8 Post Types for Your Book Blog That Could Lead to Search Engine Traffic

Are you looking for ways to grow your book blog, or just wondering how other bloggers seem to get so much search engine traffic? I don’t specifically write blog posts to get traffic, but here is a list of post types that, after 11 years of blogging, I have found tend to get readers from search engines.

1. Recommendation Lists

This makes sense because “books like The Lord of the Rings” or “middle grade books about mermaids” are exactly the type of thing people tend to Google. I can’t say that every recommendation list we have made is a big hit, but a lot of them do become popular with search engines over time. Our post on books to read if you like Jane Eyre was one of our top-performing posts on the blog for years. Something like “books with dragons” might be too general and face a lot of competition for a top spot on Google’s search, but if you hit the right combination of “things people are looking for that a lot of blogs haven’t posted about yet,” you could hit search engine gold.

2. Posts about What Order to Read Book Series (or Authors’ Works) In

Again, this is something confused readers tend to Google. If an author has a lot of books, or a lot of series set in the same world, people might be wondering where they should start and what order they should read them in. So if you can think of an author where a post like this would be useful, you could be helping a lot of readers out!

3. Discussions of the Endings of Books

I don’t know if people are searching for spoilers or trying to cheat on school assignments or actually looking for discussions about what happens at the end of books, but a lot of our posts about the endings of books have become pretty popular. For example: this post on the ending of The Giver.

4. Posts about Books Frequently Assigned for School

There are definitely people plagiarizing our blog posts for their schoolwork, which I can tell just from some of the search terms they use to get to our blog. Other people are probably using our posts more legitimately, to help orient themselves to a work they’re reading for class or see what other people are saying it. But whatever their motives, texts that are frequently assigned in school get a lot of traffic on our blog, and I can even watch the cycle. For instance, this post on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” tends to get popular in December (aka the end of fall semester in most US universities).

5. Reviews of Books Soon to Be Adapted into Movies

If you can post about a book that’s set to be adapted into a movie or series at the right time (that is, before everyone else starts posting about it), you can definitely get a lot of traffic!

6. Posts about Classic Children’s Picture Books

I don’t know if I have a clear explanation for why this happens, but a lot of our posts about classic children’s picture books like The Giving Tree tend to get a lot of search engine hits. Is it teachers searching for something about them? I’m not sure!

7. Advice for Writers

Again, this is something people obviously Google! So if you’re a writer yourself and have advice to give other writers, whether it’s actually about writing (ex. how to write a convincing romance) or something more organizational (ex. how to find time for writing), try writing a post!

8. Advice for Bloggers

Finally, book bloggers are often looking for advice on how to make their blogs even more awesome, or even to figure out some of the basics. So write about how to pick a blog host, or how to migrate your blog, or how to get ARCs, or anything useful to bloggers, and you may find yourself getting search engine traffic.

What kinds of posts get the most search engine traffic on your blog?