How You Can Triple the Average Pages Per Visit on Your Blog
Every website, and section of an individual website, has different goals. The goals for an ecommerce site are very different than a news site for example. Generally, they segment websites into the categories of brand, eCommerce, news, lead generation and information based sites. Each of these website types have different KPIs. Well, what people often don’t understand or possibly just take the time to consider is that this same concept also applies to sections of a website. Therefore, certain parts of a site should have different goals. In regards to blog, you will usually see a higher bounce rate and many cases people look at blog traffic as lower quality than that of a service page. I am here to tell you, it can be just as valuable, if not more valuable, than a service page. In this post, I will not go into how important blogging and inbound marketing is and how to effectively maximize the potential of your blog. But what I will do is focus on one element, page views. Using these practices, you triple your page views.
Related Post
One of the most simple things you can do is add related posts to the bottom of your blog. There are a lot of widgets out there to do this. Some for WordPress are Contextual Related Post or LinkWithin. Both of these are good options and it is a best practice of any blog to have related post enabled. You will generally get better interaction if you have thumbnails instead of just hyperlinks. Here is a good list of WordPress options.
Generally, the more striking the image the better chance someone will click on it. That is why many times when you are on a news site, you will see images at the bottom that are a little a sexual or just crazy. These are usually not top tier news sites, but smaller ones that have great traffic and add related post to that are from an ad network. This is a little different than related post on your own site, but still relevant from a perspective of what you can do to get more page views.
Best Content of All Time in Sidebar
A very common strategy that top bloggers almost all implement is showcasing their best content in the sidebar. Think about it, someone lands on your post and then sees a list of awesome content next to the post they are looking at. If 25% of those people click on a post, you have just significantly increased your page views and most likely time on site. Here we see a couple examples of this in practice.
Here is an example from Search Engine Land:
Here we see another example from Quick Sprout.
Most Recent Posts in Sidebar
Many times, someone will land on your blog through an evergreen topic (such as a how to post), but something more current can greatly encourage page views. I will give you an example, say you land on this blog by Googling “Google update history timeline,” we have a post that ranks very well for this. While you are on this post, you see a recent post we did on the upcoming Google Panda 4.2 update. This strikes your interest, resulting in another page view on the blog. Depending on how much content you have, many people take this a step further and instead of recent post, list breaking news in the sidebar, as that generally drives clicks and interest. But not everyone can do this, especially if you are only blogging once or twice a week.
Exciting Calls to Action in your Internal Linking
Internally linking is really important for search engine optimization. It helps pass page rank from page to page and gives Google an idea of the most important pages on the site. When it comes to increasing page views, internal linking is also critical. But in order to get someone to click on an internal link, it needs strike interest. Here is an example of an internal link that might encourage a click through.
Create Lists of Resources inside Posts
Similar to internal linking, you can take it a step further by creating lists of resources from your website inside of posts. This is a great strategy, it allows you to bring authority to the post, making it a more comprehensive guide, and it also increases page views. If you have written multiple times on more niche topics, write a more inclusive post and then link to the more niche topics in the middle of the post. Now you have created a more complete guide that has a better chance for ranking and increased your page view potential.
Build a Community, Not just one Post and Done
If you want people to come back and click on multiple pages, you need to create a community and a following, not just a one post and done type of blog. There are a lot of ways to make your blog sticky, here are a few posts that I have written on building a community on your blog.
- The 7 Biggest Reasons your Blog is Failing and How you Can Fix It
- How to Increase Blog Comments
- All the Different Types of Blog Posts
- How to Create the Best Sidebar for your Blog
Create an Educational Program
While this takes a lot of time, people generally come to your blog to get information on a topic, so if you can create a program that will result in returning visitors and an increase in pageviews. For example, “Learn SEO in 30 Days” would be an excellent example program for this blog. People can subscribe and then they are delivered one post a day until they have learned all the basics of search engine optimization (this is currently something we are working on).
Offer an Area to PDF Download your Best Posts
People love a good PDF on a topic they really want to have a resource for information on. Many people will use PDF downloads to capture emails and build their list. While this is a great idea, there is also the option to offer PDFs on your blog to increase page views. By having a simple call to action that says, download the best posts of all time in PDFs, you an encourage people to go to another area of your site, increase page views and provide additional value on your blog.
Multimedia
For media based news sites, you will often see related information shown after a post. In addition, in many cases this is step up to auto play and a new URL is generated automatically. Changing the URL is a great best practice, as it keeps each of the URLs unique for SEO and thus does not create duplicate content. Here we see an example of this from Surfline. They do an excellent job with this.
Here is an example related video that auto plays
Remarketing
Many people don’t realize just truly how valuable blog traffic is. Once someone lands on your site, you can remarket to them for as long as they maintain that cookie. If you want to increase page views, run remarketing campaigns that are specific to the subjects they came in on. This will allow you to increase returning visitors and really get your brand name in the users head overtime.
These are just a few ways to increase page views on your blog. Is there a strategy you use that we missed? Comment below.
