How To Make Your Blog More Effective: 3 Simple Steps To Beat Your Competition

Is your blog not getting any traffic? Do you want to know how to make your blog more effective?

Whether you have a message that you feel the world needs to hear, or you have a useful review for a product that you feel could potentially benefit consumers, it is frustrating when nobody actually gets eyes on your blog.

Being buried on the third page of the big G sucks.

It statistically proven that almost nobody goes through the pages on Google when they are doing their search queries.

So that means it is very important to rank somewhere on the first page when you decide to share something on the internet.

This will take a significant amount of strategizing and creative output. Producing higher quality content doesn’t always ensure you will rank on the first page of Google though. Rather, it is the stategized approach of marketing your content combined with quality that ensures your high rank.

If you are new to blogging and want to get eyes on your content, or if you have some experience with market strategy and want another perspective and approach, this article will be a valuable resource to you.

A lot of these strategies and my foundational knowledge about gaining traffic was acquired at this fantastic online university. Learn how to monetize the traffic that you receive on your blog website with the great community of teachers and students there.

Now, the first step…

1. Know what you’re up against.

If you are not popping up on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rank 1, that means there are other websites that are (duh), and that means they are “outranking” you.

See, this doesn’t necessarily mean they have better content than you, or they are better than you as a blogger. It can simply mean they have strategized a plan to get to the front page for what the topic is they are discussing, IE. Keywords.

Keywords are an essential step when optimizing your blog for traffic, as you can read here in this article about SEO.

In the blogging or article-writing world, every piece of new content will rank for certain keywords. These are essentially words that point to what the content is about, generally speaking.

Whether or not the keyword is planned or not is up to the blogger. This will depend on the purpose of your content. If you want to just get traffic on your content as the main objective, you will find a keyword that is relatively low in competition related to the niche.

If your keyword is not planned, then your title, essentially, is your keyword. For example, this blog’s keyword is “…blog more effecitve”. And I will be competiting with other sites that have that keyword in their title.

If your keyword is still up in the air, you can determine which keyword to use by trying to find one that has reasonable competition.

To find out whether or not a keyword has a lot of competition I use Jaaxy In this keyword research tool, you can simply punch in the keyword and you will see how many searches it receives on Google every month, how many hits you can receive if you rank on the first page, and how difficult it will be for you to achieve that.

Try it out here, for free.

On the other hand,

If you are deadset on a partciular keyword for whatever reason, maybe the topic is your passion, or maybe you feel you have content that is extraordinary, you will need to make sure you are performing as well or better than your competition in SEO (search engine optimization).

This means you have to find out what your competition is doing.

A tool I use to do that is SEMrush. I use this tool in conjunction with Jaaxy, because this tool allows you to track all the backlinks that your competitors article has.

Backlinks play a large part in determining your rank on Google.

Here are steps 5 to track your competitors backlinks:

Try it out for free below.

1. Type in your articles name in Google (this will include a keyword, planned or not), and then punch in the top 1 of the 5 top websites.

 

2. This will automatically bring you to the domain overview. You want to get more specific.

The side bar on the left side of the tool has an option called organic research. Click on that.

3. Then, in the keyword filter bar, put in your keyword/article name.

4. Your competitors domain may contain a few URL’s that have the same keyword. Simply scroll over the links to see if they the title matches the one that you originally searched for.

Now click on the URL that corresponds to the article in competition to yours.

5. You will now get to see the analytics of this specific URL. Go to the sidebar again and click on backlinks.

You will now see all of the site sources that have linked to this article.

This is what gives this article content search engine strength. Google favors websites that a lot of other websites link to. It makes logical sense.

To make an analogy to a job posting, you will get hired (rank) more easily if more people (websites) refer to you, which means you are more relevant to that job (keyword).

Now that you have all the backlinks, you need to do something with that information.

This is where the work comes in. And there is lots work, because successful results only come from hard work.

You must see if you can also acquire backlinks to these websites. There are a few ways to do this:

• It might be easy and you might be able to just post your link onto the site if the site is a open-forum type of thing
• It will take some networking, which means you will have to look at the website and comment on it, build a relationship with the owners, and eventually down the road email them with a proposal offering content for their site for free in return for a backlink.
• You can also design something like an infographic, or a video that is relevant, and then email the website owners offering it for free with am embedded backlink.

In your objective to obtain these backlinks, you will surely find more websites that will be useful to connect with and share your content with.

This all takes a lot of time and effort, and is the best way to gain credibility, not just with Google but with your industry. Although there are shortcuts. In this article, I wrote about black hat SEO strategies. Pretty much, stay away from the quick-and-easy stuff. It’s often not the best path to take, in a lot of areas of life.

2. Improve the quality of your content

If you’ve already written your content and you’re trying to rank it higher for its respective keyword, a great way to do that is just to improve it.

You can do this by:

• Being more detailed in your content, by refining your research.
• Use comments as feedback (mostly from constructive criticism, I hope.)
• Add some interesting pictures that are relevant
• If you are doing a review, install a review plugin. For example, use something like WP Review

 

Another way you can improve your content, and a consequence of doing more reseach and editing, is increasing the word count.

Word count is something that Google takes in considering when ranking you organically in search inquiries (if you’re not keyword stuffing).

I read an article recently by Neil Patel of Quicksprout.com that showed, in a graph, that his articles with 1200 or more attracted way more traffic.

Isn’t it nice to be connected to the internet, where we can let other people do the research for us.

 3. Pay to play

Pay to play, with Pay per click.

Basically, PPC is paying to show up on the first page of Google.

This may be out of the price range for most people, but if you really do have a blog you want to promote, and you are confident that it has the quality to generate a return, it might be great investment.

Google Adwords is Google’s native online advertisement system. At Google’s Academy of Ads there is free certification in Adwords. This looks good on a lot of resumes in this day and age, and also educates you on the fundamentals of advertiseing online.

A lot of the marketing strategies and best practices take time and practice to master. There are a lot of great affordable courses out there that you can learn from, like Seth’s Digital Marketing course.

Simply put, in Adwords you will be displaying ads on the front page of google whenever your specified keyword is searched for.

There are a lot of paramaters you can then place, like location, time, and also negative keywords so you won’t show up when those keywords are searched for.

I’ve played around with Adwords a bit, and it is a pretty advanced system. It does take a bit of practice to learn to optmize the organization of your ad campaigns. Like with anything, there is a learning curve.

Not the mention, the marketing intuition that one needs to develop in order to accurately place ads. But I digress as these are all the things you can learn in Youtube videos these days, or paid courses.

Before you decide to go this route, keep in mind that there will be quite the cost for your blogging endeavors now, but you are pretty much guranteed traffic, unless absolutely brutalize your ad management.

It is up to you, to somehow monetize your content so you can make a profit margin, if that’s what you are into. But, who knows, maybe you are a multi-millionaire who just has a message to spread. There certainly can be campaigns with those purposes.

If monetizing your traffic is your thing, I’ve learned a lot of what I know about the industry, especially about increasing traffic and content effectiveness, at this online university. It’s free and you can receive personalized help from me and the vast community of entrepreneurs there. In my opinion, it is the finest example of online education can be about.

==>Take your online education seriously.

Final thoughts

To make your blog and your content more effective, you must either choose a keyword and title that has a keyword you can easily compete in, or you must know how much more effective it has to be compared to the other blogs in competition to you.

Either way, it will take a bit of strategizing on the front-end. And afterwards, a bit of networking and promoting.

Like any business endeavor, because a blog is essentially occupying online real estate like how a business occupies real estate in reality, you must have a strategy for your content and your marketing in order for it to be successful.

Learn more about monetizing your blog here with a community of online entrepreneurs.. After you get some traffic, there are countless ways to generate revenue. Don’t leave money on the table. Join for free and start learning.

Good luck!