5 Tips for Starting a Blog That Generates Organic Traffic
No matter the product or service you are selling, starting a blog is always a great way to generate organic traffic to your website.
You need to know how to start one that gets search engine traction.
This guide will give you valuable advice on starting a blog for driving qualified organic traffic to your business.
Educate your customers and show expertise
Blogs allow you to demonstrate your expertise in your line of business. Customers are drawn towards businesses that show industry knowledge.
If your goal is to reach out to B2B customers, then blogging helps you build credibility and lets your audience know that you are the right brand to reach out to.
With that being said, aim to provide answers to questions or issues your customers care about.
Increase your website’s search engine ranking
If you want your website to secure the top spot in the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you must constantly publish relevant keywords.
When potential customers search for the kind of product or service you sell, they use specific phrases or topics to help them find what they are looking for.
If you publish blogs that target these phrases or topics, your brand visibility increases as well.
Generate new customers
A well-informed audience and increased visibility can help your website convert visitors into customers.
Building a quality blog can help you with increasing sales and building a loyal client base.
Through blogging, you can help potential customers decide and end up buying your product or service. You can also repurpose blog content for social media , email, and video marketing.
To experience these benefits, it’s essential to know how to build an informational blog, search-engine friendly and profitable.
How to Start a Blog for Increasing Organic Traffic
If your primary motivation for starting a blog is to generate more traffic , there are a few steps you will need to follow when it comes to planning and launching a great blog:
1. Start with competitor analysis
Before anything else, you need to check what your competitors are doing with their blogs to learn what makes their content marketing successful.
Doing competitor analysis helps you decide on the direction your blog will take. It’s also a means to achieve the following objectives:
- Identify topics that generate interest. Your business needs to participate in conversations that other companies are taking part in.
- Find out a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Are they writing in a dull tone? How often do you spot grammatical and logical flaws in the content that they publish?
- Determine the type of content that clicks. If a competitor gains high levels of engagement from a single blog post , you need to find out what makes the blog post successful.
- Make improvements to your content marketing strategy . Considering a competitor’s success factors, you will need to check what’s lacking in your business’s content initiatives.
- Create content that search engines love. If a competitor’s blog gets the top spot in the SERPs for a particular keyword, determine the factors contributing to such a high ranking.
To do a competitor analysis takes time, but it spares you from the process of generating ideas from the ground up.
With the information you obtain from your competitors, you can develop a blogging strategy that generates high amounts of organic traffic.
Identify the closest competitors in your industry by searching for the top brands that offer the same product or service. List down the top five and go over each one.
You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to identify their top-performing blogs. Read through each article and pay close attention to how the content is structured.
Does it include high-quality images? How are the headlines and paragraphs written? What is the tone or style they use?
Knowing all this should inspire you for starting an original blog.
2. Build a list of keywords
Along with competitor analysis, you should also create a list of keywords or phrases that your audience searches for the most. These will help improve your blog’s visibility.
When building a list of keywords, you need to focus on customer intent.
Intent refers to the objective a person wants to accomplish using a search engine. For example, if you intend to find an “auto detailing shop in Tallahassee,” you enter that phrase on Google and find a list of businesses offering such a service.
With keyword building, you narrow down your blog’s target audience to customers who have a strong need for your product or service.
You can start by entering your primary keyword (“auto detailing shop in Tallahassee”) in the Google search bar and check the suggested keyword at the bottom of the page.
To get a complete list of high-value keywords to rank for, consider using keyword research tools such as Neil Patel’s UberSuggest and KWFinder.
These tools will help you find keywords that generate better search volumes and click-throughs.
From there, you can include these keywords in every piece of content you publish. Make sure that the keywords fit naturally with the rest of the text.
3. Design your blog with an intuitive layout
Using the right keywords can help improve your blog’s visibility, but it’s not the only factor influencing your search engine ranking.
In recent years, Google has become more strict when it comes to providing the best user experience , and it rewards websites that are responsive and user-friendly.
Giving visitors an excellent reading experience needs to be a priority. Opt for a blog layout that’s meant for scanners.
Regardless of the number of words you write, ensure that the layout follows a natural left-to-right reading path.
To improve readability, make sure to write the content in paragraphs of one or two sentences.
If you are writing blogs that go beyond 1,000 words, consider adding graphics, photos, and even video content in-between subtopics.
This should provide visual relief as well as deliver more information about the topic.
Another factor to consider is mobile responsiveness . It’s safe to assume that most of your visitors use tablets and smartphones to search for the products or services they need.
For this, pick a mobile-responsive layout that adjusts your blogs to any screen size without affecting readability. To be sure, test your layout before launching your blog.
Making sure your blogs are readable is crucial to getting a higher ranking in SERPs. When visitors like their reading experience on your blog, your website gets a higher score in terms of authority.
4. Infuse it with your branding
Since your blog acts as the mouthpiece of your brand, you need to make sure it incorporates your business’s identity, tone, and aesthetics.
Brand awareness may not directly impact how you generate organic traffic, but it can help in indirect ways.
For one, developing brand awareness helps you build industry authority. People will know whom to turn to when they need answers to an issue or problem they encounter.
You have a long way to go before you get to build industry authority, but it’s still a good idea to build a blog page that resonates with your brand identity .
For that, consider using the same colours for the layout. You can also write compelling content that matches the tone of your brand.
You will also need to come up with an engaging name for your blog. Go beyond the usual titles like “Dispatches from X” or “My Story.”
Instead, look for blog name examples that work well with the personality of your brand.
5. Find topics that matter
Now that you have designed your blog, made a list of keywords to rank for, and ensured that it’s consistent with your brand strategy, you should now proceed to find topics to write about.
There’s always something to write about in your industry if you look through your audience’s perspective.
When you brainstorm for blog ideas, identify your audience’s issues or topics to learn more about.
Visit platforms like Quora and do social listening. These will allow you to pick up conversations you can write about.
Make sure to include your insights and do additional research to write credible and highly informative blogs for your audience.
Are you looking to start a blog for your business ? It doesn’t take much to build one that generates organic traffic. You just need to follow these simple tips.
