What if there was something you could do that would significantly increase your blog traffic?
Something straightforward and repeatable that you could do for all the articles you post.
You’d do it, right?
Well, there are some simple tactics that accomplish this that most blogs ignore.
I know, because our blog used to be one of them. For the longest time, we left untold amounts of traffic on the table until finally realizing SEO (done right) matters.
In this post, I’ll share the SEO checklist we’ve refined into a standard procedure that has tripled our traffic over the last few years.
I'll break down each SEO tactic on our list, go over what we’ve learned, and show you how to use them to drive traffic to your own blog.
Let’s get started.
1. Precise Keyword Targeting
The first thing we do after we’ve come up with a great content idea is to identify relevant keywords.
These are the words and phrases our target audience is typing into Google to find information on the subject we’re writing about.
The trick is to find relevant keywords that:
Get high search volume
Have low to medium difficulty
Don’t cannibalize other content
There are a lot of inexpensive SEO tools you can use to find keywords that meet these criteria. We use Moz.
Moz tells us how many times each relevant keyword is searched per month (i.e., search volume), and how hard it would be to rank for a given keyword based on the quality of the competitor content already ranking (i.e., keyword difficulty).
Moz also tells us what keywords our blog is currently ranking for so we don’t create blog content that competes against itself on Google’s search engine results pages (or SERPs).
You want your blog post to complement your previous content, not cannibalize it.