How to Get Your Blog Noticed in 2024 and Beyond

If you’re curious about how to get your blog noticed, we have good news and bad news for you.

Well, the bad news is, the competition has never been tougher for bloggers. There are now over 600 million blogs on the world wide web, which cumulatively publish more than 6 million posts every day – or over 2.5 billion annually ^[1].

The good news is that, on the flip side, the same competitors happen to be a rich source of insights into how to get your blog noticed. By assessing their analytics, you get to establish what really works with the audiences and what doesn’t.

In short, therefore, you don’t need to try and reinvent the wheel through guesswork. The trick here is to emulate the same strategies that successful bloggers have used to get to the top.

👉 We call this “reverse engineering.” And here are 5 solid techniques to get you started:

1. Discover what’s missing with content gap analysis
2. Prioritize linkable assets
3. Increase CTR with attention-grabbing headlines
4. Provide value with long-form articles
5. Loot your competitors’ backlinks

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How to get your blog noticed: 5 proven strategies

1. Discover what’s missing with content gap analysis

Don’t be the type of blogger that tries their luck with random types of posts. You should, instead, proceed calculatedly by publishing only pieces that have the best potential for getting lots of visitor traffic. That means that every single article ought to be on a relevant high-interest topic.

Now, to discover the best blog topics to pursue, we’d recommend performing a content gap analysis. This is a content auditing procedure, in which you evaluate and match your blog against the best-performing competitors so as to identify any “gaps” in your content.

“Gaps,” in this case, refers to the edge that niche competitors have over your blog. You can think of them as missed content opportunities.

And to point them out, content gap analysis involves both qualitative and quantitative checks.

You could, for instance, bring in keyword analysis tools to identify all of the major SEO keywords that you’re missing out on.

The likes of SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz already have keyword gap analysis tools that are capable of digging through your competitors’ blogs, and drawing up a list of the keywords they’re ranking for, but that your blog isn’t.

From that, you should be able to develop topic ideas using the keywords that have a high traffic potential accompanied by low levels of competitiveness.

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2. Prioritize linkable assets

As you start discovering potentially lucrative opportunities from the content gap analysis, you might want to keep in mind that SEO isn’t just about keyword placement.

Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, clarified that the search engine factors in hundreds of ranking signals – with links being one of the most essential ones.

Google’s PageRank algorithm itself is engineered to treat inbound links as indicators of your blog’s authority in the specific keyword niches you’re ranking for. The more natural backlinks your blog attracts, the higher it ranks in the search results.

And that’s not all. On the question of how to get your blog noticed, experts will also tell you that inbound links are great for increasing brand exposure and pulling in referral traffic.

The only problem is, it’s incredibly difficult to win over natural backlinks – so much so that over 66% of web pages today have zero referring domains ^[2]:

Now, to avoid the same fate, you should try to format all your content pieces as linkable assets. By that, we mean that instead of just churning out random articles, you ought to take your time and set up authoritative pieces in a referenceable format.

Some of the content types that tend to attract the highest number of backlinks include:

• Infographics: You can borrow a leaf from this NeoMam infographic post that has, so far, gained more than 104,000 backlinks ^[3].
• “How to” posts: Such as this one by HubSpot, which boasts over 22,000 backlinks.
• Research reports/compilations: Like this one that was published in 2020 by HubSpot ^[4]. It went on to gain more than 138,000 backlinks.
• Interactive tools that provide personalized information: For example, this dollar-a-day financial calculator from FinMasters tells you how much money you’d have today, if you invested $1 in the stock market daily, starting from your birthday. It has over 123,000 backlinks.

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3. Increase CTR with attention-grabbing headlines

Never underestimate the power of your content headline. This is what gives your target audience their first impression of your site, and influences their decision of whether or not to click on your article.

So, in a way, you could say that your click through rate (CTR) ultimately comes down to how you’ve structured the content headlines. Studies suggest that traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on the headline alone ^[5].

That said, audiences have shown that they’re particularly fond of unbranded headlines that are simple but sufficiently descriptive.

The ideal length for a great headline is between 14 and 17 words in total ^[6]. It just so happens that long headlines have always outperformed short ones on both Google Search and social media.

Another thoughtful tactic here would be setting up the headline as a question instead of a statement. Psychologists explain that the former registers 150% higher CTR because of the impact it makes on human curiosity ^[7]. Questions reportedly compel the inquisitive part of your mind to click and find out more.

You could also try to format the title as a list. And the reason is, 36% of readers are more likely to click on headlines with numbers, especially when they’re accompanied by superlatives ^[8]:

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4. Provide value with long-form articles

Once you draw readers in with a great headline, you’ll need an equally engaging piece of content to retain them.

The caliber of internet users today is adequately informed, and can usually discern between low-quality and high-quality publications. As such, you’ll find that they overwhelmingly go for long-form pieces with enough info to sufficiently satisfy their search intent.

On average, long-form content pieces with 3,000 to 7,000 words tend to get 24% more shares and twice as many page views as articles of average length (between 900 and 1,200 words) ^[9]. The difference even doubles when you stretch beyond 7,000 words:

Don’t get us wrong, though. We’re not telling you to throw in as many words as possible. Rather, the key focus should be the value that your readers will get from the posts. The word count should just come naturally after you’ve compiled all the relevant insights on the topic.

By providing value, you’re bound to even attract the attention of other publishers, who’ll then proceed to publish backlinks that identify you as a credible authority on the subject.

Blog posts stretching beyond 3,000 words are already boasting 77.2% more referring domains than their short-form counterparts ^[6]. This is how they ultimately manage to rise through the rankings while progressively extending their reach.

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5. Loot your competitors’ backlinks

While links have the power to improve search rankings and increase your blog’s reach, the unfortunate thing is, such inbound links don’t come easy. 41% of SEO experts find link building itself to be the most challenging part of search optimization ^[10].

It doesn’t have to be that difficult for you, though. It turns out that instead of building all the backlinks from scratch, you could simply steal a couple of high-quality ones from your competitors.

One way to do so is through Brian Dean’s famous Skyscraper Technique. This is a three-step procedure in which:

• You use a backlink checker like Moz, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to identify your competitor’s backlink-rich assets.
• You subsequently create a more insightful linkable asset on your blog.
• Then upon publishing the post, you reach out to your competitors’ referring domains with links to the updated content. Some of them will gladly replace your competitors’ backlinks with yours to keep their publications up to date.

Another technique you could leverage is broken link building. You just need to audit competitors’ sites with a broken link checker (such as Ahrefs), identify dead backlinks on subjects that you’ve already built content in, and then reach out to the broken links’ webmasters with relevant alternatives that point to your blog.

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Over to you

With these five pointers, you should now be able to figure out how to get your blog noticed by not only readers, but also search engines, social media users, and third-party publishers.

So, you don’t need to sabotage your blogging efforts with guesswork. Just invest in the right competitor analysis and content auditing tools, use them to analyze key web metrics, and then act on the resulting information. It’s that simple and straightforward.

How do you get your blog noticed? Let us know in the comments section below!