5 simple ways to increase traffic with blog SEO

SEO is way more complicated and intricate than just using Yoast and finding the right keywords for your posts. Although it might not be everyone’s favourite topic, there is so much we can receive in terms of results from investing a little effort. So I’m going to show you how to increase traffic with blog SEO.

Here are 5 awesome ways to increase your traffic by Blog SEO.

Let’s start at the beginning. Have your verified your blog with the Google Search Console? *silence* o.k then, I’ll take that as a no. For those who have hang on one minute and I’ll be back with you.

#1 Verify your blog with the Google Search Console

Google Search Console (previously Webmaster Tools) is a dashboard which keeps track of your site, notes changes and tells Google information about your site’s identity. It also controls how your site appears in search results.

First step, hop on over and set up a free account. Log in with a Google account (either a @gmail.com email, or your G Suite account email).

Then enter your website URL in the box and add a property.

You’ll then see various verification methods. The easiest one is to verify with Google Analytics, which you can find on the Alternate Methods tab. If your Google Analytics account is setup with the same @gmail.com email address your site will verify immediately.

Otherwise you can download an HTML file and upload it to your site to get verified.

Have a look around, there is lots of interesting stuff within the Google Search Console, but then head to the crawl tab (that’s the one related to SEO).

Check how often Google crawls your blog.

Click on Crawl Stats and you will see graphs. This graph represents when the Google search algorithm is scanning your site looking for changes. So the more crawls it’s doing a day the better, as it means it is going to always have the most unto date version of your blog.

Check your site map

Click sitemaps (also in the Crawl section). Check to see if there is a sitemap already submitted. If not you can add one manually. Just click on Add/Test Sitemap at the top. Then, type in “sitemap.xml” into the box and press Submit.

#2 Keep your post URLs clean

Ideally remove the dates from showing up in your post URLs as this dated content super quickly. Also having a super long url makes it harder for Google to index.

If you’re using WordPress, you can install the free Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to customise your post URL to ensure it’s SEO optimised (include keywords and keep it short!).

Let’s take 5

You want to take the dates out of your urls?

This is how you do it. In your WordPress dashboard navigate to settings-> Permalinks.

Then just choose your desired setting and that’s it!

#3 Use SEO keywords in the right places

Write content for your audience but do your best to select the right keyword and then to use it well within your post. Never stuff your post with keywords or change your tone to suit the SEO.

As I spoke about last week there are some pretty important places to put your keywords, in order to increase traffic with blog SEO:

• In the URL In the blog post title

• In the blog post title

• In at least one heading (h1 or h2)

• In about 1.5% of your copy

• In your image ALT tags

#4 Interlink your own content

Let’s so important to interlink your posts. It helps keep people on your site longer, lowers your bounce rate, and gives you longer to develop the know, like and trust factor. It is so easy to do and if you have Yoast Premium, it suggests links you might like to add to each post.

By interlinking all you are doing is suggesting another blog post of yours to a reader. Don’t overdo it, but interlinking posts creates a great site structure that the search bots will love.

Don’t forget to do this will older posts too (add in links to more current posts). It is easier to link to older posts when we are writing fresh content and we sometimes fail to go back and add links in those older ones too!

#5 Update archived content

Content doesn’t just have one life. It can have so many lives if we’re clever.

It is good practice to keep your archived content up to date. This helps your blog’s SEO and provides a better quality experience for your reader.

Also when you make a change to a post google will re-crawl your site to index those recent changes. This means that your position in the search engine results could improve quicker, than if we wait for Google to recrawl; the changes make it happen sooner.

When you update an older post, pay particular attention to the content, is anything outdated, could you update it in some way? Are the images good (I cringe at some of my early ones!)? Could you do better in terms of optimising for SEO? Lastly double check your internal and external links.

Did you learn anything today that you can use to help increase traffic with blog SEO? I’d love to know how you get on.