4 Practical Ways to Boost Your Blog’s Performance
There are two kinds of bloggers: those who blog as a hobby and those who blog as a way to build a brand as a content creator. If you’re the former, you might not care too much about your website’s performance as long as it can remain your passion project. All the same, it’s always a good idea to appeal to your readers by maintaining an organized blog that’s both aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.
But if you’re the latter and you intend to set up a blog for your career, for the purpose of generating income, you’ll need to put in the work so that your blog—and you, by extension—can succeed. Some of the most important performance indicators to pay attention to are your site’s metrics, such as traffic sources, homepage visits, time spent on page, and the like. By analyzing the insights derived from this type of data, and then developing appropriate strategies to respond to your findings, you’ll be able to craft a blog with quality content. This will then further push your blog into relevance in an ever-changing, highly competitive landscape.
There are several ways that you can boost your blog’s performance, both on your own and with the help of professionals. Here are some practical tips to get you started:
Practice Good SEO
Literally millions of content creators around the world are trying to make their mark in online spaces, which can make it difficult for your blog to stand out. That being said, the task at hand won’t be impossible. You just have to be more conscientious about developing your content and your website overall. One of the things that can influence this is good SEO or search engine optimization.
By implementing SEO best practices into your blog content and into your website in general, you’ll gradually be able to make your way up to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Ideally, you should work with a reputable company that provides web design services on top of SEO. This way, you can ensure that your blog meets all of the criteria that search engines use to rank websites.
Of course, you shouldn’t leave everything to the capable hands of web designers and developers. You should also know a thing or two about good SEO so that you can abide by its principles every day. Some of the most important SEO practices related to blogging include:
- Making original content
- Making content that’s helpful to your audience
- Optimizing your blog for mobile devices
- Ensuring fast page load speed, even on slower connections
- Add alt text to your images
Finally, make sure that you’re updating your blog regularly. Some bloggers post new content up to four times a week, but you can start small with a once-a-week schedule. After a month or so, check your site’s performance and see when it would be best to upload new content. The key is to be consistent so that your audience always has something to look forward to. Posting new content regularly also ensures that search engines will always have something to crawl and index from your blog.
Make Sure Your Content Is Easy to Read
Today’s readers have short attention spans. If your blog is difficult to read, they’ll probably leave immediately. Do note that “easy to read” in this case means two different things: easy to look at, and easy to understand.
Keep in mind that compared to pictures or videos, text often requires more mental effort to engage with. To make your blog content appealing across all formats, you’ll want to make your formatting as easy on the eyes as possible. Don’t just dump all your talking points into a giant block of text. Instead, use the conventional formatting practice of using sub-headlines to logically divide the content and to introduce a new subject.
It’s also better to write shorter paragraphs and allow the readers to have some visual space in between large chunks of text. If applicable, you can also use bulleted lists to further break up the text and emphasize important points. Visuals like photos, videos, or infographics charts can also serve as pleasant breaks from all the words.
Your blog posts should also be easy to understand. If the language is a little too long-winded or highfaluting, even those who are interested in the topic may be intimidated or even turned off from reading. To gauge the readability of your content, consider an online tool to rate a piece’s comprehension level. Many bloggers aim to reach the reading comprehension level of a 14-year-old for each of their blog posts.
Utilize Popular Keywords
Whether they’re driven by profit or not, the best blogs usually stand out for the creator’s meticulousness and passion for their field. If you don’t like what you’re doing, it will definitely show in the quality of your work. But you should also consider striking a balance between creating content that you like and creating content that delves into popular topics. This will be crucial when it comes to boosting the search traffic on your blog.
Fortunately, there are many free keyword research tools online that can help you get an idea of where to marry your niche with the latest concerns or issues. Make sure to check them regularly for popular articles, questions, and topics that you can write about. You should also pay attention to user intent, as this often influences how queries are typed (e.g., “how to,” “where,” “best”). Thoughtfully incorporating such keywords into your blog topics will allow you to create content that’s relevant to your audience.
Build a Network
Last but not least, you need to learn how to market your blog. If no one knows about it, then almost no one will be able to read it. (Again, you are competing with millions of others.) A good way to get the word out about your blog is to build a network for it. Some ways that you can do so include:
- Writing insightful comments on other blogs
- Linking to other blogs that are relevant to yours
- Sharing your content on social media
- Posting “guest blogs” on other sites
- Joining blogging groups and being active in the community
Networking is an important part of any business, and a blog is no exception. Aside from improving your blog’s performance, your professional network may also pave the way for sponsorships, partnerships, and similar opportunities.
Maintaining a successful blog takes hard work and a lot of patience, but with these tips at your disposal, your blog may eventually become a top-performing asset as well as a passion project. Be thoughtful and purposeful in your approach to maintaining your blog, and create awesome content that will mean as much to others as it does to you.
