6 Tips to Get More Visitors to Your Blog

You spend a lot of time writing great content for your blog, so it would be nice if more people read it, right? If you want to get more visitors to your blog, this post is for you.

You probably also have a goal for blogging. You might be an author trying to connect with readers or a small business owner trying to reach your customers. Those things don’t happen if people aren’t reading your posts.

Try these 6 tips related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that will help you get more readers to your blog.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

The short answer: SEO is designing your website in such a way that Google will feature your page high in it’s results.

For instance, if I’ve done this right, you might have found this post by searching something like “how do I get more readers on my blog posts?”

SEO can be complicated, but I find it makes sense to my clients when I boil it down to “how can I make a website or blog post that people want to use?”

How to get more visitor to your Blog

To put it another way, Google recommends websites based on what it thinks readers will want. If you know the things Google is looking for, you can make sure your blog post includes them.

Here are 6 specific things that you can do in your blog posts to increase your SEO scores.

1. Pick blog post topics that will help or intrigue your audience

People want websites that are useful and interesting. When Google is deciding what websites to suggest, it looks at this to decide which post to show people.

Specific things to do:

  • Research your audience and write content that they will want to read. What questions do they have? What content do they enjoy?
  • Writers: Your audience may be readers, fellow writers, teachers, and others. 
  • Small business owners: your audience is your customers

Most of the topics for my blog posts come directly from discussions with my clients. Other have come from questions I see in writers groups and small business groups.

2. Make your writing readable

Screenshot from Hemingway App of the first draft of this blog post. It shows that the readability score is at 4th grade level.
The rough draft of this post as seen in Hemingway App. The readability score in the right-hand side is listed as a 4th grade level.

People want easy to read blog posts. Given the option between a dense novel like Crime and Punishment and a fun, page-turned like Gideon the Ninth, I know which I’m taking on vacation. (Sorry, Dostoyevsky.)

Aim for writing that is easy and fun, even if it’s technical. My Writer Websites for Beginners post is an example of that.

A 4th grade reading level is recommended for most adult audiences. It gets easier with practice. I rarely use a tool to check my readability these days because I’ve spent enough years honing my writing to hit readability goals automatically. (The screenshot above is the rough draft of this blog post – I hit a 4th grade level automatically.)

Specific things to do:

  • Run your blog post text through a free tool like Hemingway App. It will help you zero in on ways to improve your writing and give you a grade level estimate for readability. Try to write at a 4th grade level or lower.

3. Use good structure for easy to read (and skimmable) content

Screenshot Of Adding A Header To This Blog Post

People skim online writing. So let’s make it easy for them to get the most important information from your posts.

Google likes websites with good structure because it makes it easy to skim quickly.

  • Use headers in your blog posts. Use headers to show people the structure of your post. (It also means they can skim them and still get the important content.
  • Make your paragraphs skimmable. Summarize your most important points in the first sentence of each paragraph. So if people only read the bolder parts of this post, they’ll still get the idea. (If you’re still reading this, say hi in the comments.)

4. Use keywords and phrases

Google looks at keywords and key phrases in your blog post to identify it’s content and match it to Google searchers. It can help to target one per blog post.

But use them well! Once upon a time, people figured out that they could game Google by using as many keywords as possible. (Aka. “Keyword stuffing.”) Real people don’t want to read a bunch of keywords vomited onto a webpage, which is why Google began to look at content quality so it can recommend websites that are actually good for users. And we all searched happily ever after.

Specific things to do:

  • Identify a keyword or phrase for each blog post. Make sure that keyword is in at least a few of these prominent locations in your text: the title, first paragraph, some headers, picture alt text, etc.

5. Use alt text

Screenshot of adding alt text to the previous image.

Alt text is a short description of what an image contains. It’s hidden in the website code most of the time, so you don’t see it.

Google likes it when you use alt text on your images for two reasons:

A. Alt text makes your blog posts more accessible to people who are visually impaired and using screen readers.

B. Alt text helps Google know what the image shows.

Specific things to do:

  • Add an alt text to every image on your website. In WordPress, you can click on the image in the media library to add an alt text. (In the screenshot above, it’s the box below the preview of the image.) Other website builders have similarly easy ways to add it.
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6. Use quality links

Google also looks at the number and quality of links to and from your website. That’s because good websites tend to connect to other good websites. Users also don’t reshare bad blog posts on social media!

Specific things to do:

  • Use external links from your website to another reputable website that’s relevant. For instance, I’ve got a link to Hemingway App earlier in this post.
  • Use internal links from one part of your site to another. This helps readers find your content. Linking to another of your blog posts on a related topic is a fantastic way to do that, like I did with my
  • Backlink from other sites back to yours and encourage readers to do the same. Sharing a new post on social media is a great way to do that! It’s also how a lot of blog posts are discovered these days. (If you came here from social media, let me know in the comments!)

Tool to help you with SEO on your website.

Part of the Yoast results for this blog post before I tweaked the post. It notes the things I’ve already done and things I can improve to get more visitors to this blog post.

For WordPress Websites like the ones I create, there are a couple of free plugins that can help you manage all this.

Yoast is the one I use. It helps you identify ways you can improve the SEO on a page or blog post. (A lot of the stuff on the list in the screenshot above should sound familiar!)

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is another popular plugin that works well.

SEO is an artform

Learning these rules will help you level up, getting better SEO scores, and more views on your blog posts

Really mastering it takes time because, like writing, it’s an artform. It takes practice and experience – something I lend to clients when I help them build or rebuild a website. That lets them start with a firm foundation so they can build on it using the resources I share with them – and now with you.

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