How To Increase Your Blog Traffic By 50% With An Easy SEO Strategy

So this was a much-requested post after a tweet I posted about how my traffic had increased by 50% over last months by implementing a strong SEO strategy on all of my posts that have been published, so here it goes. It’s a meaty one with a lot of information because each post takes around 30-45 minutes to really optimise properly.

If you’re like me with over 1,000 posts on your site then this isn’t going to be something you can do in a day but small efforts daily all add up.

First things first I highly recommend having your own hosting from a reputable company such as Hosting Foundry. Then downloading an SEO plugin I used to use Yoast SEO but then a few months ago switched to Rankmath SEO which I personally find to be far better for my purposes. So if you don’t have an SEO plug-in download one and configure it now.

Logically set out how you’re going to optimise your posts. Are you going to start in chronological order or work through the ones with no assigned keyword? I personally started with the posts with no assigned keywords. But either way works, just don’t miss a single post out.

Keyword Research & Your SEO Strategy

You’re going to want to start by doing some keyword research to find out what popular terms people are searching for. You can use the Google Search bar for suggestions, or you can utilize the Keyword Research tool. Alternatively, Answer the Public is a good resource to use as well, especially if you’re looking for in-depth insights and questions related to your niche.

If you’re looking for professional assistance, you may consider utilising the services of the best keyword research services available to help you uncover valuable keywords and phrases for your content strategy.

Open your post and work out what the keyword is going to be for the post, you can choose a short tail keyword or a long tail keyword. 

An example of a short-tail keyword (1 word) would be ‘SEO‘ and a long-tail keyword (4 or more words) would be ‘creating an SEO strategy‘

It’s worth noting that short-tail keywords are more competitive to rank for whilst long-tail keywords are more niche-specific and targeted however have a higher conversion rate.

Once you’ve chosen your keyword add it to your SEO plugin and look at your score. You DO NOT want to be publishing anything that’s less than green. So it might take a little adjustment of your post for example adding headings to your blog post (they’re so important) and adding the keyword into your heading.

Make sure that you’ve completely followed the instructions and your post is now showing a green SEO banner. 

Headlines & Your SEO Strategy

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, I bet your headlines suck. Mine did too (and the posts not optimised are still awful). It’s amazing just how much impact changing the headline of your post can actually have on your SEO ranking and volume of traffic to your site.

I always use Headline Analyser to check the SEO score of every headline I post and now every headline of a previous post I’m optimising. Taking the keyword and usually changing the post to a ‘how-to’ or ‘x tips’ post helps to really increase the SEO score of the post. 

This has been monumental in increasing conversions and spending 5 minutes perfecting your headline to be catchy and attention grabbing is massive. I only will be satisfied, again if the SEO score is green on this site for the headline. See how I’ve done this below. 

Meta Descriptions & Your SEO Strategy

Sometimes the first few opening sentences of your post aren’t necessarily the best for search engine optimisation as you’re setting the scene for your reader that’s why you must optimise your meta description.

Here we’re going to use 2/3 keywords in a proper sentence (no keyword stuffing) to help those searching for your keyword see what the post is about whilst simultaneously helping search engines to drive your result higher up the page. You can see how this is done below.

Internal Links & Your SEO Strategy

You must ensure that you have a minimum of 2 internal links in your post linking to other similar posts that the reader may be interested. You can feature it like this;

Other articles on SEO Strategy for you;

• How To Audit Your Business To Rank Higher On Google
• How You Can Increase Your Site Traffic With Old Posts
• 5 Ways To Increase Your Pinterest Referrals By 1,000%+ In A Month
• Why you need a blog for your business
• Why your business needs an FAQ page
• What Matters Most In Strategy?

Or you can embed the links within the sentence you’re writing to help direct your readers to a post which uses the keywords in the post. 

Tip: If you’re using WordPress you can simply go to add a link and start typing say ‘how to improve my SEO’ and options for blog posts with that phrase in from your site will show up.

Never ever link ANYTHING, to the anchor text ‘click here’. You want to be linking to keywords.

Find 2-3 other posts that you’ve already published that contain your keyword from the post you’re currently optimising and link back to it. What you’re doing here is creating a spiderweb-like structure that links posts together to ensure that when search engines crawl your site they can really ‘see’ your posts.

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ALT Tags & Your SEO Strategy

Adding appropriate alt tags really impacts SEO as it helps search engines ‘see’ what the image is about. It also helps to add context to the image on your page. So make sure that you check every image on your post has a suitable ALT tag. Here’s an example of what to include in your ALT tag to help your SEO Strategy.

‘How to create an SEO strategy for your blog to drive more traffic – image of headline analyser showing how to improve headline score’

Always add ALT tags to your images. Give them a bit of context this is for people who can’t visually see the images or have low bandwidth PLUS are great for SEO purposes. Use your keywords in here too.

Make sure that you’re also adding a minimum of 3 relevant and good quality images to every blog post.

Optimise Your Ads, Affiliates Widgets and Opt iIns

So this tip isn’t going to help you rank higher on social media but if you’re looking to make more money from your blog then you may as well spend the time optimising your posts fully for making money. 

One of the most important things to add to your post is an opt-in to your mailing list. The money is in the list and you should be capturing the emails of those people visiting your site. Think of an attractive opt-in for your readers such as our

Or if you run a beauty blog why not create an opt in on how to remove gels properly. Food blogger? Add an opt in for a recipe download. Fitness blogger? An opt in with some exercises to tone a specific area. Think creatively about how you can attract somebody to give you their email to market your posts, products and affiliate offers to them at a later date.

Make sure that you’ve got automatic ad placement across your whole site if you use affiliate networks such as Awin you’re adding affiliate links to the relevant places or any widgets that will help convert affiliate sales.

I know travel is contentious at the moment but for example, if you’re a travel writer why not spend this time optimising widgets so add the booking.com location widget to help people see hotels in the area of your blog or add a Get Your Guide trip suggester.

In addition to this if you have a YouTube channel embedding the videos into the relevant posts is a great way to get more views to your videos AND often in search results search engines show videos in results so will also show your blog post as a suitable search result if your relevant video is embedded.

Creating Pinterest Images (& a Pinterest SEO Strategy)

Pinterest is my biggest ‘social’ referral traffic source so I have a complete strategy in itself for Pinterest (you can grab my free starter guide to Pinterest below). Although this isn’t directly impacting my SEO ranking it really has helped me convert clicks and views to my site. 

I break the whole strategy down bit by bit and show you how I went from 86k monthly unique views to over 260k in less than 2 months with a simple strategy.  

But for now. Every post I optimise I’ve been creating 15 different pins and then adding them with a strong description to Tailwind which I swear by and a business expense I’m happy to pay for. Although you can get 100 free pins here. 

The beauty with Tailwind is that it suggests optimum pin times and automatically schedules your pins. My favourite part is that you can shuffle the pins in your queue which when you’re adding 15 of the same pin is great as it allows you to shake it up with other pins and unlike Pinterest’s own scheduler you can schedule your pins months in advance as you optimise each post. I even have my Christmas content scheduled and it’s only May! 

Grab 100 scheduled free pins from Tailwind here now

Submitting To Search Console For Your SEO Strategy

This one is often forgotten about, however, submitting your new or updated posts to Google’s Search Console is a great way of giving a nudge to say you’ve got new content or updated older content and your website is relevant. Don’t rely on Google or other search engines to automatically find you as there are millions of new pages added to the internet hourly. It takes 2 seconds to submit and will help make a difference.

I’ve got myself into a habit of also submitting my content to Mix and adding the Pin featured on my post and pushing it to Facebook and Twitter all at the same time so I’m giving myself a multi-pronged platform to maximise potential viewing. Whilst my Pinterest strategy drip-feeds 14 other opportunities for a viral pin over the course of a few months.

So in summary on every single blog post on your website you want to take the time (even if it’s just by optimising 1 or 2 posts a day) and make sure that you do the following;

• Research & add a keyword
• Make sure that your SEO plugin is satisfied green with your content 
• Optimise your headline title
• Add keywords into your meta description 
• Internally link to 2/3 older posts and have 2/3 older posts link back to the new post
• Make sure every image has an ALT tag to help search engines ‘see’ your images
• Optimise your page for making money in the form of ads, product sales and affiliates as well as adding an opt-in
• Create a bank of Pinterest images and add them to Tailwind
• Submit to Search Console

Which of these tips do you already use in your everyday SEO strategy and which ones are new ones that you’re going to try for ranking higher on search engines and implementing in your strategy? I’d love to know in the comments below. As always, if you’ve found this post of any value I’d love for you to share it with your friends and family across social media who would find some of the tips helpful.