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Bloggers brand new and seasoned seem to chase one thing: pageviews. Whether it’s because they want to make enough pageviews to join the illustrious Mediavine, or because it’s validation that this blogging “thing” is more than just a hobby.
Whatever your reason for wanting more pageviews, I don’t think it needs to be said that your content needs to be up to par if you want pageviews. But if your blog has a clean aesthetic, you’ve got great content, and you’re posting regularly…you’re going to want to hear these tips from 20 experts on how to increase your blog’s pageviews.
I posed the following question to SEO experts, bloggers, and strategists: How can bloggers increase their blog’s pageviews?
One thing that bloggers have to get ok with, sooner rather than later, is that pageviews are driven by what people are actually searching for.
As an example, while I want to talk about the differences between hot and cold growing regions, there aren’t any searches attached to that. As opposed to that, there’s almost 5k searches a month for something really basic like how many ounces are in a glass of wine.
So really, to effectively have a pageview strategy, much like a SEO
strategy, you need to have an idea of what people are actually searching for, not what you want to write about!
Oddly enough, bloggers can be quite reserved when it comes to promoting their posts. There is often a fear that they don’t want to become ‘spammy’ or turn their followers off by constantly promoting their blog posts.
I coach bloggers to think about it in another way. With social media algorithms making it so that only 6-10% of our audiences see our posts, by promoting a post 10 times in a day, a different group of readers could see that notification at different times therefore they won’t feel spammed.
It is the same for our Insta Stories and our Facebook posts. So instead of just popping up a quick note to tell your followers that you’ve written a new post, strategically plan out a promotional schedule which means you are informing your platforms as much as possible.
Since doing this, my traffic has tripled and I’m now getting more returning visitors. Plus anyone who loves you, loves to hear from you – and if they don’t, then they’re not your people anyway!
helps experts, authors, and coaches grow their impact online and book more clients using sales psychology and modern marketing methods.
My favorite strategy for building momentum and reaching new readers quickly is to use Facebook Ads. You can target the readers of other big magazine websites in your industry, and even narrow it down by location, gender, age range and a wide variety of other interests.
Once you’ve found an audience of your ideal readers, promote your blog posts to them using the Facebook Ads platform and if your content is good, they will stick around for more.
Look at how other magazine sites are sharing their content on Facebook, and format your ads to look exactly the same. This is really important, as if your ad looks like an interesting article that they are used to clicking on, you won’t have people subconsciously scrolling past and just labeling you as spam or a promotion.
The best types of content to share are list posts, like “10 things/reasons/ways to…” and articles that are a little controversial or are on topics that are currently trending.
With a bit of testing, you can get this as cheap as $0.10 per click and is
well worth the time!
In my marketing, blogging and entrepreneurship career, the most effective strategy to increase pageview traffic should be keyword research.
PERFORMING KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR BEST TRAFFIC
Your SEO core strategy to enhance pageview traffic is incomplete without
keyword ranking and research. To improve search engine ranking and overall ROI, keyword research and optimization is an important integral part of the SEO campaign and one of the best pageview strategies for bloggers to increase traffic.
This strategy with many others was key in increasing the organic traffic of our sister blog from 253K to 650K within 7 months.
Long-term, the best traffic strategy for bloggers is to focus on search engine optimization (SEO). Other traffic sources, like social media, can be great, but you’ll need to put in continual work to keep the traffic coming. If you have a blog with solid on-page optimization, and you continue to focus on creating content that has a chance to rank, you’ll see great results in the long-term.
One of the reasons a lot of bloggers don’t really like SEO is because it can take a while to see the results. You may not get much search traffic the first 6 – 12 months, but once you’ve started to establish some authority and Google trusts your site, you’ll start to see more traffic. If you keep working, that traffic is likely to continue to increase.
There are a few great things about organic search traffic:
- it’s free traffic
- the visitors are actively looking for the content that you offer, and
- you won’t have to continue working everyday to get that traffic. Once your blog’s authority is established and you have some posts/pages that are ranking well, the traffic will come every day with no extra effort on your part.
In order to get organic search traffic, your blog should be well optimized for search engines, you should be creating content to target specific keywords and search phrases, and you should work to build links from other blogs in your niche.
My favorite strategy for getting more views on my website is simple: Write blog articles on topics your audience wants to know more about.
All too often, businesses make the mistake of starting a blog with no clue what to write about. So they default to what they know: themselves. They write content that is overly promotional or give updates on what is happening internally like, Jim Jacobs got promoted to VP of Sales! I hate to be the one to tell you this, but prospective customers don’t really care.
What they do care about is getting answers to the most pressing questions they have about the products and services you sell.
So how can you do this right?
Send out an email to all customer-facing employees (especially the sales team) requesting the top 20 questions prospects and customers ask on a daily basis. In less than half a day’s time, you should have months worth of blog article topics to write about.
The key to answering these questions is to be as open, honest, and transparent as possible while NOT focusing on your company. Use these articles to better educate your audience so they can make the most informed purchase decisions that are best for them, even if that means not buying from you (which can be a tough pill to swallow).
Aim to be the Wikipedia of your industry: the most trusted source of information on topics relevant to your consumers. Use the 80/20 rule of content marketing: 80% of the content should be educational and only 20% should be promotional. Listen to your prospects. Learn their pain points. Write content that solves their problems. You’ll be rewarded with an increase in traffic, higher quality leads, and, ultimately, more revenue.
This is a strategy I’ve used myself to grow traffic for a company I used to
be the Content Marketing Manager for– Alaska Sleep Clinic. While there, I
took their monthly traffic from 2,500 visitors per month to over 400,000 in
under 4 years.
Now, I work for IMPACT as a Content Marketing Consultant teaching companies how to achieve similar results. Every company I’ve worked with that has truly embraced this strategy has seen incredible growth.
My favorite pageview strategy is to include internal links to relevant articles within your blog. Make sure the link is preceded or followed by an interesting snippet that encourages readers to click the link to read about the other page on your site.
You’ll also want to make sure you have all your links open in a new tab so you don’t lose the reader on the other page of your site. This helps increase pageviews and spread link juice across your site.
marketing company that helps businesses generate more leads and grow revenue online.
One of the first and most basic strategies to increasing blog traffic is to find keywords related to the client’s business. It’s not always easy as it appears, especially if you’re writing about a niche subject. Longtail keywords done in the form of questions or phrases have become a central SEO technique for increasing rank on Google.
As voice search becomes more prevalent, blogs can be found faster using more conversational keyword phrases.
Here are some other tips I have:
- Create compelling headlines as well using the keywords from above. Remember to make keywords a focus of the blog’s outline and part of the user experience rather than being a slave to search bots.
- Google’s Keyword Planner is a great place to search out specific longtail keywords to make your blog more findable. By searching for these keywords you’ve designed yourself, you’ll see which ones are the most successful or overused.
- Make sure blog content is valuable and evergreen as well. Creating great content now rises above anything technical to please Google’s algorithms.
- Always look at your metrics to see what your page speed score is.
Optimizing toward mobile screens should become a #1 priority now, but visitors want a fast-loading page…as in three seconds. - Be sure to comment on other blogs related to your industry, including
creating backlinks. It’s a great SEO technique, plus you’ll likely have
other blogs return the favor.
After making some tweaks to my website, I was able to get my pageviews from around 1.2 pages per visit to 3.
There were a few things I did, and it was all about thinking about what would make my audience stick around longer. I tried to put myself in their shoes as much as possible and also just thought about how I use websites as a visitor.
Here’s the gist of it:
1) I put a related articles plugin in the right-hand widget area of my website. This widget shows a thumbnail of the article’s featured image and title. It recommends articles in the same category on the site.
If a user is going to stick around, it’ll most likely be by reading content
similar to the article that brought them to your site in the first place.
2) I did the same thing, but it’s related articles that come after the article the visitor is reading. I made the titles’ font size as big as possible for better visibility/readability.
3) I placed previous/next buttons so that visitors can read articles that were published around the same time.
It’s also worth trying infinite scrolling to the next article, which can hook people longer into your site. I just haven’t tested this yet myself because I’m not sure I like it as a user.
4) I’ve always done this and many people already do too because it’s built into many themes, but I put my real name and of all the other authors who write for my site in an author box at the end of the article with a little bio. I’ve just noticed from looking through my analytics that people often click the author bios and read more of the author’s articles that’s listed on their author page.
Most bloggers come up with topics that are in the news, or that pop into their heads. The next stage of mastery comes from keyword research, where a list of topics are chosen with traffic in mind. The first tactic usually results in total failure, the second creates a few wins and a majority of losses.
The best strategy is to only write about the best topics from your competitors website stats. First, create a list of all of the competitors in your industry or niche. Next, sign up for SEO software and check the authority of these websites. You can order them in Domain Authority, Domain Ranking, Alexa ranking, Trust Flow, or whichever metric your chosen software gives you.
Find out how authoritative your own website is, and then create a new list of competitors that have weaker search authority. Check each competitors ‘top pages’ on the SEO software. You’ll be amazed to see that the majority of traffic for most websites comes from 2-10 pages. Replicate these pages but make them fresh, original and more in-depth.
By doing this, you’ll be sourcing the trial and error blogging strategies of all your competitors. You’ll only publish content that already works for sites with less authority than yours, so should out rank them, or at least appear on page one with them.
My best advice? Create compelling content and share it freely! Behind every traffic burst on your site is genuine interest from your prospective customers. We like to create interesting infographics, publish authority content, and invite feedback from our customers.
When you create a compelling infographic and then offer it up to relevant blogs in your industry, you’ll see a huge spike in backlinks and traffic.
Authority content may need a little boost from manual promotion, but it
should speak for itself, i.e. start generating links as the buzz spreads
about your solid piece of content.
Finally, inviting customer feedback is key – leverage social media, and ask customers to leave transparent reviews on your site – this has helped us create over 20,000 unique views, and a whole lot of conversions!
Promotion is everything. I love leveraging social media to blast a solid piece of content, but it’s also important to conduct outreach hands-on. When you engage fellow thought leaders in your industry in a genuine manner, they will naturally promote your content.
Creating a solid network is not the same as reaching out to someone you’ve never met and asking for a backlink straight up. Follow others in your industry. Comment on their work – engage by asking questions, offering genuine compliments, etc. If someone asks to connect over the phone or via email, great! Follow up, and continue to stay in touch.
If you have done your job and created a solid network in your industry, you will find that when you share your latest work via direct, manual outreach, you will receive positive responses, and those invaluable backlinks and social shares.
If you want readers to check out your content, the first step is making sure they won’t have a problem finding it. For this reason, SEO is a major player in ensuring you get eyeballs on your blog content. Some people think this science is dead, but don’t believe it; it’s more important and powerful than ever.
It’s also remarkably simple to do. For entry level bloggers, it’s as simple as inserting the correct keywords into your content. If your blog is focused on reviewing organic beauty products, you must make sure the phrase ‘organic beauty products’ is included within your blog’s homepage copy and the individual blog posts themselves. These keywords also need to be integrated into your social media marketing, too – SEO doesn’t just stop at Google.
Creating organic and original content is also a major player in making your blog SEO compliant. Google and other search engines look at content which is well written and original with great favour; this pushes you further up the search engine rankings for your key search terms, which equates to more traffic to your blog.
SEO also means links: Giving and receiving. Creating content that is link-worthy means offering other websites something newsworthy or worth referencing on their own website. In return, they can provide a link back to your blog, the original source, which will strengthen your domain authority and further identify your blog as a reliable and quality platform. Just make sure you don’t pay for links – that includes guest posts. Since Google launched Penguin 4.0 in 2016, guest posting is no longer an acceptable form of link building as anyone can do this – it’s a quantity not quality way of gaining links.
Blogging Done Better
A strategy to get more pageviews is to republish your content on sites like Medium, Tumblr and WordPress.com. Republishing your blog posts on these platforms doesn’t attract Google’s duplicate content penalty. If you regularly post quality content, you’ll attract a loyal following on these platforms.
You can include links to related blog posts within your content to give readers a reason to visit your blog.
That’s a great way to increase pageviews on your site.
For example, my post 13 Secrets Of Writing Amazing Headlines was chosen to be featured Medium.com and got a great response. As a result, a lot of people visited that article on my site and signed up for my newsletter.
Bonus Tip: You can even repurpose your blog posts and create a video, which you can share on sites like Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion.
One of the best pageview strategies to drive more traffic to your blog is to leverage social media in your content marketing and posting efforts. You should have a page set up on Facebook and Twitter, but there are plenty of other popular social sites at your disposal as well. Consider Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.
To take the strategy a step further and get involved with what are known as social bookmarking sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and DIGG. These types of websites are basically run by its viewers and subscribers, who save and share links on content they feel is valuable and compelling. But you’ll probably need to expand your traditional content offerings to include videos and other mediums when
getting involved with some of these sites.
That said, it’s a great strategy because it allows you to share your content with a much wider audience then just your email subscribers. Just make sure that all content is of high quality and top notch, and while getting on a posting schedule is important, never sacrifice quality in the name of submitting content. It should absolutely be your best stuff. Be sure to respond to all comments, that way other social media enthusiasts will see that you truly care for your audience and are eager to listen.
like G2 Crowd & more!
Last year our ContractSafe blog began updating the site with a Glossary page. This glossary page includes a host of technical terms and definitions relevant to the contract law and contract management software industry. As you can already see, this strategy can be implemented across a variety of industries like garment manufacturing, search engine optimization, big data analytics, the list goes on…
With this strategy, we were not only able to give search engines like Google an opportunity to rank us for these terms but see growth on a few important metrics.
For example, glossary pages allow you to drive new & targeted traffic to related blog articles. The glossary page for the term “contract audit” includes a few links to articles that speak more on the topic. With the help of a few savvy developers, we can even automate this process with the help of tags that pull in related blog content. Another key metric you’ll see growth in is within the pages per session metrics tracked by Google Analytics. By including related articles within each glossary page you encourage site users to explore more pages throughout the site.
My favorite page view strategy is very simple. It’s Pinterest. I recently wrote a blog post on December 13th that has received 3,180 page views in 45 days. And, I wrote another post on January 21st that has received 2,386 page views in just 9 days.
I launched my website on December 1st, 2018 so I get very little organic traffic from google. Almost all of the 1000+ page views a day we receive are from people on Pinterest who click through to our website.
The strategy is to create good looking pins with Pinterest keyword rich descriptions and hashtags. My partner Susan and I then pin throughout the day at various times. We joined Tailwind about a week ago and that has helped to boost our daily referral traffic from Pinterest, as well.
It doesn’t matter how old your website is: If you are consistent you can get great results, too.
I helped cofound ecommerce site Kettlebell Kings and blog content promotion has been a huge part of our business growth for the past three years. We sell kettlebells online, and the single biggest way we have built our presence is through paid ads to content pages about different kettlebell movements, expert advice and signing up for weekly workouts to receive in your email inbox.
Here is an example of one of our landing pages. By being able to target people who are interested in ‘kettlebells’ on social media we are able to get new leads into our workflows at about $1 per lead. This method has had about a 10X return on spend over the last year with these people turning into real customers who are buying our actual kettlebell equipment.
We were recently featured by Hubspot for what we have accomplished through paid content using their landing pages and workflows. This has been a super effective way for a business that has bootstrapped from the beginning to build our email list and community with the $1 per lead cost, because we were early adopters in the content strategy game in our niche we were able to spend less to get leads and turn them into customers as opposed to adwords.
It solidifies us as thought leaders in our space by putting out expert driven content that has sharable qualities with friends of those receiving the content.
We are also able to try different targeting methods by targeting those interested in kettlebells and then narrowing it further by targeting another interest that person might be interested like a particular fitness personality or brand. This helps our brand enter the conscious of those who are not familiar with ours as the relative newcomers in our industry.
If you want to increase traffic to your website, the most important thing to do is a little bit of keyword research. What are the terms your prospective audience is searching for? There are a number of free tools out there that can help with this (such as Ubersuggest).
Then, you can head over to Google Trends to see what terms are growing in popularity in your niche.
For example, if you’re a food blogger, you could research terms like “keto diet” versus “vegan diet” to see which ones are gaining more and more views. That can help you determine which one to write about. Focusing on terms that people are searching for will help you get found in Google, and you’ll be able to validate the topics you pick by showing that people are looking for these terms, meaning that your content is likely to interest potential viewers (and even help you gain new ones!).
The best, long-lasting strategy for increasing page views is creating quality, relevant content. It sounds easy enough, but finding the right content can be a challenge. Once you crack the code, however, your blog will become the number one source for all of your readers.
It’s important that you stay on top of trends and evolving news. Set a Google Trends and Google News alert so you can be ready for whatever new topics in your niche start going viral. Infuse your content with relevant, SEO-friendly keywords. This will boost it to the top of the Google search page. And make sure you’re answering the right questions.
From here, make sure you’re giving your readers insights that are targeted, high-quality, and intelligent. If you align yourself as a leader and innovator, they’ll choose you over the competition.
Infuse relevant imagery and examples into your content as well. This increases its value and shows your audience that you can go that extra mile in providing them with content that separates you from the competition. Content is key, after all. You don’t want to repurpose what everyone else is doing. You want to solidify your place in the competitive market with it.
But there’s one important thing that most experts take for granted but that we, home-based bloggers, also need to consider: Our writing environment. When you work from home, your blog responds to everyday distractions and disruptions. You might have a fantastic idea for new and refreshing content, but your younger one requires attention, which can force you to shorten the article and adjust the content.
Home bloggers need a space where they can create without distractions. If you want to bring your blog to the next level, you need a home office area that is comfortable, quiet, and inspiring. Start by considering your comfort, budgeting for window replacement, and ergonomic desk settings to keep physical nuisances at bay. Nobody wants to interrupt blog creation because it’s too cold or physically painful. Finally, you can also add smart elements to soundproof the room. Did you know that houseplants can act as an elegant sound barrier, for instance? Alternatively, sound-canceling headphones can work wonders!
Admittedly, if you have children at home, it can be tricky to demand absolute peace. Yet, sharing your schedule with your family can help keep interruptions to a minimum.
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I’ve struggled with getting my pageviews to where I’ve wanted for a really long time now. It’s kind of sad, really:( I’ve been blogging since 2008 and get less than 10,000 per month. A lot of these strategies I’ve never heard of before, thank you!
I was surprised, too, at the different strategies there were to increase your blog’s pageviews! Which was your favorite?
I’ve been blogging for about six months and then took a little break. Page views seem to be something I struggle with. Pinterest has been a main promotional platform for me, but I’m not sure how well it’s working. Brandon Ballweg’s tips were super helpful because they focus on improving the look and usage of the website. I’m going to do some research and see what I can do to improve the look of my blog so it’s more user appealing.
Great article and thanks for the tips!
Thanks for stopping by, Skyler! I know that the Elite Blog Academy will be opening for enrollment. It’s a course I’m taking and so far, I love it. It might help you, too (I’m not an affiliate).
After blogging for like 7-8 months I was so frustrated about the fact that my pageviews weren’t increasing. My boss shared this article with me and I can’t thank him enough. It’s a great piece! You guys have earned a follower.
I’m glad you enjoyed the article! Thanks for stopping by.