By Joydeep Bhattacharya
It’s never too late to start your own small business blog. Your competitors already utilize content marketing to divert tons of traffic to their blog.
As a first step, create a small business blog using any popular CMS like WordPress and get your new blog indexed as quickly as possible. Once, indexed, follow the below strategies to divert organic traffic to your new blog:
1. Have Better Content and Increase Your TF-IDF Score
TF-IDF score is a little known secret formula that Google uses to identify the relevancy of a webpage w.r.t. to the user’s search query.
TF-IDF score is calculated using the formula:
TF Value = No. of times the common word appears in the document / Total No. of words present in the document
And IDF score is calculated using the formula:
IDF = log ( Total No. of Documents / No. of Documents Containing the unique term)
Having good TF-IDF scores for your blog pages will help them to rank better in the search engines.
Apart from having a good look at the TF-IDF scores, please follow the below guidelines for preparing better content for your small business blog:
- Content should be original and must focus on solving a problem.
- Create actionable and scannable content that is broken up with sub-headings, bulleted lists and short paragraphs.
- Provide accurate, engaging and thought provoking content.
- Use Videos, Images and revamp your posts for maximum value.
- Write controversial without being wordy.
2. Prepare Blog Posts That Focus on Users’ Problems
Einstein once said, “I will take fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.”
Identification of the problem takes more time as compared to finding solutions for them.
Don’t simply find keywords that have the highest search volume if they don’t cater to your audience needs. Instead, go for long tail, medium volume keywords that helps to exactly define the problems of your targeted demographic.
Blog posts that provides answers to user’s problems often receive the highest engagement. Utilize tools like Cloudvote to ask questions and collect instant feedback from your audiences using interactive PowerPoint presentations.
Here are some tips to get started:
- Use audience personas to discover the right stories.
- Start with Epics and refine the problem until they are ready.
- Create “How to” style posts that are actionable and provides practical solution to the user’s problem.
- Use SEO copywriting to target specific keywords on the content in order to make your content rank for those keywords on Google.
3. Utilize Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to Drive Traffic From Mobile Devices
AMP is an open source initiative launched by Google that aims to improve the performance of the mobile web. Under it, AMP specific versions of HTML needs to be created in order to boost the rankings on mobile devices.
If you are having a WordPress blog then you can simply install the AMP WordPress Plugin which will automatically generate AMP-compatible versions, for all the blog posts in your site. For example, if your post URL is http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/, you can access the AMP version at http://example.com/2016/01/01/amp-on/amp/.
Additionally, you can add the below code in your .htaccess file in order to automatically redirect mobile users to AMP pages:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/amp$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (android|blackberry|googlebot\-mobile|iemobile|iphone|ipod|\#opera\ mobile|palmos|webos) [NC]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)([\/]*)$ https://example.com/$1/amp [L,R=302]
4. Create Sticky Headlines For Your Blog
A catchy headline immediately grabs the attention of the user and proves to be a successful bait for increasing the Clickthrough rate (CTR) of the blog pages.
Follow the below tips in order to create successful sticky headlines for your blog:
- Make use of the curiosity gap that aims to fill the gap between what we know and what we don’t know. Some examples of headlines leveraging the curiosity gap are “4 Reasons Your Next SEO Campaign Will Fail” or “9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact”.
- Provide a quantifiable benefit to the end user from the headline. For example – “Get Your First 1000 Followers on Twitter”.
- Create headlines that can be easily pictured. For example – “The 10 Most Affordable Areas to Live in Dubai”
- Leverage the power of immediacy like “5 Things You Need Right Now in Your Kitchen”.
Creating sticky headlines can easily raise the amount of traffic that you are currently getting in your blog. Additionally, utilize these SEO tips to optimize your content for local search.
5. Fix Technical SEO Issues Like Broken Links, Redirects, URL Structure, Schema Markup etc.
Last but not the least, fix all the technical SEO issues that you have been ignoring for so long.
- Broken Links: First, identify all the broken links on your blog by using data obtained with the help of Webmaster Search Consol and Xenu. Once they are identified, map them to their respective new pages and 301 redirect them. This will divert all the lost traffic to the newly created pages and also make the new pages rank on Google in place of the old ones. It is also recommended to make use of rel=canonical tags to correctly point to the new pages so that it becomes easier for Google to track and rank the new pages.
- Redirects: Sometimes users face the error on their browser like “The page isn’t redirecting properly. Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.” Hence, it is important to check your website regularly with tools like Screaming and OSE in order to identify the redirect problem so that you can fix it.
- URL Structure: Use keywords in the URL structure and make them user friendly. Canonicalize URLs that serve the same content and exclude dynamic parameters from the URLs wherever possible. Matching URLs to titles works best most of the times and also helps to increase the overall relevancy score of the webpage thereby diverting loads of organic traffic.
- Schema Markup: Schema is a data markup that helps the search engines to better understand the content. It is available for mark up of articles, local businesses, restaurants, TV episodes and ratings, book reviews, movies, software applications, events, products etc. You can make use of Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to add proper schemas on your webpages. This will enable the search engines to better understand the provided content and help it to rank well in the search engines.
Once you start to get sufficient traffic on your blog then make use of analytics software like Google Analytics to better understand the likes and dislikes of your audiences. Understanding the user behavior and revamping your marketing strategy accordingly will help you to increase engagement and retention rate.
Are you aware of any such strategies that helped you to raise the organic traffic of your business blog? Please share with me in the comments below.
Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing evangelist and author of SEOsandwitch.com. He is a regular contributor on publications like Wired, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Hubspot and several other sites.
