How to Get Traffic to Your Blog: The Ultimate Guide
By: Boussalia Rafik
Tags: Blogging Tips, Blogging, Traffic Optimization, SEO, Digital Marketing

If you’re a blogger, one of your biggest struggles is probably getting traffic.

You’ve probably tried looking for ways to grow your traffic, just to find generic advice like “publish more often” or “share it on social media”.

The thing is when you’re starting out, no one reads what you’re writing and you have no social media following, so how are you supposed to get traffic?

It’s simple: you reverse engineer what successful blogs are doing.

Basically, the most effective way to grow your traffic is to see what’s working for your competitors and then copy what they’re doing.

Here’s how you can do this.

1. Find your top 10 competitors

Go to google and type in “best blogs about [your niche]” and choose the 10 most popular blogs.

If you already know who your top competitors are, you can skip this step.

2. See where their traffic is coming from

As I said earlier, the best way to get traffic is to see where your competitors are getting traffic from and replicate what they’re doing.

To do this, we’ll use a tool called Similar Web. This is an awesome tool that lets you see where other blogs in your niche are getting their traffic from.

All you have to do is type in your competitor’s URL, and Similar Web will give you their traffic stats:

Do this for your top 10 competitors and you’ll start to notice a trend in the results.

3. Go after their biggest traffic source

After analyzing your top 10 competitors, you should have a clear idea of how they’re getting their traffic.

Now your job is to choose just one traffic source and understand how you can use it to get visitors to your blog.

You’ll probably find that their biggest traffic source is search, mainly Google.

You should also know that search traffic is a reliable source, unlike social media or other sources that give you a quick spike in traffic that fades away days later.

Since we’ve established that the most popular blogs get the biggest chunk of their traffic from Google, it’s time to learn how to optimize your blog to do the same thing.

4. Learn SEO

I know what you’re thinking:

“SEO is too hard”

“SEO is too overwhelming”

“I’m not a tech-savvy kind of person, I can’t do SEO”

“SEO takes too long”

If you’re thinking anything along those lines, you should think again. I also thought that SEO was too complicated for a while, but it’s really not.

If you have the willingness to learn and the proper resources to learn from, you’ll be able to pick it up fairly quickly.

Instead of leaving you wondering what to do next, here’s how you can learn SEO:

First, read Brian Dean’s post, How to Learn SEO In 2020 (In Record Time) — By far one of the best guides about SEO on the web. It covers EVERYTHING you need to know about SEO in one place.

After that, I suggest you go and watch How to Do Keyword Research for a NEW Website (Full Tutorial) — An excellent tutorial about keyword research from Ahrefs.

Finally, I highly recommend you go through Ahref’s Blogging For Business free course — It’s an excellent training about SEO and growing your blog.

I also recommend you subscribe to Ahref’s Youtube Channel and Backlinko’s newsletter, they offer really good content on SEO.

5. Practice what you learn

After you spend some time learning the basics of SEO, it’s time to start implementing them on your own blog.

Conclusion

After years of trial and error, and countless hours of research, I came to this conclusion: if you really want to get traffic, optimize your blog for SEO.

Sure, there are other methods that will help you get small wins and traffic boosts from time to time, but if we’re talking long term traffic that grows over time, SEO is the best option.