How to Write a Blog Post That Actually Gets Traffic

How to Write a Blog Post That Actually Gets Traffic

How to Write a Blog Post That Actually Gets Traffic. You write a blog post, hit that publish button, and then… no one reads it. The problem isn’t necessarily your writing. It doesn’t mean that people don’t likeyou. It just means that your content likely isn’toptimized to be found. So in this video, I’m going to show you how to write a blog post that drives consistent readers to your blog that you probably should be getting. Stay tuned. [music] What’s up bloggers? Today, I want to help you clear the confusionand turn that blank screen into an absolutely epic blog post that a.) people want to readand b.) attracts the target audience you want. Now, rather than focusing on subjective techniqueslike writing style, I’m going to show you how to build a consistent stream of readerswith strategic topic selection and workflows. Let’s get to it. First, I want to give you an idea of whatconsistent readership looks like and what it definitely does not look like. They’re essentially the same thing. All of these people fall into different bucketsin terms of how they discover and consume content on your website. You might also be using paid ads or emailmarketing to send readers to your posts. These are all great, but paid traffic is onlygood for as long as you’re willing to pay. 

The same goes for your email list. Now, what about social? Same thing. hese peaks, as Rand Fishkin calls them, are "spikes of hope." And if you’ve used any of these marketing strategies, then I’m sure you’ve experienced what comes after. The "flatline of nope." Organic traffic on the other hand can produce the opposite effect. Free, passive, and hopefully growing trafficthat doesn’t fade over time. And this is the primary strategy we used to grow Ahrefs blog to over 220,000 monthly search visitors. Now, I’m not telling you to stop sendingemails to your list or reduce your PPC ad spend. What I want you to take away from these examples is that billions of people are searching for informational content. And if you have a blog, you should make itspurpose to satisfy the needs of searchers and in return, get the traffic you deserve. With that said, let’s jump right into step 1, which is to come up with topics that are proven to generate traffic. The most common problem I see with new bloggersis that they write "me-centered" posts. Now, there’s nothing wrong with creatingcontent about what you ate for breakfast. But it’s all about how you frame it. For example, if I had a recipe blog, how manypeople do you think would search for, "what did Sam Oh eat for breakfast today?" No one! People go to Google for solutions to their problems. 

Let’s run a search for our main topic, "blueberry pancakes." Next, I’ll go to the Phrase match reportto find keyword ideas on this topic. Right away, you’ll see some great keywordideas like "blueberry pancakes recipes," "how to make blueberry pancakes," and "vegan blueberrypancakes" along with keyword metrics like search volume beside them. Now, the thing with search volume is that itcan be a bit misleading. Now, if we click on the SERP button, and lookat the traffic column for the top ranking pages, you’ll see that these pages get significantlymore traffic than the estimated search volume. Top ranking pages only get around 27% trafficcompared to the main keyword’s search volume. Now, this is just one topic you might wantto write about. So let’s change this to "recipes." And just like that, you have a list of over 2.4 millionkeywords that contain the word "recipes." Let’s narrow this down to some low-competitiontopics with high search volume. I’ll set the Keyword Difficulty filter to show keywords that have a maximum score of something low like 10. From here, it’s just a matter of clicking on the SERP button and analyzing traffic potential of each topic that might be worth creating a post on. Another thing you can do is find topics thatare generating traffic for your competitors and then create content around those topics too. 







So since I have a recipe blog, I’ll go toAhrefs’ Site Explorer and enter in one of my competitor’s domains. Next, I’ll go to the Top pages report, tofind out which pages are generating the most search traffic for them. So looking at this report, I can immediatelysee that chocolate chip cookies, lo mein, and cooking tofu, might be good topics to writeblog posts about. And as you can see, finding topics that peoplecare to search for isn’t hard. Just make sure you check the total trafficpotential behind the topic, so you don’t waste time writing content that people don’t care to read. Let’s move on to step 2, which is superimportant and that’s to assess search intent. Search intent represents the reason behinda searcher’s query. For example, if someone searches for "howto make pancakes," what do you think they want to see? Probably recipes, right? But what about if someone searches for thequery "slow cooker?" What are they looking for? Do they want to buy one? Read reviews? See a list of recipes or something entirelydifferent? The good news is that search intent is reallyeasy to identify. All you have to do is search for the keywordphrase you want to rank for in Google and the search results will reveal what I liketo call, The second C is content format. When it comes to blog posts, a few commonformats would be "how-to" guides, step-by-step tutorials, list posts, or opinion editorials. There are a lot of different formats, butthis should give you an idea of what you should be on the lookout for.







The final C is content angle. The angle is often depicted in the title asthe "benefit" as to why someone should 

Now, just to show you how important this stepis, let’s type "slow cooker," into Google. If you don’t have a similar page on yoursite, you probably shouldn’t target the keyword, because your chances of ranking will be slim to none. tutorialwhich I’ll link up. For now, let’s move on to step 3, whichis to write a data-driven outline. A page doesn’t rank for just one keyword. In fact, our data shows that on average, the#1 ranking page also ranks for nearly a thousand other keywords. So when you’re creating your outline, it’ll pay to know which keywords the top ranking pages are ranking for so you can get the most mileageout of your blog posts. To do this, go to Keywords Explorer and searchfor the target keyword you want to rank for. Then scroll to the bottom of the page, whereyou’ll see the top 10 ranking pages along with their SEO metrics. And as expected, a bunch of these pages areranking for thousands of keywords. To see the keywords that this page ranks for,let’s click on the number in the corresponding row, which will open up the Organic Keywordsreport in Site Explorer. Now, to keep these keywords relevant, let’sset a filter to only show keywords that rank in position 1 through 10. This will weed out a lot of irrelevant keywordsthat we don’t need to target. A few interesting words that pop out to meare "from scratch," "recipe," and "batter." Now, rather than trying to stuff these keywords into your post, it’s best to think of these as subtopics. You can also use them to solidify the angleyou want to take for your post.

So I may take the angle of creating homemadepancakes from scratch. As for the subtopics, I would likely havea section on "making the batter." And under the subheadings, I may include descriptivewords people are searching for like "delicious and fluffy." And I may even include a substitute to makethe batter without milk. Finally, just add some bullet points beloweach of the subheadings to ensure that you stay on topic once you get to writing the draft. Speaking of which, let’s move on to step 4 and that’sto write your first draft. Now, the purpose of this step isn’t to writea perfect blog post that everyone's going to love. It’s to get your thoughts on screen andinto full sentences. If you’ve created a detailed outline, it’s just a matter of looking at your bullet points and making them flow together. These are two tricks that I use that workparticularly well for me. First is the Pomodoro technique. In short, you set a 25-minute timer and agoal you want to achieve in that time. For example, my average typing speed is around115 words per minute. But since blogging requires more criticalthinking than a typing test, I’ll set my goal to 20% efficiency. So this translates into around 575 wordsevery 25 minutes. 

Times before you find the perfect phrasing. After your first 25-minutes are up, take a 3-5 minute break and rinse and repeat until complete. This step is all about efficiency and youdon’t want to do anything that would stop you from reaching that goal. In the next step, you need to edit your draft. From my experience, it’s best to take timeaway from your piece before editing it. There are usually two parts to this. First is to fix spelling and grammatical issues. This is pretty straightforward and tools likeGrammarly can help ease the process. The second part is to make sure that yourblog post flows and provides value to readers. If you find that it sounds unnatural, roboticor whatever, then make edits where needed. One last tool I recommend is Hemingway Editor. Just paste your post in there and it’llgive you a readability grade. A general rule of thumb is to aim for sixthgrade level readability. This will ensure that your blog posts areeasy to read and understand. Now step 6 is my favorite part of writingblog posts and that’s to get honest feedback. In my opinion, this is one of the most criticalsteps in our content creation process. And it’s what allows us to consistently get positive feedback from various online communities. Here’s how we do it at Ahrefs. 

Josh, our resident blog master, is responsibleto ensure that every post that goes live on our blog is absolutely epic. But epic is subjective. So for each post that he writes, my job isto provide feedback, question any claims, and offer suggestions where relevant. Now, my job is to create videos that are alwaysproviding value to you, our viewers. So Josh will review and provide feedback justas I do for his blog posts. And to add an extra layer of quality control,we loop in Tim and Nick to make sure that everything we publish is top notch. I cannot recommend this step enough. Ask your colleagues, friends, or whoever toreview your content, so your team can consistently produce your best stuff. The last and final step is to create your final draft.It’s now your job to take that feedback and make decisions on what goes in the final version and what’s not. Go through each touch point, and once allpoints have been resolved, you just need to do one final read through.