Knowing how to drive traffic to your website is the key to having a successful site. After all, your website can be great, but if people don’t find it then it becomes nothing more than a personal blog. So how exactly do you get traffic to your site? Here’s a look at some of the most effective ways to get traffic to your site with content marketing.
Content Marketing for Your Website
Content is always king when it comes to any site. You need to provide useful information to visitors. This is what will get them to your website and if you write on a regular basis then it will keep them coming back. When you’re writing content think of questions that people will type into Google search. These are the questions that you want to answer on your website.
Answer the Public is a great keyword tool that gives you a snapshot of questions people ask related to your keyword. For example, I entered baseball as my keyword. Answer the Public gave me the following picture. You can also download the list of questions in a csv file.
Now baseball is a very broad term and you would never try and rank for that keyword. But, this is a good starting point to find a niche surrounding this term, or to delve deeper into keyword research. Once you’ve done one round of searching you can take one of the questions shown on the picture and either start building your content around it or do another round of research with that keyword. Take a couple of the phrases over to the Google Keyword Planner and see what the monthly search numbers look like. You can then figure out which question to write your content around.
Evergreen vs Trending Content
When writing content for your website you should consider the type of content that is best for your site. Evergreen content is content that never goes out of style. Sure, it may need to be updated and tweaked over time. However, the topic is something that people are always looking for. Evergreen content keeps people coming back to your website because the articles will be helpful no matter the date. Year after year this content is relevant which means that it will show up in Google search results.
Trending content on the other hand is written about a current event, trend, or topic that is relevant at the moment. But, it won’t be something that people will search for in years to come. The benefit of trending content is that it can be good for social shares. It may not go viral, but trendy topics may get a lot of clicks when you share them on social platforms. The traffic will be temporary, but if your website has good content then people may come back. So trendy content is the hook and evergreen content is what keeps them coming back.
Consistent Content to Drive Traffic
The other thing to consider when posting content is consistency. You want to post new articles to your website on a regular basis. This will keep people coming back to your website and it also gives Google more chances to crawl your website. Google also wants to know that your website is going to be around and isn’t just a temporary fad or hobby for you. By publishing content on a regular basis Google will look at your website more favorably than others and this will ultimately help with your rankings.
To write on a consistent basis, you can use the scheduling tool within WordPress. Instead of publishing immediately, you can schedule your posts for a specific date and time. This is a great strategy if you like to handle tasks in phases. For instance, one day you work on keyword research and then the next day you write the articles. But you certainly wouldn’t want to publish all of your posts at once, so simply do a drip schedule so that a new article is published every couple of days.
This also works out well if you outsource your content writing. You can use Fiverr to hire a freelance writer to write an article based on one of your target keywords. This is a huge help if you’re trying to produce content on a regular basis. You could always work on one lengthy article per week and then have several shorter articles written by Fiverr freelancers who target keywords that link back to your larger article.
Use In-Depth Articles to Drive Traffic
I think that people often think that more content will mean more traffic, but that is not always the case. Studies show that Google favors longer articles vs shorter ones. That’s why when you use an SEO tool like Yoast it won’t even give you the “green light” until you’ve written 300 words. A longer article has more authority and it also gives you more room to share valuable information with your readers. So instead of splitting up ideas into several posts, you are better off combining those into one killer post. You can still have shorter posts if you want, but the real value to your website will be in the longer posts and this is the best way to drive traffic to your website.
Now that you know a little more about content marketing, you can start planning the content you want to add to your website. While there are some great tools online that can help with this process, sometimes a good old fashioned pen and paper is the easiest thing to do. Map out keywords to target, questions to answer in your articles and how frequently you want to post these articles. Then you can set-up a schedule for writing the content. Or, give to a freelancer if you decide to outsource some of the writing. Knowing how to drive traffic to your website is key to its success and spending the time to map out a good strategy and timeline makes the process so much easier.