Blogging 101: Increase Your Page Views

So you’ve created your blog and you’ve put in the time and hard work to create content, but your page views have plateaued to a steady number, plus, when looking at your Google Analytics you have a high bounce rate… So how do you get visitors on your site, and to stay on your site for multiple page views?

This was the question I had for myself back at the beginning of the year, and I had decided to give myself a bit of a challenge to increase my page views. Unfortunately University got in the way and hiatus occurred instead. But I still wanted to write this post because my hiatus helped me understand some of these points anyway.

Note: Page views and users are different. Users are how many individual people have been on your site, page views are how many views you’ve had on all pages. One user may have multiple page views, which is often why page views are higher. If companies you want to collaborate with want statistics, they will usually be interested in users instead of page views.

SEO

Yes I know I keep yelling about SEO, and you can read my other posts on how to optimise it. However, making sure that posts are shown in search engine results means having a larger chance of ‘passive’ traffic. Passive traffic means you’re not actively driving people towards the post by using social, or direct referring. For example, this meant that whilst I was on hiatus I was still getting a decent amount page views on site from search engines, despite me paying no attention to Uptown Oracle.

Create Unique and Useful content

A lot of people skim read posts before reading them fully, and this is to see whether there’s the information they want or need in it. Of course this doesn’t always apply, depending on the niche and who your target audience are. But for the most part, if your post contains content that isn’t necessary or interesting for the reader, they’ll bounce straight back off the site.

So if you prove your content is interesting, unique and useful, readers are more likely to go to multiple posts on your site. This will up your page views. For example, this Blogging 101 series is good for this as often readers will read more than one of the posts at one time.

Creating unique and useful content can sometimes take a bit of research to know what to write. It also means honing your writing style, to ensure that people enjoy reading the content no matter what it is. Often if your personality can flow through the words, it can help keep your reader interested for longer.

Things to think about when creating content:

• Is the content up-to-date?
• Is the word count too much? or too little? (for this particular topic)
• Is the formatting well done?
• Could you use more imagery? or videos?
• Will users appreciate the information being given?

Internal Links

On top of posting the unique and useful content, make sure your content links to other pieces of content on your site. For example, if you’re posting a beauty review of a product you posted about in a haul post – you can link back to that haul post. It’s as simple as adding a link to text you probably already have in the post, meaning it’s within context and relevant to the reader.

Post Consistently

Harder done than said I know, but ensuring that you post consistently is important for page views. On days that content is posted, often views go up because readers are interested in the new post that you’ve been promoting. These views usually level out after a few days, but then you post again and there’s another spike.

Ensuring you have a consistent spike of views, which will work with other items on this list to keep your views on track.

User Experience and Design

On top of the actual content, you need to make sure that your users experience with your site is good. A blog/site design is extremely important for branding, and this means people are more likely to remember you and return. Your site also needs to be functional and work as expected. Readers should be able to know where to go, how to information about X, Y or Z easily, and find what content they like. And example is, some of my readers prefer book content over beauty (or vice versa) so they can simply click books or beauty on my menu to see specific content.

On the other hand… if your site has parts which are non-functional, or the design is sub-par – unfortunately readers will leave. And not come back. I feel quite guilty when admitting this, but there’s some blogs I never visit because I just dislike the site so much (despite liking the blogger). This also means they may read a post when they see it, but bounce off quite quickly.

Accessability

On top of user experience there’s also an aspect of accessability. I’m surprised at the amount of sites which still have text that is almost unreadable because of colour, font, style and background colour.

Most sites use black text on a white background – this is because it’s extremely easy for most people to read. Whereas white text on black backgrounds can be difficlut. Or large chunks of yellow, purple, whichever colour, can make it harder for readers.

Making your sites as accessible for as many readers as possible with help in the long-term for returning users, allowing higher page views.

Promote content

Of course one of the biggest ways to get people onto your site is to promote your content – and promote it well. Make sure you test out different ways of promotion, different wording, different imagery and see what works best for your blog. For example, I find that longer worded tweets, with a little added info helps a lot more than just posting the link and post title.

Social Media Scheduling

Using scheduling tools for social media really helps you to keep on top of promoting your content, without spending your entire life on social media. Making sure you promote content when it goes live, and re-promoting it can be extremely helpful at getting those views. My second highest form of getting page views on hiatus behind SEO, was that I use the Revive Old Post plug in to re-promote posts.

I also find that using content which doesn’t necessarily promote a blog post helps. Increasing your engagement on social media means that when you do have something to promote, more people are ready to engage with you. When using social you can also utilise hashtags to catch attention on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

Email Newsletter

A lot of bloggers also use newsletters to send an overview of their recent posts directly to readers inboxes. This is extremely helpful to reach readers who may not check online every day, or miss your other promotions on social media.

In order to be even more enticing, newsletters often include additional and exclusive content just for email subscribers. You need to include incentive for readers to sign up.

Categories

Having too many categories, or too many niches can mean that people who visit your site don’t know where to start. I currently use 5 parent categories and 7 sub-categories – where my parent categories are where users can look for specific topics of interest. If a site has 20+ categories, there may be a choice fatigue when chooisng which content I want to read about.

Tagging posts

This advice is more for WordPress users. If you’re tagging your blog posts correctly then your posts are more likely to be found on the WordPress Reader when people are searching for new content. Whilst non-tagged posts do still appear in search results, if your post is using tags then the post will be more relevant to the reader, and will have more of a chance of being clicked on.

Tagging posts also means that on your site you will have a page that you can send people to that is about 1 very specific topic. Therefore added internal linking and relevant useful content. For example, for my internal linking in this post above I’ve directed you to my SEO tag.

Featured on relevant sites

Creating good content often means you will end up with your content being shared on other sites. A lot of bloggers share posts where they link out to other sites in the community, meaning if they have authority in the area can drive traffic to your site. Another option is to ask for guest posting opportunities for other sites, which when done right can be helpful too.

Create a Search Bar

If a user is coming back to your site to find a great post they read, they need a search bar. If you don’t already have one then you are missing out on possible returning users increasing their page count on your site. It also means new users can’t find specific content that they’re looking for. For example, if a user wanted to know my thoughts on the Sea Witch book, they could simply type it into my search bar and read all about it.

Utilise that Sidebar

Sidebars are often a large space on your site that can go underutilised. (It can also be overutilised though… so be careful with that balance). Creating a ‘top posts’ or ‘recent posts’ part of your sidebar gives your readers a choice to move towards more of your content.

Be Active in the Community

One that I think a lot of people miss is that actually taking part in the community can help your page views. If you’re engaging with other bloggers, viewing their posts, commenting, tweeting etc, then they’re more likely to return the favour. And I’m not saying we should all expect the same actions back from everyone we interact with (because that would make the community a tad toxic with entitlement). But just taking time to get to know people really helps a lot when it comes to supporting one another.