How to increase WordPress blog traffic

How to increase WordPress blog traffic

WordPress is by far the most used content management system on the planet. An incredible 76.5 million blogs are hosted on the site, with 50,000 added every single day.

Setting up a WordPress blog is the easy part; establishing yourself as an authoritative voice and attracting visitors to your site requires dedication, know-how and, most of all, patience. In this post, I’m going to outline five ways you can increase traffic to your WordPress blog, starting with organic traffic.

Optimise your posts for SEO

There are a number of ways you can optimise your blog posts so they perform as well in the SERPs as possible. As a bare minimum, Pauline Cabrera of TwelveSkip recommends:

• Including a ‘short, unique and relevant’ meta title and description to convey to your audience what your post is all about.
• Setting up Google Authorship so your audience can put a credible face to your name.
• Using a plugin such as YARPP to display relevant content; ideally, you want visitors to stay on your site for as long as possible.
• Making use of the category and tag functions in WordPress – use appropriate tags so those searching for the terms you use in your content can find you more easily.

WordPress is renowned for its selection of free plugins, and there are several you can use to optimise your posts so they’re easier to find. We use Yoast SEO, a particularly handy tool, which allows you to check how search engine friendly your content is, before you actually post it.  The plugin incorporates a traffic light rating system  when analysing your content for things like placement of keywords, number of outbound links and difficulty of reading, and also allows you to easily customise your title and meta description. The more green lights you get, the better optimised your post is.

Regularly share on social media

Social media is vital in showcasing your content to a wider readership. A couple of weeks back we shared 10 ways you can use social media to build your blog audience – tailoring content for specific platforms, using share buttons to allow users to disseminate your posts and automating updates are the key take aways.

Again, there are a number of plugins that can help with this, including Simple Share and Digg Digg.

Don’t just share content once. As Matt Lindley of Verve Search highlights, “companies aren’t sharing their blog content nearly as much as they ought to.” Think about it: you’ve just spent a couple of hours writing content, formatting it in WordPress and tweaking it for SEO. Are you really going to tweet a link to it once at midday and then leave it at that? What about people who aren’t online at that time?

Consider incorporating Derek Halpern’s 80/20 rule. Halpern says “it’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more”, so broaden your reach as much as you can by scheduling tweets to appear at different times of the day and finding snippets you can share across LinkedIn and other sites. Garrett Moon of Kissmetrics provides this handy social sharing schedule as a starting point.

Explore guest posting opportunities

This is an effective way of increasing traffic to your blog, and it works both ways: actively search for guest posting opportunities on relevant authority sites and also invite influencers and thought leaders in your industry to write posts for your own blog.

Kristi Hines of Kissmetrics suggests that “there are three main goals for guest blogging.” You want to position yourself as an authoritative figure in your industry, hence the importance of finding a relevant site to post to; you want the readers of the site you’re guesting for to come back to yours for more and you want to get backlinks to your site so Google realises you know what you’re talking about.

Make it clear you accept guest posts from bloggers on your own site by including an open invitation ‘write for us’ page somewhere in your layout. Building relationships with other bloggers allows you to tap into their (hopefully sizeable) social media following, and benefit from a fresh perspective on your blog subject.

Ensure your site is fast and mobile-friendly

This might sound obvious, but that doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels. As Megan Marrs points out, “visitors aren’t going to wait around for your blog to load”; they’ll simply go elsewhere. Similarly, if they’re browsing via mobile, as 80% of web users do, they’ll want a site that reads easily on a smaller screen and doesn’t take ages to load images and videos.

These issues are easily remedied: use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to get an idea of how well your site is performing in terms of speed and install the Jetpack plugin to help create a mobile version of your blog.

Interact with your audience

Whether you’re responding to comments on a post on your own blog, offering your insight on another blogger’s piece or replying to a tweet, people like to know that their voice is being heard and their opinion addressed. Actively invite comments at the end of your posts and follow Moz’s tips on ‘comment marketing.’ As this post suggests, “participation can yield awareness and branding to the blog’s audience”, while “comments with links, especially those that are well-written and enticing will result in visits.” You should also participate on online question and answer sites, such as Quora and StackExchange: again, well-written answers to users’ questions will, at the very least, introduce your name to a new audience, but hopefully users will appreciate the insight you give and will click on to your blog for more.

Increasing traffic to your WordPress blog isn’t an exact science, and your level of success will largely depend on your industry and the level of competition. Keep coming up with quality, relevant content, apply the tips above and you should start to see results improve sooner rather than later.

Image courtesy of Cristian Labarca.

Sam Carney

Sam Carney

Sam is a freelance journalist who has been working as a copywriter and proofreader since graduating from Lancaster University in 2014. Sam mainly writes about sports, in particular football, and has been published by the Guardian, Manchester United and the Manchester Evening News. In his spare time, he likes to read, travel to new places, go on walks to the Lake District and attend live music events.