After you’ve worked so hard to create a blog post that will speak to your audience, it can be really disappointing when the readership is low. The good news is there are some easy tactics you can try that are sure to increase blog traffic when done right.

Plan Your Keywords

If you’re not getting the traffic to your blog that you’re hoping for, the best thing to start polishing up is your keywords. Unless your traffic is coming directly from social media or some other outlet, then your readers are finding your post based on the keywords you have selected.

When selecting keywords, the goal is to figure out what your users will be searching for – what they will type into Google. In order to do this, you need to have a good understanding of why your users will want to read your content. What is the value you are providing them? What is the problem they are experiencing that will lead them to your post?

One key point to remember before starting the process is that it’s good to be specific. If you are writing a blog post about the best essential oils, you will be competing with a ton of other blog posts about the same topic and will likely not rank very high on search engines. (There are almost 10,000 monthly searches for this!)

However, writing a post about the best essential oils for migraines has substantially less searches per month, and is a more specific problem that you will likely be able to rank better for – as long as your article is full of great content of course.

Bonus Tip: Use a keyword planning tool such as HubSpot or Google Keyword Planner to help you find the right keywords for your content.

Change Title & Meta Descriptions

Once you picked your keywords it’s time to implement them into your title and meta descriptions. It can be tempting to come up with a unique title, but for best SEO practice it must contain your keyword. (Remember, when using your keyword in a title, meta description or body text, you need to make sure it’s readable and flows well with the content.)

This doesn’t mean you can’t still be creative however. Add a power word to the keyword in your title and a eye-catching statement such as a statistic to the meta description to intrigue readers.

Optimize Your Images

Images can truly make or break an article. Check to make sure that the images you’re using are great quality and relevant to your blog topic. Switch out any that don’t enhance your content. In addition, consider adding illustrations, infographics, video or other types of media that may support your article better than an image. Finally, add your keyword to image titles and alt texts.

Refresh Your Copy

There is always room for improvement, and your blog is no exception. Maybe you had a tight deadline and had to publish a post that was subpar. Or maybe there is new information or opinions to be said about your topic. No matter what the situation is, it won’t hurt to spend a little extra time proofing, rephrasing and adding additional content your blog.

Add Current Links & Stats

With so much content being published every day on the web, users want to find the most current articles. A blog post containing stats from two years ago are most likely irrelevant now. Search for new stats or information about your topic to replace any outdated information, then republish.

Check Your Formatting

One of the best ways to improve SEO and readability in general is to check your formatting. Moreover, on average people will only read 20-28% of your post, so properly formatting will ensure better readability even to the skimmers. Make sure you’re using the proper tags (H2, H3, etc) for your headings. Choose a clear typeface, and pay attention to the width of your content and size of your paragraphs – generally 4 lines or less.

Drive Engagement

Once you have re-edited and formatted your content, you want to think of ways to get people to engage with it. Of course it’s great to have social buttons for readers to share the post with their networks, but it doesn’t need to stop there. End your blog with a reader poll or questionnaire to find out their opinion on the topic. You can take that up a notch by asking them to submit their email so you can send them the results.

Revise Your Posting Strategy

Finally, take a look at how your social media posts have been performing. Are people clicking through to your blog post? Create a custom graphic or video snippet to share with your blog, and try A/B testing your posts using different phrases to see what works best.

Have any more tips for driving traffic to your blog? Let me know in the comments!