If you started a brand new blog or you already have one, then you know that if you want to become a successful blogger, there are a lot of things that you should take care of (SEO and Internet Marketing, for example).
Increasing page views and decreasing bounce rate in your site is essential.
In a few words, you want your visitors staying on your website as much time as possible and increase the number of pages that they visit.
And talking about making money online, you know that getting more page views may increase clicks, impressions or sales.
Here are seven tips that you should consider in order to raise considerably the number of page views per visitor, thus increasing the impressions and, consequently, decreasing the bounce rate of your site.
1. Create a lot of Quality Content
This is the most common tip : create high quality content.
Of course the more articles you produce, the more information your visitors can read and the more content the search engines will crawl.
But keep in mind : you do not have to copy some content or write low quality articles, with no added value, just for the sake of producing more blog pages.
Also, be sure to follow some basic rules : create something interesting to your audience, write correctly in your language, use properly text and images, integrate the content with social media and optimize in SEO terms.
If you are able to create quality content, visitors will be encouraged to prolong their visit in your site, with the benefit of growing your page views.
2. Create Internal links
Remember to insert internal links, when you produce new content.
When you write about a topic, that can be related to an article that you already wrote (which is present in your archive), be sure to create a link that send the user to that specific old post.
Of course use the right number of internal links for each post, do not abuse and mention only if it is really relevant to that specific topic.
The procedure of internal linking, not only allows your visitors to read several of your articles on specific subjects, but is also very useful in terms of SEO.
Google loves internal linking. So be sure to use this method when you write new posts.
Of course this practice will help you increase the page views of your website.
3. Insert Related Articles
At the end of each of your posts, you should let your readers know about related articles, that they could be interested about. In this way, the bounce rate of your blog can decrease.
I use “WordPress Related Posts” plugin, that will generate a number of related posts (that you can set), below each of your article, with relation of the tags that you used.
First, the “Related Articles” method, serves to increase the page views, as your goal.
Second, it gives you advantages in the rankings on Google, because people will spend more time on your content.
Finally, this practice also significantly improves the user experience.
4. Use an Internal Search Engine
Often, your visitors want to search within your site some old articles or find particular information, with help of specific keywords.
Then the internal search function could help them.
It is important that you make available to your visitors a good service like this.
Some WordPress Themes already include the internal search engine, some others not.
I use a personalized Genesis theme called “Magazine Pro”. As you can see in the footer, there is an internal search engine.
5. Create Lists of Posts
For instance, you can insert in your sidebar a list of most viewed articles or most commented ones.
This will attract the curiosity of your visitors and they may want to click on those links. As a result, your page views will increase.
WordPress Popular Posts is a good plugin.
It lets you put a widget in your sidebar, and it will display your most important posts, listed per views or comments.
I use “Genesis Featured Posts” in this blog.
6. Create Fast Loading Pages
This is a practice that will ensure your visitors a better experience in your blog.
Of course you do not want your site to be too slow : this may bore your readers and they can decide to leave.
If your pages are fast to load, visitors will have little difficulty moving between them.
Conversely, if the pages load slowly, almost nobody is willing to navigate along your website.
You should install a Cache Plugin, so it can cache pages and deliver them without accessing the database, making your site much faster.
As you surely know, the loading speed is a factor that Google consider in search engine results.
Some nice WordPress plugins are “W3 Total Cache” or “Super Cache”: they are among the most popular ones.
Also, you should take a look to the Google PageSpeed Tool. It helps you analyze and optimize your pages, in order to implement the performance best practices.
7. Divide a Complex Topic in Several Articles
You should apply this suggestion with moderation and avoid forcing it.
It is simply like this : when a topic is complex or too long to be explained, you can split it into several articles or posts.
It’s also good to create curiosity and have your readers waiting for the next article of your “specific blog post series”.
Conclusion
If you apply all the above listed suggestions, you will surely increase your page views and decrease your bounce rate.
Do you have any other tips or considerations?
Please share your experience in the comments below, thanks!
Hi Erik,
I’m glad I read this post because I seldom uses internal links even though I see others using it frequently. I always thought that “related articles’ was more of the same. Plus this post helped me concerning the speed of my site. I didn’t know I had control over that.. Now that I know, I will take a look at the plug-ins you mentioned.
Thanks!
Hi Erik
Increasing your blog’s page view and deceasing bounce rate is a worthy goal for bloggers. These 7 tips that you have listed most certainly will help achieve this goal.
Having quality comment is a necessity as no reader will put up with low quality content. Inserting internal links in posts shows that you providing extra value to you readers. but one should avoid too many links as they become spammy. I see a lot of blogs with related articles as we all know how important it is to have one.
As for internal search, you have treated such brilliantly as such feature is needed for users to be able to query your blog posts easily. Bloggers love lists post as it is easy to read so you are right that it does decrease bounce rate. Today, having a fast loading page is not an option but a must as Google as your SEO is affected if your page is slow.
Thanks for sharing.
Hello Erik,
You won’t believe me that today, I was marking a point in my mind that how to increase to my page views. Becasue I started a blog last month which in turn brough me some 1K page views, So now i’m setting a target to get more page views than the previos month. Your post is in need and I believe it was exculsively for me to know about “how to increase page views for our blog and also to decrease bounce rate” … The number one tip that you’ve stated is a good reason where people will return to your site often is of good content and also how well you frequently post new content.
#4 Point: I felt like this is one of the great tips, where you are giving your audience more freindly to website/blog and they search what ever keywords relatedt to posts in your blog. And I’ll make use of it and thanks for suggesting me this “Magazine Pro“ plugin too 🙂
I would you like to add a point here that “Guest writes post” also will increase in page views right ?, And i belive its something like fresh air into a website/blog and offer a new point of view. Each time its happens and will of course makes/attract more audiences and it bring new readers to your website/blog
Ps correct me if i’m wrong
Thank you for your brilliant post & Happy christmas friend,
Siva
Hi Erik,
This is a very timely post, especially considering we are heading into a new year and what better time to introduce some new strategies into our business model. It surely is important to keep visitors on our sites as long as possible.
Creating quality content is paramount! What I like to think about when I am creating content is the fact that the visitor is coming to my blog for their benefit not mine, so in my mind that means I need to write my blog post in such a way that it solves a problem or at least gives information/ideas the visitor had not thought about.
I just recently started creating internal links after reading someone else discuss this topic. I am glad I did because have noticed that my readers are clicking on these links for more information. This surely keeps them on my blog longer.
An internal search engine is very convenient for the visitor. If we make their user experience easy I believe they will not only stay on our blogs longer but they will come back again. An internal search engine is a great example of making their experience on our blogs a user-friendly one.
I like you idea about creating lists of posts. There are some awesome plugins that do this. If your reader likes the niche/topic then of course they probably would be interested in other topics that may be similar. Providing them with that information right at their fingertips is a great idea.
We all know we only have about 8 seconds or so to capture the attention of our visitors. It is vital that our page loads fast. If it does not I would expect the visitor will click off immediately. People have a lot going on in their lives and they may not be patient enough to wait while your page loads slowly.
I like the idea of creating curiosity in your posts. You are right, we should not force a series of blog posts, but if the opportunity presents itself and we are dealing with a complex topic, then yes we could create some curiosity by breaking down the subject matter into a series.
Erik these are some great ideas to decrease the bounce rate and keep people engaged and interested while on your blogs. Thanks for sharing my friend.
Hi Eric!
Great set of tips!
I loved the one about including related posts! As an end user I always preferred posts which helped me explore the associated topics around the one on which the post was written.
I will definitely try out the plugin and let you know how things progress 🙂
Merry Xmas!
Nik
Hi Erik,
Excellent tips!
Page views and bounce rate is really important. Page views can declare how popular a page is where the bounce rate will help us to know how people are engaging. So really need to work on it.
Among your tips, I think internal linking is very much necessary. Because the visitors, especially the search visitors will leave a site after reading their valued article. So if we can interlink to related posts, they might visit them too. So we will get more page views and reduce the bounce rate in the same time.
Thanks for such a nice write up. 🙂
Great tips Erik. Pretty much sums up the important ones.
I would also include checking the page flow in analytics so you’d know where most of the traffic goes after that post and increase the visibility of that to further get more clicks.
Merry Christmas to you and your family!
I love this. Your tips are very correct and well explained.
Actually, I’ve been practising most of the tips explained above but my question is that is it okay to make internal links open in new tab?
Hi Erik
Very actionable tips and work great if someone follows them in their true spirit.
Remote past era of blogging was the era of quantity. One simply needed to publish more and more posts with a lot of keywords in them to get higher ranks easily.
In past there was much hue and cry to shun running after quanitity and follow quality. Every blogger was advising to publish least to maintain high quality.
But now owing to ever stiffening competition both quality and quantity is required to stay ahead in blogosphere. So it is wise suggestion to publish more of high quality to get more pageviews and stay visitors longer.
Rest of the tips are also wonderful.
Thanks a lot for sharing.
Season’s greetings to you and your blog’s awesome community.
I have a blog already, created from WordPress.
Your post are really excellent.
It help me for better blogging thanks a lot.
I don’t know why my bounce rate is 80% while I’m focusing almost on techniques mentioned in this article. :-/ any other way?
Some great tips Erik,
I think the most important is not the content. Not just good content, but content that engages with the reader and makes them read on, or want to read more. Catch their attention and keep it. Also think content that adds personality and is interesting the read.
Something I am still working on mastering. But some day 🙂
I think it’s all about balance, with quality content holding the rest up! It makes sense, but never occurred to me before taking clickminded seo training that content should flow naturally.
Hi Erik,
Fantastic guide. Proper internal linking and quality contents makes it easy to get more views and also helps to decrease bounce rate of site.
Creating a list of post also help to get more attention of people.
Thanks for sharing-
-Mustafa
Hi Erik, I think a 40-50 % bounce rate is acceptably a good bounce rate for a site. Have below 40 % and that’s excellent! and even the 60-70 % interval is, although not good, it’s not “the end of the World”, but above 75 %, above 80 % is terrible.Anything above 80-85 % leaves a terribly negative footprint and is a bad signal in the SERPs.
The role of quality contents and SEO makes huge difference to make your blog popular and reachable to more and more readers..You should have enough knowledge of all blogging skills.This is very important and you must keep patience while blogging. If you wait and give your best efforts then definitely more traffic will be attracted towards your blog…
Hi Erick,
The immediate benefits of more page views are not limited to good analytics of your blog only. It equally helps you achieve reduced bounce rate, more time on site and enhanced readers engagement.
Increasing page views has multiple effects. If at least one attractive internal link you offer in your each post your visitors would be just reading post over post at your blog and spending a lot of time at it.
Regards,
Ovais Mirza
All the ways you suggested to increase page views are really cool and bring a big change in your number in a short time.
But the most effective way is always putting internal links in your each post. They should be more relevant and with anchor text of most attractive phrases.
Bounce rate is really important in blogging carrier ..
High bounce rate is a sign of low blog value .
I sure these suggestions by Erik are really a game changer for a blogger specially those are novice about blogging tweaks of success.
Bounce rate is very big factor, In my thinking, but many just don’t look towards factors like this, which can hugely effect a website. A very high Bounce rate means, Visitors are not getting what they want (not always, but in most cases) and are leaving website to find more content, which also be called as Pogo sticking, if those visitors click on other search results in Google. Indirectly, We may lose our authority as Google will consider our content as worthless and will take down rankings. So, Bounce rate has lot do, no matter, which niche we are working on, from Blogging to eCommerce, this factors needs to be focused on, if we are really looking to provide good user experience.
I don’t think that decreasing the bounce rate of any blog or website is any rocket science. Only some tweaks can do magic. Most Importantly you can Interlink your older posts to the newer ones is more than enough. But, you can even make it more effective by putting valuable and related content to it.
Hi Erik,
One of the key points of where I forget each time is Interlinks, it’s quite necessary. Our article move to one page to another. Thanks for sharing an impressive and informative article and I really enjoyed!
I wonder about effect of pageviews to SEO between 2 webpages. The first page, user stay longer time but have no link to click (one pageview/UIP over 60 sec) and the second page, user stay shorter time and click several pages (5 pageview/UIP less than 10 sec). Which page will get better rank?
Thanks for the tips, i think internal linking is best way to decrease bounce rate