Simon is a Growth Marketing Manager at Shopify, we worked together for a couple years on the same team and saw some incredible growth on the Shopify Partners Blog thanks to Simon’s efforts. He believes that search engine optimization is a key contributor to sustainable growth. It can be hard to compete on keywords depending on your subject matter so Simon suggests going with a long-tail approach where you optimize for a bunch of small, more relevant keywords where the aggregate volume has potential to be larger than those whales.
According to Wordstream.com long-tail keywords are:
Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search. They’re a little bit counter-intuitive, at first, but they can be hugely valuable if you know how to use them.
Take this example: if you’re a company that sells classic furniture, the chances are that your pages are never going to appear near the top of an organic search for “furniture” because there’s too much competition (this is particularly true if you’re a smaller company or a startup). But if you specialize in, say, contemporary art-deco furniture, then keywords like “contemporary Art Deco-influenced semi-circle lounge” are going to reliably find those consumers looking for exactly that product.
Managing long-tail keywords is simply a matter of establishing better lines of communication between your business and the customers who are already out there, actively shopping for what you provide.
Obviously, you’re going to draw less traffic with a long-tail keyword than you would with a more common one, but the traffic you do draw will be better: more focused, more committed, and more desirous of your services.
Alex Hosselet
Alex is Digital & Marketing Strategist for United Way Ottawa, we worked together a number of years where Alex was a marketing manager on a product I designed for. I always admired Alex’s passion for connecting with people and measuring results.
Alex’s advice was to make sure you have a good combination of content strategy and search engine optimization. Content strategy is all about making the right content that attracts people. That involves taking the time to understand your audience and developing a plan with clear goals that can be measured. Search engine optimization is a combination of writing, research, and coding best practices.
Takeaways
My biggest take away is there’s no silver bullet to getting more traffic — it’s a lot of hard work. If you want people to visit your site, you need to pay with your time or money. Based on these conversations, here are some of the tactics I’ll employ to increase traffic to my blog:
- Share content on as many channels as possible,
- Try paid advertising,
- Optimize posts for long-tail keywords and SEO best practices, and
- Improve visibility of my social media channels on my website.