8 Proven Content Writing Strategies That Can Increase Your Website Traffic

Content writing is not only an essential part of your search engine optimization (SEO) & search engine marketing (SEM) strategies, but will also significantly increase traffic to your website. This can result in higher user interaction, ie. conversions.

This is important – by creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content, you can attract more visitors to your site and improve your search engine rankings.

1. Targeting specific keywords:

By researching and targeting specific keywords in your content, you can attract visitors who are searching for those terms. This is especially important for businesses that rely on organic search traffic to drive leads and sales.

Start by making a list of topics related to your business (Note: these are not going to be your keywords). From there, create a list of keywords for each of your listed topics.

There are a few metrics to consider when selecting appropriate keywords including relevance, authority, and volume.

• Relevance simply means that the search engine must see that your content ranks for the search intent of your audience; it’s important that your content ranks well for the topics you intend to target.
• Authority is a search engine’s analysis of how well-versed you are in your field; thus, having a lot of quality content is key.
• Volume refers to the necessity of your keyword; i.e., are people actually searching for your keyword?

2. Improving website usability:

Well-written and organized content can improve the usability of your website and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages. This can result in higher search engine rankings and more traffic.

So what can improve a website’s usability? For one, you’ll want to make sure your site and all of your content is “readable”. This includes white space, paragraph formatting, proper use of lists, and more.

Another way to improve usability is to consider the colors used on the site: what color is the background? Is there enough contrast? It is imperative that the text color you select stands out on top of whatever background color you use. These two may seem a bit stylistic, but they have a massive impact on usability. These subtle but critical usability improvements are considered standards for web accessibility in regards to the user experience (UX). In fact, color contrast guidelines are legally enforced for American federal agencies by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

3. Building backlinks:

High-quality content can attract links from other websites, which can improve your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your site. There are quite a few strategies that, used correctly, can really increase the number of backlinks. Some of these strategies include:

• Creating high quality content (e.g., articles based on data)
• Creating resource pages (e.g., information for web designers)
• Reaching out to site owner’s with broken links (e.g., a webpage with a 404 error)
• Reaching out to a reporter at HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to see if they will use your content as a resource

There are some other options that are also worth your time, however, this is a good starting point in building backlinks for your site!

4. Increasing social media engagement:

By creating shareable content, you can increase your social media following and drive more traffic to your website. Social media benefits website traffic in a major way AND it’s cost-effective. With social media, you can utilize paid and organic methods to rapidly expand your website’s reach.

Each social media platform offers different features, pros, and cons. For example, Facebook allows you to reach a massive audience; however, with that, comes a lot of extra work and potential costs if you opt into paid ads. On the other hand, a social media platform like LinkedIn, where the primary focus is business and networking, there is less of a potential reach but it is specialized.

The overarching theme with all social media platforms is that they can rapidly increase your website traffic if you have a good strategy in place. Since each platform varies, this can present a challenge. Focusing on one social media platform to start with is a good idea. With social media, you can also interact with your audience which is a huge deal–if you want to know something about your customers, you can simply pose a question and receive answers–in real-time.

There is a lot more that we could delve into in terms of social media, but for now just consider the massive benefit of having a platform where you can engage and intrigue your audience with minimal effort required.

5. Providing value to your audience:

By writing informative and useful content, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and provide value to your audience. This can lead to increased traffic and engagement on your website. For any business to truly provide value to their customers, creating original, fresh content is integral to success. Getting creative in this process is something to hone into. There are many ways to provide value in your content. Some of those include storytelling, diversifying your content, releasing certain content on social media only, providing further resources for your audience, and helping people solve problems. In order to make content that adds value in the lives of your audience, you need to know them well. What do they like? Dislike? What are their problems? Assets?

6. Improving local SEO:

If you have a local business, creating content that includes your location and relevant keywords can improve your local SEO and attract more customers to your website. One great way to improve local SEO is to make location specific pages. An example of this is here at The Clever Robot, we primarily serve a few different cities. Those include Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and High Point. For us to rank for each of these locations, we needed to create a page for each city. In each page, we included information relevant specifically to that city, plus information about The Clever Robot and our services.

7. Answering common questions:

By creating content that addresses common questions and concerns in your industry, you can attract visitors who are searching for solutions to their problems. Your audience will always have questions, so it is vital to figure out who your audience is. Once you truly know your audience, you can then figure out what kinds of questions they want solutions to, or better yet, you can ask them; to know your audience you will need to interact with them. Once you have established an open channel of communication with your audience, you can begin to provide valuable solutions to the problems they have, no matter how big or small.

8. To maximize the benefits of content writing, it’s important to follow best practices such as:

• Researching and targeting specific keywords
• Creating high-quality, engaging content
• Optimizing your content for readability and usability
• Including internal and external links
• Using header tags and subheadings to organize your content
• Optimizing your images and videos with relevant tags and descriptions

By following these best practices, you can create effective and SEO-optimized content that will drive more traffic to your website.

In conclusion, content writing is a powerful tool for increasing traffic to your website. By creating high-quality, relevant, and engaging content, you can attract more visitors, improve your search engine rankings, and establish yourself as an authority in your industry. By following best practices and continuously creating and promoting new content, you can continue to drive traffic to your website and achieve your business goals.