How to Get More Views on Your Blog
Here’s a secret: it’s not actually that difficult to get lots of views on your blog.
Getting started
You don’t need a huge social following or a super fancy website, you just need a decent site, good, well written content, and to follow a few simple tricks that I will explain to you in this blog post. Unfortunately, this isn’t a scheme where I can promise you how to get lots of views really quickly, but what I can share is how I’ve increased my yearly views to 18,000 in just two years since launching.
Although I have a large Instagram following, this isn’t where most of my traffic comes from at all. My advice is to write blog posts specifically so that they’ll show up in Google search results, which is where I get the majority of my views. It’s actually very easy to do, and can set you up to receive organic traffic to your blog for years to come.
Writing for Google doesn’t mean that you need to stop covering topics that interest you and that you enjoy. In fact, I encourage you to continue to write for fun - but the secret is to find the overlap between what you enjoy writing and what people are searching for. That is the sweet spot that will land you lots of readers.
writing for google search
Let’s say you want to write a blog post reviewing your new bag from the Cambridge Satchel Company. The first thing to do is to head over onto the Ahrefs website and use their Keyword Generator. This is a free tool that can help you to identify what people are typing into Google, and where you can expect to rank in searches if you wrote about it.
Here’s what the keyword generator is telling me about the key words ‘Cambridge Satchel Company’ in the UK.
As a smaller blogger, you’re likely to have a lower domain authority. That means you’ll find it harder to rank for keywords that have lots of content written about them. Take another look at my screenshot above; that number in the coloured box shows how difficult it is to rank in search. The lower the number, the easier it is. Next to it you can see how many searches it’s had within the last month. Before you write a blog post, I would recommend searching for the keywords that you want to write about, and choosing things that have a maximum difficulty rating of 10.
Once you’ve written a blog post around a keyword, your content is not going to show up immediately. It takes a little while for Google to index your post and for it to start appearing in searches, so be patient, and you’ll probably find that you start to get search traffic within a few months. The secret is to keep on writing in this way, building up your searchable content to slowly grow your hits on Google.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should exclusively write blog posts that people are searching for - it’s your space and its a good idea to find a balance between writing for search and writing for your followers/readers. Find what works for you.
a few more things to know about Seo
I’m not an SEO expert, and I’m sure there are loads of things that I can do better, but there are a few things that I always recommend doing. Firstly, make sure you write alternative titles that will appear when your posts show up in Google. Think about what people are looking for when they search for your keyword, and set your alternative title as something they will click on.
That’s the same for the SEO description - write a paragraph that will make searchers want to click on your post. These are the two quick and simple SEO tasks that I would recommend implementing immediately to start seeing real results. SEO is a HUGE area and can get really complicated, so keep it easy to start off with.
and tHat’s it!
Give it a few months for Google to start indexing your pages and for your blog posts to start appearing in search results. You’ll start seeing improvements fairly quickly, and the more of this that you do, the more views you will get.
See it as playing the long game. You won’t get results right away, but the work you put in now will mean that your blog posts are receiving organic traffic for a very long time. Good luck, and if you have any questions feel free to drop me a message @juliasbookcase!
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