Are you struggling as a Christian blogger to increase organic traffic to your website? As a Christian business owner and business coach, it can be so discouraging trying to grow website traffic with SEO.
I can understand wanting to give up on SEO altogether. But SEO isn’t just about using keywords inside of content.
There are some simple but overlooked things you might be missing as a Christian blogger. In this post, I’m unpacking 5 website traffic mistakes you might be making and not even know it.
I’m also going to share 5 ways that you can increase organic traffic. These SEO tips are so simple to apply to your content!
Um, What’s Organic Traffic?
First of all, you might be wondering what “organic traffic” is and why it’s important for your website. Organic traffic means to have unpaid traffic coming from search engines to your website.
Organic traffic is FREE. You don’t have to pay for it. This is the cheapest (and best way) to increase website traffic as a Christian blogger.
To increase organic traffic to your website, your content has to rank on page 1 or 2 of search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical piece of making sure your content has a chance of getting to the number 1 spot on search engines.
3 other important ways you get traffic from search engines are:
- Direct traffic – People entering your URL in the browser and going directly to your website
- Referral links – Traffic that comes from other websites with your URL link
- Social traffic – Traffic that comes from social media and clicks a link that directs to your URL or content
What are The Benefits of Organic Website Traffic?
Organic traffic is the bees’ knees of growing an online business. A few amazing benefits to organic traffic are:
- Organic traffic is completely free.
- It’s a great way to grow your credibility and authority as a Christian blogger and small business owner
- You can reach new people who have never heard of you
- You can bring new website visitors to your website based on search intent (more on this in a future post!)
It’s the number 1 best way to grow your authority in any niche or market and also a great way to sell your offers and digital products.
Growing an Audience as a Christian Blogger
Keywords are a major part of SEO to increase organic traffic (*obviously*). But using specific keywords inside of your content to increase organic traffic to your website is a small part of the SEO strategy.
As a Christian blogger, the best way to grow an audience (rather than relying on social media and a competing algorithm), blogging is THE best way to create free, valuable content for your audience to consume.
An SEO strategy, in general, is by far the simplest way to increase organic traffic to your website & content and grow an audience of forever fans.
Blogging is THE content marketing asset and strategy your online business needs long-term.
Listen to the episode on the go!
I’m sure you’ve heard *and seen* social media coaches claim that social media is where the marketing success of growing your business happens.
It’s more about promoting instant gratification than the strategy itself. Instant gratification sells. But they neglect to share how much work and effort (and money, cuz it ain’t free) it takes to actually grow an audience and get clients. And we’re not talking about ad spend.
The Truth About Using Social Media to Increase Organic Traffic
Here’s the down-and-dirty on social media marketing. In order to utilize someone else’s group to get eyes on your offer, it takes paying into a membership to post whenever you want, and frequently posting.
So you’re not only paying to promote your business, you are also having to spend a good chunk of your time daily in these pay-to-post groups to make sure that you stay front-of-mind to that specific audience.
It’s a strategy that is time-demanding and costly. Obviously, it’s important to invest in your business initially, but this isn’t the best way to invest in growing your online business as a Christian blogger.
It’s also definitely the complete opposite of working smarter, not harder.
I’m all for popping into Facebook groups and utilizing threads to share a link to your most recent piece of content or offer, but there are much better time-efficient ways to increase organic traffic to your website and grow an audience.
The best long-term strategy to grow a thriving, successful online business as a Christian blogger is *patience* and applying SEO to promote blog content.
Effective SEO Strategy to Increase Organic Traffic
SEO is an extremely effective strategy to increase organic traffic to your website, but one that takes patience, especially if you’re business and domain name is new.
Aged websites are able to leverage keywords, not just because of keywords, but because they have been producing consistent content for search engines. It’s no different than growing your own audience.
Prove to Google that you are going to provide consistent, valuable content, and they will reward you with traffic.
If you can establish a consistent schedule continuously, this signals search engines to know how often your website and content need to be crawled and updated.
Another simple SEO task that can easily be overlooked is regularly updating content, pages, and even plugins.
Search engines want your content and site to be up-to-date. Being a Christian blogger and business coach, you could easily be overlooking some simple and critical ways to increase organic traffic.
They are super easy fixes, so you don’t need to stress!
5 Easy Fixes to Increase Organic Traffic
1. Use more targeted, niche-specifc keywords
The right keywords = more organic traffic. It sounds pretty obvious, but you actually might not be using niche enough keywords to target your audience.
General or broad keywords like “nutrition” or “weight loss” are obviously going to be difficult to rank for. So instead of using these main phrases inside of your content, it would be better to use them as categories.
It takes research to find out what key phrases are being searched for, but if your audience is busy moms and you create content about weight loss, you might be able to rank for something like weight loss for “busy moms” or “weight loss” for “women in their 40s”. “Busy moms” or “women over 40” are very niche-specific keywords..
Trying to rank for one-word keywords initially might be somewhat difficult, especially if they have a high SEO score.
If you can find a keyphrase specific to what you do and what niche you serve that has a low SEO score, those keyphrases are gold.
How to Use Keywords to Increase Organic Traffic
What I always tell my clients is when you are trying to increase organic traffic to your website, your main priority in using niche-specific keywords is to make the SEO score your main focus.
Yes, search volume is important, but you are trying to rank on the first and/or second page of Google and be essentially known for that keyword.
If your domain name is new and your business is new, unless the search volume for a keyphrase or word is zero, it’s worth using.
Long tail keywords are usually very specific. They are actually easier to rank for versus using one single keyword.
If you’re using a keyphrase like “Healthy snacks for busy moms”, that keyphrase should be used exactly the way you found it in search.
That specific keyphrase should also be used in the title of the content. You can use variations of the keyword in the body of the content like “healthy snacks” and “busy moms”.
2. Keep the topics minimal
Having a wide variety of unrelated topics is a big no-no for SEO. As a Christian blogger, having an abundance of topics not only confuses your audience, it also confuses site crawlers, which is a big deal when it comes to SEO.
Optimizing your website also has to do with making sure that your topics stay very tight and within your audience, your expertise, and what your audience is interested in learning from you.
What it really comes down to is being as clear and as specific as possible. For example, if your overall main expertise is nutrition, your subtopics might be meal planning, healthy snacks, and weight management. All of the subtopics mentioned are umbrella topics tightly related to nutrition.
You wouldn’t want to have subtopics on your website that have no relation, like interior design. Maybe you’re a nutritionist and your hobby is interior design.
If you also want to coach on interior design but you already invested in building your audience around nutrition, you need to make one of two choices.
Since nutrition and interior design have nothing to do with each other, you’re either going to have to one: Decide which niche to serve, because you can’t serve two niches on one main website, or two, Start an entirely separate platform and grow your interior design audience that way.
3. Make your content readable/skimmable
Content structure matters. If your content is a big jumbled mess and it’s not easily navigational or readable, you’re going to lose readership, plain and simple.
Content structure also matters to make your content easily crawlable for bots. In other words, It totally matters!
Add subheadings between every 3 paragraphs to break up the text. Break up the text into smaller paragraphs to make it more skimmable.
Especially on mobile view, longer paragraphs are so hard to read.
When it comes to the teaching part of the content, list form or bullet lists are usually the best to use because it breaks up the content to make it easier to read and consume.
4. Create VALUABLE content – Provide a quick win or solution
EVERY single piece of content that you create must give your reader the small next step to solve their current problem.
That’s what makes content so valuable. If your content is not outcome-based, it’s not doing your reader any favors. So, the next time you sit down to write content, ask yourself these questions:
- What am I teaching in this piece of content?
- What solution am I providing?
- What are my reader’s next steps?
Your content should always walk them through their current problem and provide an outcome, step-by-step.
5. Create better titles that trigger your reader
Apart from using keywords that get your content to rank on Google, titles also are a big deal. You want your content to stand out from others in the industry.
The best way to start adding some flare to your titles is to research some power words and uncommon words.
You can also do some research and see how other people in your niche are creating their titles (but don’t copy!!).
The three best title headlines that get a lot of clicks are:
- “How to” posts
- “3 ways to [solve your problem]”
- “Stuck with [problem]? Try THIS”, or “Use these 3 hacks to [insert solution]”
Growing an Online Business as a Christian Blogger
Trying to increase organic traffic and grow an online business as a Christian blogger isn’t just about keywords. It’s also about those little details that are easy to miss, but easy to test and tweak.
If you have any content or page that you feel needs some feedback, we have a copywriting prompt Wednesday in my Facebook group for you to leave your link to get feedback on.
Hey Katie!
This is a wonderful blog telling about simple ways to increase organic traffic. Getting organic is not easy but if you follow few simple tips, organic traffic becomes as smooth as a pie.
Thank you so much for your comment! I totally agree! Having a successful organic strategy is just by following some basic steps to increase traffic to your website. It doesn’t have to be complicated! 🙂