This is a guest post by Jane Crighton. If you wish to publish a guest post on this website please read the guidelines.
Launching your new website is an exciting moment but without a proper strategy, you can not reach out to a large audience. Even now, a high number of websites are getting launched and competitors are coming. If you don’t think about how to get more traffic then nobody will come to your website.
These tips can apply to any website, even if you aren’t newly launched:
Optimize your website
Get started by optimizing your website for search. Focus on finding keywords that showcase your niche representing your blog and other pages. You can use SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner to get relevant keywords.
At the start, focus on keywords that have search results of under 10,000 searches a month. After at least one year of your niche topic and optimizing pages, you can focus on getting high volume keywords.
Use Long Keywords
Long-Tail Keywords are phrases related to your target keywords. These keywords are important and give good results in the term of reaching more people because most people aren’t searching for one-word, they are searching for multiple words.
Their are many tools online that can do this for you, however, since you are an expert in your specific niche you should think about what long-tail keywords you could use. Make sure to always keep a piece of paper handy as you never know when you will think of keywords. Once you have those keywords you can do some research into how to make them long-tail keywords.
Google, and all the other search engines change their algorithm’s often. You should keep an eye on SEO blogs like Ahrefs or Moz to make sure you are keeping up with the changes related to keywords.
Promote Your Content on Social Media Platforms
Promoting your content on social media platforms can help you to reach a high number of readers. Find out where your audience is hanging out, and figure out how to share your content without coming across as spamming. Answer people’s questions and chat with them, and only when it’s appropriate should you include a link to your post. Some platforms (or groups) may not want you at all to promote yourself so make sure to read the rules and seek clarification if you have a question on them.
Look At Your Competitors
You can look at competitors to see what they are currently doing, and what they aren’t. This will help you to do something they aren’t doing, or do something that your competitor has good success in.
Don’t copy their blog posts, or anything directly off their website as search engines may lower your website. You can take ideas you get from their website and use it on your own, like we have done on many blog posts, including Why You Should Outsource Your Website.
Create Quality Content
Many website owners want to see tons of traffic quickly and put out tons of blog posts right away. While that will help to populate your site, it won’t help a ton with search engines. Search engines really love quality content, when you spend time to create content that helps the reader, points them to other resources, and isn’t too long (or short) to read.
What About Length?
Early on in your blog journey you will figure out how long your content can be written and stop when it feels natural. There are many websites that say there is an ideal length and you should always try to aim for that. While that length may be current, it can change in a couple of months which may require you to scramble to update all your content. Stop when you feel it’s natural and you have covered your topic in detail.
Create Evergreen Content
Depending on your website, you may be focused on current events or content that can be read years later and still be accurate.
If you create evergreen content then you don’t have to update your content every couple of months to reflect what is currently happening. Posts about current events will have a good number of readers when it gets published, however after people have forgotten about the event, the readers will drop back down.
You should decide early on what you want to do. While doing the opposite every so often isn’t a bad thing, if you don’t update it then it shows that you don’t care to keep it current.
Have a Sitemap
When you go somewhere new for the first time you have a map that will direct you there, and how to get to exactly where you want. It’s very similar for your website, as other websites and search engines will want a sitemap to know what posts and pages already exist and the exact link.
If you use WordPress 5.5 or higher than WordPress has it’s own sitemap, however many people want to use a SEO plugin that allows them to have more control.
If you use Wix, Squarespace or Shopify then you already have a sitemap, it is at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml. Wix and Squarespace allow you to have control over what exact pages are not shown to search engines.
Submit to Search Engines
Search engines go around to find new websites, but if you submit your website directly to the search engine then it will be quicker to find your website and your posts. Each search engine have their own method and site to submit, and you may need an account with them so they make sure spammers aren’t taking advantage of it.
Every website will have their own opinion on this and what search engines to submit to, make sure you submit to the big ones (Google, Bing, Yandex) then as you spend more time on SEO you can submit to other sites. It isn’t suggested to use one of the website that say they will submit your website to all the search engines, as you won’t get control over it. If you control it, you can see what keywords you site appears on and adjust your future content.
Backlinks To Your Site
Backlinks are one more important factor for SEO. When an different site links to your website, it indicates to Google that your site is reliable and related to the words in the anchor text. Above SEO, backlinks have the potentiality to get traffic to your site in and of themselves. There is a high chance that readers from those sites can click through and read your contents as well.
There are many ways to increase your backlinks, some which are ethical and look good on search engines and some are black hat and will move your website down in search results. Don’t pay for backlinks, let websites links to you when it suits them.
Many websites say to reach out to other blogs, including your competitors and ask for a link to be included in one of their blog posts. Don’t do this, as almost all the emails get deleted and some people mark them as spam (since it’s an unsolicited email, an email they didn’t ask for).
Keep Going
It’s easy to get discouraged after working to get traffic on a website and not seeing the results you want. You start to second-guess yourself and go through all the reasons why you think you aren’t getting the traffic.
After doing that, look at what traffic you have and be thankful there are people reading your content. Look into what links they click on your posts and think about what other posts you can write, maybe your audience wants a different type of content and aren’t telling you.
You also have to figure out a schedule that works for you, you can’t publish 20 posts a week for two years without losing out on quality and driving yourself crazy. Publish as often, or as little as you can while still having good quality. The readers will come.
Guest post bio: Jane is an educator and marketing professional who has interacted with students and industry professionals alike. She is also the co-founder and consultant at Top My Grades, an educational platform. Jane specializes in delivering business management assignments to students. Beyond work, you can find her on a trekk with friends or fishing.
