3 Action Items That Will Get You Massive Traffic

Heya fellow bloggers! I’m Lena Gott, blogger at What Mommy Does and blog coach at Adventures in Blogging.

I hope you’re doing well and not too weary from a summer traffic slump (if you experience this like I do every year).

In case you missed it, I did a joint video interview (while you’re there, why not subscribe to the Mediavine YouTube channel?) with fellow MVP Stephanie Keeping of Spaceships and Laserbeams this month where we talked all things traffic. I highly recommend checking it out, as we tried to share some of our best tips for getting more traffic to our blogs.

If we’ve met before, you know that I like to provide crazy specific advice on getting traffic. You won’t see generic advice here. I want you to be able to take these tips and get more traffic starting tomorrow.

I’ll start out small with two of my favorite hacks and then end with one nerdy, secret strategy that allows you to get amazing results with less effort. As a stay-at-home-mom who is also a professional blogger, I need all the time-saving yet high traffic strategies I can get, so I collect them like candy!

One of my favorite things in this world is seeing another blogger succeed, so I hope you like these tips!

TRAFFIC HACK #1: FOCUS ON THE BEST, FORGET THE REST

When it comes to traffic, I find the most success by focusing on what already works for me and letting the duds go. Stephanie and I agreed on this 100% in our live chat.

There are two ways I like to approach focusing on the best.

1. Repeat your winners by creating similar content.

You already know what does well for you by seeing which posts get the most traffic in Google Analytics.

If “5 Simple Household Cleaning Hacks” is one of my best posts and traffic is my goal, you better believe that I am going to write more posts about cleaning hacks!

You never want to duplicate yourself, but similar content should perform similarly, assuming you use similar keywords and promote it in a similar fashion on social media. Your audience knows what they like, so give them more of that.

2. Boost content that already does well

The easiest way to get traffic is to re-introduce already high performing content back into the eco-system. For me, this means seeing which pins are doing well in Google Analytics and repinning those referring pins.

Your best platform might be Facebook. If that’s the case, then re-introduce high performing past content on your wall. I like to keep the goodies in rotation periodically over time because if my audience liked it once, they will like it again!

On Pinterest, this is how I find out which pins referred lots of traffic so I can repin them (I call them “Power Pins”):

Navigate to Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Referrals and click on the little box next to the URL to pull up the pin. Then schedule it out from there! I use Tailwind for this to save time.

TRAFFIC HACK #2: MAKE YOUR HEADLINES 100% CLICKABLE WITH ENTICING PROMISES

Have you ever been arrived at a Google search results page only to hesitate over whether to click on the #1, #2, or #4 listing because you can’t figure out which one contains the best answer to your questions?

Or browsed Pinterest for an idea and hesitated between clicking on two different posts because you didn’t know which one had the best recipe / easiest tutorial / outlined a process step-by-step?

When you write a new post, consider how your headlines might encourage someone to click on your post vs another post.

I refer to how enticing your post is as “clickability.”

Clickability is not something you can quantify. It’s more of a feeling. That feeling of “I better click on this or I’m missing out on something good!” or “If I click on this, it will improve my life.” That’s what you’re going for.

I see so many bloggers making this same mistake over and over again.
They have an amazing post, but when they are in what I call the tournament bracket of search results, competing against other posts for clicks, they lose out because that extra oomph of clickability is missing.

By and large, the following is true:

• The most clickable Google search results promise desirable outcomes
• The highest ranking organic pins in Pinterest search results always deliver on a transformation
• Posts that promise EASE, offer STEP-BY-STEP GUIDANCE, and say they’ll deliver AWESOME OUTCOMES win the click every time

As you can imagine, everything about your post on the surface goes into clickability.

It starts with your headline and trickles down to the meta description that appears on the screen, the description that auto-populates on the various platforms (Pinterest, Facebook, etc), and how clearly your images and overlays convey the benefits of reading your content.

Try look at your posts on a particular platform (let’s use Pinterest as an example) as objectively as possible and consider whether someone would be compelled to click on your post or if you could do a better job.

Pull up the pin like so:

Why would someone want to click on this? Do the headline + meta description + pin description work together to make a good case for the click?

To take it a bit further — compare your content to someone else who clearly does an amazing job in your niche. How do your posts’ “promises” match up?

Note: If you feel like you need to change your titles, you CAN do this. Just change the title of your post in WordPress, but DO NOT mess with the URL or you’ll produce broken links. You can always change meta descriptions and pin descriptions with no issues.

Any effort you put into making your posts more “clickable” will go a long way.

Remember that the site owner that does the best job of making their case will get the page view.

The bonus effect of getting more clicks is that it only serves to get you MORE clicks! Getting more clicks will only serve to boost your search engine rankings and makes most platforms show your content to more people because that’s how popularity works!

Pin this post!

{SECRET} TRAFFIC HACK #3: TARGET HIDDEN KEYWORD NICHES

One thing we cover extensively in Adventures in SEO is how to know whether or not a keyword is worth going after.

Google SEO is not all that complicated once you know which keywords to pursue. Finding them in the first place is the hard part!

I show my students how to compete for the harder-to-rank-for keywords through proven optimization strategies, but probably just as important as knowing what to do when the competition is fierce is how to find keywords that nobody else cares about! 

If you don’t know anything about SEO, don’t worry. This is easy even if you’re a beginner. That’s because when there’s no competition, you don’t have to try all that hard. Seriously!

To find a low competition keyword phrase, you don’t need any fancy software. All you need is a connection to the internet so you can pull up Google.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Think of a topic you love to write about.

2. Now think of a very specific issue related to that topic.

For instance, if you like to write about decluttering & organization, then think of something specific like “how to organize a small bedroom on a budget.” This is called a LONG TAIL KEYWORD PHRASE which is the technical term for something more specific than one or two words.

“Decluttering” or “organizing” on their own are very hard top-level terms to rank for. Anyone can think of those phrases. Get more creative and you’ll have an easy time getting traffic to your content. Lots of people need to organize and lots of those people have small bedrooms. Give them what they’re looking for and the search engines will reward you!

Examples of Page 1 results that have lackluster search results:

Let’s do an example so you can see what I mean…

Imagine being the person who just wants a “21 day fix weekly meal planning printable” but all Google gives you is this….

Do you think Google wants to return THREE pins in the search results?! I think not. If you wrote a properly optimized blog post on this topic and delivered the goods, you’d blast right onto page 1 of search results.

Or what if you’re the person who just wants to get inspired by “pretty bullet journal daily layouts,” and you’re on your own to figure out where they are!

How not a single person in the entire world has never written about this topic before in a way that Google can pick up on….I do not know….but this kind of under-representation is all over the place!

Capitalize on the fact that not many bloggers care about SEO, and tons of easy traffic is yours for the taking. 😊

You can become a professional blogger with a catalog of posts all based around long tail keywords.

Getting to the top of search results for a broad term like “decluttering” is like producing a viral – you have very low chances of doing that. But almost anyone can stack up traffic from many different long tail phrases into an amazing amount of traffic over time.

Many of my posts targeted to long tail phrases have received over 400,000 page views each in their lifetime. One has even broken the million page views mark on its own.

This strategy rests 100% on your creativity paired with the ability to optimize your content for search and the patience to give the algorithms time to do their magic.

Here’s the exciting part – just do the math on 150,000 page views. If you get a $10 RPM, that’s $1,500 over time for ONE post!

For some context, here are some of my stats out of 700-ish posts:

• I have 70 posts in the 10,000 – 30,000 lifetime PVs range. Even at that level, we’re talking $100-$200 in ad revenue to date for posts that are still bringing in page views every month.
• I have 160 posts in the 2,000 – 9,000 lifetime PVs range.
• I have 71 posts in the 30,000 – 500,000 lifetime page views range. As you can imagine, these drive the majority of my income. 71 posts!

The point of me telling you all of this is to say this –

Every single one of my blog posts was written with a long tail phrase at the forefront (with the exception of one category landing page that contains 2 words).

You won’t write a winner every single time, but that’s okay. I still publish lots of duds myself!

The good news is that you’ll get better at choosing keyword phrases over time and you won’t have to write hundreds of posts to get 71 winners. You’ll eventually create mostly winners.

3. Keep searching for different phrases…

…until you come to a Page 1 search results page where it looks like Google doesn’t have a ton of relevant content to deliver OR the page is dominated by blog posts that don’t correctly match the phrase you typed in.

Google is good at what it does, but if nobody has covered a specific topic in depth, then it just has to return the best match possible. Lots of people are searching for things that Google can’t find great answers to. Find those phrases and you’ll be golden!

There is amazing traffic hidden in longer keyword phrases.

Lena Gott is a CPA turned stay at home mom who loves growing her blog in less time by tracking the metrics that matter. If you would like step-by-step help with traffic, you can grab her latest free course, 5-Day Traffic & Monetization Mini Challenge.