35 – 3 Easy Tricks to Help People Discover Your Website and Blog
If you have been blogging or podcasting consistently for a year or more, chances are that over half the people who visit your website or blog find it via an “organic search.”
In other words, they’re not discovering it through clicking a link on a paid Google ad. In an organic search, they google a word or phrase when they’re looking for information about you or about a topic. In the search results, one of your blog posts or a page on your website pops up.
Massive Action Step #1:
Check Google Analytics
Check your site’s Google Analytics to see what channels your traffic is coming from.
Click the Acquisition tab, and under All Traffic, click Channels. It’ll give you a breakdown of:
Organic Search – Includes traffic that search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) send to your website from search results. Organic means that a search engine includes your website in search results because it is a good match for the user’s search, and not because you paid for it.
Direct – When someone accesses your website directly, either through typing in your website’s URL (website address) or through clicking on a bookmark or “favorite” they have saved in their browser.
Social – Traffic generated through social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
Referral – Visitors who come to your website after clicking on a link on another website.
E-mail – Visitors who click a link to a page on your site that’s in an email they receive.
Paid Search – You pay a search engine’s ad network (such as Google AdWords). People who click the ad land on a page of your website. Paid search is the opposite of organic search.
My Analytics Results
Before recording this episode, I reviewed my site’s Google Analytics. During the past 6 months, 72% of the traffic to my site came from organic search.
This is likely because I’ve been blogging consistently about online marketing since 2007, so I have thousands of articles on my website. This gives people thousands of ways to discover me via a search. I also have an engaged email list, so I get a lot of traffic via email.
Massive Action Step #2:
Before Writing Your Post, google Related Keywords
If you want to ramp up the organic reach of your blog posts and podcast episodes, do this:
Before you begin writing your post, ask, “What words and phrases would I google to find my post?”
Do a search for those keywords.
- What articles are listed in the search engine results?
- Do they relate topically to your article?
- Do they include keywords that you could add to your article or title to make it more discoverable?
Massive Action Step #3:
Follow my Foolproof Formula for Writing the Title
When writing headlines for blog posts, ask yourself, “What words would someone google to find this article?”
Include those key words in your post’s title.
Simple, huh?
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Thank you!
Laura