Quality blog traffic is crucial to your marketing goals – whether you want more leads, customers, or sales.

And that’s why most businesses know they should maintain an online presence by having a website that includes a blog.

However, randomly creating a blog page and throwing in different pieces of content will not bring more traffic.

On the other hand, it can negatively impact your website’s SEO. if not done correctly, especially if your content is duplicate or low-quality.

To drive genuine blog traffic, you need to do the following.

1.   Create Valuable Content

There is a widespread belief in the marketing world that “Content is king“. And that’s somehow true.

Whether you have the best product on the market or your brand owns the most technical website in the industry, both have no particular relevance to your target audience if there’s no valuable content.

People visiting your website want informative posts that can resolve their queries and meet their needs.

But they will bounce out immediately if your blog posts feature only rehearsed and regurgitated content with no depth or value. And there’s no possibility they will ever come back again.

Besides, Google gives ranking preference to sites with good content.

So, creating valuable content will rocket your website to the front page of search engines like Google and keep you there for as long as possible.

Here are some steps to take:

Research your target audience

You need to know who will want to read your content before creating valuable, practical information that draws in quality traffic.

Don’t just create daily posts on different topics, relevant and non-relevant to your product and audience.

That’s more like shooting sporadically with no target in mind.

Say you offer a beauty product. Most likely, you will target mainly females aged 16-29.

This information shows that most of our target audience will be social media users – Gen Zs and millennials.

We can also outline what type of post will excite them and keep their eyes glued to the screen.

Figuring out your target audience and catering your content to them will also help you generate quality traffic over quantity.

And according to Techiebode, quality traffic brings in more sales and conversions.

Once we reach the content creation stage, we can align whatever we create around this information for a more personalized and relevant blog post.

Analyze your competitors

It’s time to see what your competitors are doing. You can use tools like Ahrefs or semRUSH to analyze their blog page and see which topics they produce more.

Other things to look out for are their best-performing articles.

Extract these links and dissect them individually till you know what makes them rank and draw in traffic.

You are doing this because some of your competitors are already years ahead in their content marketing strategy.

And they have results. So, it doesn’t hurt to learn from them.

Of course, you must ensure you’re not duplicating precisely what they are doing. Instead, aim for unique content that fills a gap they are not covering.

Carry out keyword research

Once we know the relevant topics to address, we should conduct keyword research to make it easier for potential customers to locate our content and increase the chances of them becoming paying customers.

You need to analyze each keyword’s difficulty. Especially those for which your competitors rank.

Don’t forget to copy this data into a spreadsheet and categorize your keywords with scores to help you identify individual relevance.

Good advice for new startups is to begin with low-competition keywords with lesser difficulty.

Once you are comfortable with ranking for these keywords, you can try ranking for the more competitive, higher-volume keywords.

Create topic clusters

The topic cluster approach involves creating a long-form pillar page and several shorter articles around a central content theme.

Let’s say you focus on marketing. That’s your main content theme. Your first pillar page can be “A comprehensive guide into marketing“.

Then you can follow up with shorter or supporting pieces like “X marketing strategies to scale your business” and “X marketing statistics you should know“.

The essence of topic clusters is that it gives your blog page more structure.

It also helps search engines see you as an authority in a specific niche due to the abundance of information you’ve created on it.

Each supporting article piece will supply traffic juice to the central pillar page so long as your internal linking process is full-proof.

Be strict with your editorial standards

Lastly, but not less importantly, you need an editorial team that reviews your content before publishing it on the web.

This team is responsible for creating guidelines that align with your brand’s purpose.

Often, most startups hire random, proven or new writers to create top-notch content.

But these writers might be unable to key into your brand tone, voice, relevance, and style on their first project with you.

That’s why you should hire an editorial team that understands everything and keeps a tight hand on the standards.

And preferably, they should be in-house editors. So, whenever you have your content, they will review it, comment, and make necessary edits before passing it for public view.

Also, they will always be available to update your blog content when needed.

2.   Use Videos in Your Blog Posts

Now that you have a quality blog post, it’s time to add visuals.

According to Wyzowl, websites with videos generate 86% more traffic than those without.

And the reason is simple. Videos engage people more than blocks of textual copies.

So, no matter how good you are with words, your audience will still prefer videos.

That’s precisely the strategy social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok used to draw millions of active users within a decade.

Including video summaries with your blog posts can drive traffic to your site and increase engagement.

Top sites like HubSpot and Ahrefs use this strategy to engage their readers.

They create a video on their subject topic, post it on YouTube or host it on their website alongside a blog post, and optimize it for easy viewing.

Regarding SEO, videos do not directly serve as a ranking signal for search engines. But it can increase your visibility.

How, you say? There’s a video page on Google. Once you do a search, you can switch between the “All” page, the Image page, the Video page, and a few others.

For example, if you were to type the following into Google: “Instagram Spam Comments – How To Delete A Comment”, then click on “videos” in the search results, you will see the YouTube video created for this post at the top of the search engine results page.

Anytime your video goes live, it will appear on the Videos page. When people look up related queries, Google will recommend these videos.

Once clicked, new leads or traffic are directed to the hosting page – which is your blog.

3.   Build Backlinks

Link building is another traffic-generating strategy that you definitely can’t ignore.

Search engines use backlinks to your blog to assess how relevant your website is. In turn, you get to rank higher on SERPs.

You can carry out the first two steps to build backlinks. Quality content and videos will earn you natural links from top sites.

Other ways to gain high-yield backlinks are via guest posting, juicing out broken links on competitors’ sites, creating infographics, using HARO, and sharing your blog posts to social media platforms like Quora.

Conclusion

Traffic brings leads, and leads bring in sales. That’s why the sole purpose of your marketing strategy must be to draw in quality traffic and potential prospects.

Here’s a quick summary of the steps to take. Firstly, create a valuable blog post. No one wants to read regurgitated jargon.

Secondly, optimize your blog content with visuals like infographics and videos.

Visuals help with retention and increase engagement. Lastly, build links from relevant sites.