The Importance Of SEO For A Blog

SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, it is the process of getting your site or blog ranked on the unpaid list of results of a search engine.

Related read: Using Google Analytics To Improve My Blog

To create these lists, search engines 1. Crawl pages to build an index and 2. Determine which websites are most relevant and provide a ranked list to searchers.

SEO is the best free way to drive traffic to your site or blog. According to internetlivestats.com, Google can have an average of over 40,000 search queries worldwide every second. This equals to more than 3.5 billion searches each day. Can you imagine capturing just a little bit of that traffic for your blog?

(This post includes affiliate links. Should you click an affiliate link and make a purchase I may make a small commission at no extra cost to you.)

For several months I’ve been trying to capture as much of this organic search traffic as I can. In May I captured more of it than I ever have. Comparing May to April my organic traffic increased 16% month-over-month! This made it my largest traffic driver for the first time ever! I couldn’t believe it.

This increase in organic traffic couldn’t have come at a better time as my social traffic decreased 50% month-over-month. This is completely due to Pinterest. My traffic from Pinterest decreased by 58% while my traffic from Facebook and Twitter both increased.

Related read: What I’m Doing To Reduce My Bounce Rate

Another thing I saw this month was the visitors coming in from organic search tend to read a few more posts during each visit than those who come in from social media.

When I saw this all I could think about was what a few other bloggers have started saying. You can’t and shouldn’t depend on social media to increase your blog traffic. SEO is crucial for growing a blog.

To help increase my organic traffic I did several things to SEO optimize my blog. Some of the key things I did were

• Included keywords and longtail keywords in old and new posts
• Added related post links to old and new posts
• Updated headlines to be more compelling and used keywords
• Changed to a more mobile and SEO-friendly design theme

I’m hoping that I’ll be able to continue this trend with my organic traffic.

How I’m Doing with My 2017 Goals

1. Fully optimize arelaxedgal.com site for SEO by the end of Q1
Completed. As noted above my organic traffic increased 16% month-over-month and social traffic decreased dramatically due to a 58% decline in Pinterest traffic.

Related read: How I'm Winning At Pinterest An You Can Too

2. Retain readers on my site
In May I had slightly fewer new visitors than in April. My bounce rate decreased by less than 1%.

What really stood out to me is the Pages per Session increased by about 7% and Average Session Duration increased by 13%. This shows that visitors were interested in my content and stuck around to consume more content.

3. Grow my social followers and increase engagement
I saw a slightly greater increase in social followers in May than I did in April. This was driven primarily by Facebook. To help me post more consistently to my social channels I've been using a tool to automatically post to Facebook and Twitter - SocialPilot.

While I've been posting more consistently, the downside is my overall social engagement decreased. Not the direction I wanted this metric to go.

4. Grow my email subscriber list to at least 1,000 by 12/31
In May I got more serious about my email list and made several changes and updates. The biggest change I made was how my subscriber lists are set up.

I've been using MailerLite to send out more emails in an effort to keep my subscribers engaged. I didn’t have many unsubscribes and I also got a little bit of site traffic from those emails.

Unfortunately, these changes only led to about 15 new subscribers, but taking into account unsubscribers, I had one new net subscriber. This brings my total number of subscribers to 89.

5. Do a least one paid post a quarter
I’ve had a few brands reach out to me about sponsored posts. I’m working on getting more information and finalizing details. Hopefully one of these will pan out into something viable for the quarter.

6. Create an image library of at least 24 images by year-end
In May I added seven more images to my library bringing me to a total of 19 images in my library. I’m not five images away from my goal. I’m hoping I might surpass it.

What was your blog's biggest traffic driver in May?