You put so much hard work in building your blog and making it a success. You search for answers and seek help from other bloggers for how to get more page views.
But what are you getting in return for all of your labor to grow blog traffic?
There is little to no traffic. The engagement rate is also significantly low. The only thing that’s high is the bounce rate! 🙁
You’ve tried so many tricks but to no avail. The visitors simply won’t stay on your site for even a mere few seconds! You thought blogging would be easy when you first started but now…you’re stuck and discouraged.
What possibly could you be doing wrong?
This question isn’t meant to discourage you, but rather motivate you to find a solution.
Why Are Page Views So Important, Anyway?
After seeing all your efforts going down the drain, your compensatory thinking pattern may be dominated by this question.
Let’s get it clear: if no one visits your blog, how do you think you’ll generate those links, traffic, and sales?
If you don’t prioritize blogging, your return on investment will ultimately go downhill. Therefore, don’t kill your blog just yet.
How to Get More Page Views on Your Blog
If you want to attract more visitors to your blog and encourage them to stay on your page for longer than a few seconds and check other pages on your site before leaving, you’ve landed on the right article.
Before we dive in, allow me to give you a reality check.
Successful blogging is not easy. It requires focused consistent effort. And it’s just as hard to keep your readers focused. According to a Microsoft study, the average attention span of a human being is about eight seconds. You have to be up to the challenge of keeping your readers engaged with well-written and well-formated content.
The Hub-and-Spoke Content Marketing Strategy
If you fail to convince your website’s visitors to stay on your page within the first few seconds, you might not get a second chance. The hub-and-spoke content marketing strategy is my favorite general strategy for getting the most out of your blog content and increasing page views.
The hub-and-spoke content marketing strategy features high-quality content on your hub (aka your website). This content is then shared through your various content distribution channels (email, podcast, video/YouTube, and social media) with the purpose of engaging people at the end of each spoke. The end goal is to usher the engaged individuals at the end of the distribution spokes back to your website to do even more educating, marketing, and/or sales nurturing. And as you can see, this hub-and-spoke content marketing strategy will help you get more page views on your blog.
Are you ready for more tips? Get your pen and paper ready and take notes on the following tips for how to get more page views on your blog.
13 Tips to Get More Page Views on Your Blog
1. Review Your Content and Blog Design
The foremost thing to do is to evaluate if your blog has something different to offer to the visitors that they probably won’t get anywhere else.
You must know that the competition in almost every niche is pretty crazy out there. The only way to stand out from the crowd is by offering a unique experience.
Make sure that your content is relevant and valuable based on the needs of your target audience. Ask yourself, ‘Does my blog theme needs an upgrade?’ Ideally, the content on your blog should be clear, to-the-point, and compelling. The design also needs to be exciting rather than dull and confusing.
A great way to improve the experience for your visitors is by reducing the time your site takes to load. Let’s face it, nobody likes to stare at the loading sign for even a couple of seconds! Consider compressing all the images used on your site and using a caching plug-in to reduce the loading time of your site.
2. Keep a Close Check on the Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the single-page visits on your blog – the only action that follows is of leaving the site.
One of the best ways to stay on top of your blog’s performance is by tracking your bounce rate for each page from time to time. If you use Google Analytics, you can check it out by navigating to:
Behavior > Site content > All pages
The average bounce rate falls somewhere between 41-55% while 26-40% is considered excellent. To get an accurate idea of your site’s bounce rate, consider using the Reduce Bounce Rate Plugin. It helps you determine what you need to do for the pages with the highest bounce rates.
Generally, visitors bounce off a page if:
- It doesn’t fulfill their expectations
- It doesn’t have any relevant thing that leads them to another page
To reduce the overall bounce rate on your blog, you should follow these tricks.
- Cater to the Visitors’ Needs
To meet your visitors’ expectations, you should focus on optimizing your content. Consider making your pages richer in terms of content by adding a few facts and researches and some relevant images and/or videos. Also focus on the formatting, titles, and meta descriptions of each page.
The higher the satisfaction your blog page yields in the first few seconds, the lesser the bounce rate!
- Offer Relevant Links to Click On
A site that has random, useless links thrown all over the place will never help you achieve your goal of successful blogging.
You should place your relevant links carefully throughout the landing page to guide the visitors through a series of pages they’ll find valuable. The best way to go about this is by breaking long-form posts into a series of smaller posts, adding internal links in your posts, and using excerpts in a smart way. Adding a list of featured posts also works.
3. Use a Good SEO Plugin
The key to getting more page views and generating more traffic on your blog naturally is by ranking in the search engines.
This again brings us to the importance of high-quality content that’s optimized with high-ranking keywords. We understand that the competition is very tough out there but having a good SEO plugin like Yoast helps a lot.
4. Use the Page-Link Tag
If your content strategy is primarily focused on long-form posts, you can break them into a series of two or more shorter posts. Add the page-link tag at the end of the post by typing <!-nextpage-> to guide the readers to the remaining portion of the original post.
Important: Please note that making your visitors click through multiple posts to read content that could easily be put into one post may frustrate them. So, make sure that you use this strategy for long-form posts only.
5. Insert Links at the Right Places
Adding links in your content is a great strategy that offers additional resources for the readers for topics that weren’t the main focus of your posts. You may either do it manually or use a plugin that does it automatically for you.
When you have a few relevant posts linked within your content, it greatly increases your page views in the long run.
6. Learn the Linking Strategy
Another easy way to increase your page views your blog is by adding links to other posts or pages within your content. These links are called internal links.
In WordPress, you simply have to highlight the text you want to add a link to, click on the Insert/edit link button, and click on Or link to existing content. You can either insert the link to a post that you’ve searched or choose one from the given list.
While you’re at it, make sure that you highlight the words or phrases that are really intrigue the reader to explore further. Not to forget, the links should be relevant to your original post at all costs.
To make things easier for you, you can choose to use an interlinking plug-in to quickly link to other relevant posts and pages.
7. Make the Most of the Sidebar
The sidebar is an important aspect of your page — don’t make the mistake of ignoring it. To make the most of this real estate, you should suppress your temptation of adding big images or banner ads that don’t convert and use the sidebar to highlight your most popular posts instead.
Please understand that your popular posts are ‘popular’ for a reason. Showcasing them can help you increase your page views.
WordPress Popular Posts is a great plugin that can be dragged into the sidebar to list all your popular posts. Not only this, it also allows you to add thumbnails, customize the type of posts you want to highlight, set a time range, and even add another version of it in the footer. Most importantly, it’ll keep you updated on the stats of your most popular posts.
8. Pay Attention to the Category Menu on Your Page
There’s a good chance the category menu on your page is pretty basic featuring the pages you have on your site.
Why not get creative and take your visitor experience to the next level?
You must know that visitors like as much help and guidance as they can get when they land on a page. Customizing the categories on your menu list is just one great way of doing it!
Many WordPress themes offer a built-in feature of category navigation or one that allows you to customize the menu feature. Use this opportunity to highlight the specific areas that your visitors may be most interested in or find the most valuable.
That being said, you can even add multiple menus to your WordPress theme if you think it’ll add value.
Power Tip: Don’t go crazy with the categories. Don’t create a new category unless you have at least three articles (or posts) for that category. The goal is to keep your readers engaged with more content that could interest them. You don’t want to annoy your readers by only showing them the same article that they just read when they click on a category or tag.
9. Don’t Forget about the Excerpts
Excerpts are the summaries of the content on your blog page featuring the most recent posts. They usually feature the title of the posts and a thumbnail image to gain the attention of the visitors and push them to click through, resulting in more page views on your blog.
When you’re drafting your excerpts, just make sure that you describe your posts in a way that instantly grabs the attention of the visitors and make them click, click, click!
10. Introduce a Newsletter or Post Notification Services
One of the most powerful tools to get more page views on your blog is an email newsletter.
In the newsletter, what you can do is that you can make a section for your ‘hot posts’ where you can recap the most popular posts of the week.
Apart from all this, you can also offer notification services to automatically notify your readers via email when you post new content to your blog.
11. Invite the Readers to Comment
A great way to get more page views on your blog is by motivating your visitors to participate on your blog. You can do so by inviting them to comment with any suggestions, questions, or concerns that they may have. I know that comments aren’t as popular today as they used to be several years ago, but it’s still a strategy that can’t be completely ignored.
The more comments that your post has, the longer the content and the longer that people spend on your page. Any strategy that keeps visitors on your website for longer is a positive for SEO.
Experiment with highlighting the excellent comments under your post within the body of the post. Sometimes, another visitor’s comment may inspire one to leave a comment.
12. Add a Search Feature
Adding a search feature on your blog page can also greatly help in increasing page views. Your visitors might be looking for a post they read a couple of days ago and the search bar will make it easy for them to get there.
That being said, most blogging platforms already have a search bar on the page but in case yours doesn’t, you can the one offered by AdSense.
13. Give the Visitors a Homework Assignment
This trick works wonders when you’re offering tips and tricks regarding a certain topic. You can even ask them to come back and comment how under the respective post about how their experience was after they learned something.
The bottom line is that there’s so much that you can do to increase page views on your blog. We hope that this post equipped you with what you need for a successful blogging experience.
To continue your quest for how to get more page views, go through our successful blogging tips article to see if you’ve done everything possible to grow your blog traffic.
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13 Tips to Get More Page Views on Your Blog
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