3 Easy Ways to Increase Your Online Traffic with Content Marketing

If you’ve ever put something online and only gotten likes or shares from your great aunt, you’ll know that reaching an online audience can be a herculean task. Many people try to increase their online traffic with all sorts of gimmicks and manipulations, like paying for traffic or stuffing a billion keywords into their pages, and it usually doesn’t work.

How do l increase online traffic? Every time you type something into the Google search bar and get results in under a second, millions of processes are at work. Something called search engine optimization (SEO) ranks sites according to their relevance and authority. While search engines base relevance on how long people stay on your page and whether your page seems to satisfy their question, authority is a more difficult factor to create in content marketing.

How do I create authority for my domain? One-way authority gets measured on the web is how many people have shared or linked to your content. That shows you provide solid material that people find helpful and pushes you up in search engine rankings.

If no one can see your content, however, no one’s going to be sharing it or talking about it. The best way to get your content out there is to do some good old-fashioned content marketing. These four strategies used by content marketers will help you increase your online traffic.

Conduct Market Research

Before you ever write content for your website, you need to know what people are searching for. A great tool to do this is free, and you’ve probably used it a billion times. Type a something about your niche into the Google search bar. Maybe you sell couches in Eugene, Oregon. If you type “couches Eugene” into the search bar, what other options does it give you?

Use your search engine’s suggested searches as a jumping-off point for what people are looking up. You may find out that people are asking, “Where to buy pull out Couches in Eugene?” That is where you get ideas for content. If a question comes up repeatedly, and there aren’t a lot of great resources for that question, it means there’s a void for your business to fill, as long as clients can find you. Continue this process with many phrases, and see what comes up.

Choose niches that seem to not have enough resources, because if your content is the best when that search comes up, you’ll find that traffic is driven to your page in droves. Not only does this increase your page traffic, but it also creates authority for your page and your brand.

Use Optimized Keywords

An important thing to do when writing content is to know what words and phrases people are specifically looking for and to put these in specific places in your content. The average person doesn’t read an entire article when they’re looking for an answer. Most people will skim headings and bulleted lists to see if the item fits what they’re looking for, and then will sit down to read the whole thing.

If you have a website for your law firm in Albuquerque, you want your page to come up when someone searches “law firm Albuquerque,” of course, but you’ll get more traffic if you use keywords and write content that’s relevant to your industry. For example, your law firm could have a blog that talks about an often-searched term, “How to get out of a speeding ticket in New Mexico.”

Put keywords that you’ve found during your market research into your h1 and h2 headings, and be sure to create concise, bulleted lists about the topic so online visitors can find what they need.

Promote Yourself on Social Media Using Content Marketing

As said before, if no one can find your content, how are they going to read it? It’s important to have a robust social media presence on a variety of different platforms.