Top 20 Best Practices That Can Help In Better Blogs And More Traffic For Your Website

“If you’re writing a book, writing a blog, or starting a business, don’t get discouraged. Keep going. Don’t give up. Take your time. We all want success tomorrow, but that’s not how it works”.
-Jon Acuff

The same applies to blogs and content creation as well.  When it comes to blogs for our small business, we all want quick results, but it is going to take time to build blogs and an audience.

Writing blogs may sound simple at the beginning. But to write great blogs you will need great ideas, good process, and best practices.

Before we tell you what are some of the best practices when it comes to blogs,  let’s see and understand what are blogs and the different types of blog traffic.

What are blogs?

A blog is a regularly updated website or web page, run by an individual or small group presenting their activities, thoughts, or beliefs in an informal or conversational style. Personal blogs, business blogs, niche blogs, and affiliate blogs are the four most prevalent forms of blogging.

What is traffic? Are there different types of traffic?

The number of visitors to a website or blog page is usually called website traffic or blog traffic. Below are broad categories of traffic:

1. Direct Traffic: Visitors who type the URL directly in the browser, bookmarks/favorites, untagged email links, etc.
2. Organic traffic: Visitors who come through the page naturally by searching the query or keyword in SERP(Search Engine Ranking Page).
3. Referral Traffic: Visitors who click the links from other websites.
4. Social Traffic: It’s similar to the referral, but the links are from social media.
5. Paid Traffic: When visitors visit the websites through search engine marketing.

Now let us jump to the best practices in blogging to increase the traffic for your small business website.

1. Understand your target audience :

Build an audience framework by answering the following questions

• Who is your target audience?
• What type of content they are looking for or interested in?
• How are they trying to find the answers to their question?

Once you get the answering to this question you might get a picture of your target audience.

2. Do keyword research for your content :

Keyword research is the way of finding the specific word or sentence that users type in the search engine for their query.

By doing proper keyword research, you will be able to get the following benefits:

• Find actual search terms or queries people are looking for.
• Design unique content ideas with popular search terms.
• Write better content with the keyword and beat your competitor.
• Create a series of pillar articles to drive more traffic to your blog.

While a result, if your material succeeds in getting in front of your target audience as they conduct searches, you will see an increase in traffic. As a result, you should concentrate your efforts on such queries.

3. Design a plan or workflow :

Once you get better ideas for content, make a plan on how you’re going to work on it. Make sure you stick to the plan.

The goal is to arrange, create a panorama of your strategy, and be more productive.

4. Write blogs regularly :

Make a habit of writing twice a week, increasing the visitor’s curiosity about the next blog post, and sending the update through emails regularly to your subscribers.

5. Keep a user-friendly URL :

The URL should be short and easy to remember and include the keyword in the URL describing the content of the blog.

6. Create complete and appealing content :

Readers usually look for good quality content otherwise they will bounce back to other websites or blogs.

Select the most promising keywords and create in-depth content around them. If your material provides all of the answers to the user’s questions, they will spend a considerable amount of time or return to your blog more often. As a result, you’ll have a low bounce rate and your page will rank higher in search engines.

7. Make blogs readable and visually appealing :

Make your content more visually appealing, readable, and user-friendly. If your content is difficult to read or understand, the user will move on to another website without even looking at the valuable information you have supplied.

Everyone loves colors and readers are usually attracted to the colorful content with images, infographics, and videos. Use your own or free-to-use images as most of the images on the internet have copyright issues. You can utilize your blog to post lessons, influencer interviews, or videos of areas you’ve been in that will engage your readers more.

8. Apply SEO to your websites & blogs :

If you want your blog to stand out from the crowd, the best approach is to use SEO(Search Engine Optimization). You may create user-friendly blog pages and use SEO guidelines.

9. Learn to write catchy headlines :

When users search the terms the search engine shows various websites but the first thing the user notice is your blog headline. So, a catchy headline gets more clicks.

10. Internal linking with other pages of your blogs :

Internal linking is linking the articles with existing articles which helps the search engine to understand your blog’s information and also helps in ranking signals. It also increases the page views and the bounce rate will be low.

11. Get backlinks from trustworthy websites :

A backlink is a link from other websites and it is one of the main factors for ranking signal. Getting the backlinks from a trustworthy source is difficult for both beginners and professional bloggers. 

Tips for getting the backlinks:

• Write a guest post for other websites.
• Help a reporter out (HARO)-Become a source of information for reporters and in turn, get the links from their news websites.
• Interview the influencers or bigshot person from your industry for your blog. They usually ask their followers to read the interview on your blog.

12. Improve page speed for faster page load :

Page loading is the major factor in increasing traffic. Your site takes an extra sec to load and will hurt the user’s ability to engage. No user or reader has the patience to wait until no more than 3 sec for the page to load.

13. Use email marketing :

The trick to growing the traffic is not to get new visitors only but also to keep engaging the existing visitors. Ask the visitors to subscribe to your blog. Send a series of email newsletters to subscribers about your blog content or promotional event, you can transform a potential visitor into a lifelong visitor.

14. Use of social media posts :

In the digital world, everyone spends time on social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Make use of social media to post your blog content in images or infographics way and provide a content link with the caption for the visitor’s visit.

15. Indulge in online communities :

Online communities are a group of people who are interested in a specific area. Look for the community who are interested in a topic that you are discussing in the blog.

Don’t share the link to your article in the community. This will be considered spamming and they can instantly block you from their community. You can indulge in answering the questions, joining discussions, and building a reputation within the community.

16. Use user-generated content :

User-generated content is original, brand-specific content created by customers. It may be in the form of content, images, videos, reviews, or testimonials. Users who find their material will likely share the content with their friends or other members

17. Relaunch your old content :

Keep on sharing your older content on social media which keeps your profile active and increases visibility.

18. Keep updating the old content :

Find the older content and add additional & updated information to the content to make it better and more relevant.

19. Reply to all comments in the blog :

If you want to win the trust and build a good rapport with your readers, reply to all comments in a positive way. It will help in increasing the reader’s engagement with your blog.

20. Podcast marketing :

As per the survey done in 2021, there are 383.7 million podcast listeners worldwide. In the podcast, you can talk about the important point of the content and raise the listeners’ curiosity to visit your blog. You can even share your blog link in the podcast account.

Conclusion :

Driving traffic is never a one-time event, and the results do not appear overnight. Be patient and take your time experimenting with each idea, and you will eventually get visitors to your blogs and website. Make certain that you provide visitors with fresh and in-depth content via the blog.