How to Get Traffic to my WordPress Blog?

WordPress has made it easy for everyone to launch a blog. So launching your blog is not a difficult task anymore but bringing traffic to it surely is!

In this article, I’ll share with you some of the best ways to get traffic to your WordPress blog. Being in the website management business for a while now, I’ve been fortunate enough to manage dozens of websites and blogs for my clients. It helped me learn the helpful strategies that work in bringing traffic to WordPress blogs.

I’ll be sharing all these tried and tested strategies that worked well for my clients’ blogs. You do not have to be an expert or a marketing guru to get traffic to your WordPress website. Just follow the helpful tips I share in this article and see the visitors pouring in! After you get the traffic you can monetize it by learning how to make money with WordPress.

Use Powerful Headlines that Can Get You Clicks

The very first thing related to your blog that a user reads in the search engine results is your article headlines. Nobody wants to click on a boring article title. But a powerful headline stands out from the rest and gets you more clicks.

Use meta titles

The most important consideration while writing headlines for your blog articles is their meta titles. Meta titles indicate the topic of your articles to Google and other search engines.

They increase your blog’s Click-Through Rate (CTR) by optimizing your content for Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). So pay special attention to creating meta titles for all your blog posts that search engines can display.

Use targeted keywords

Using one or more target keywords in your article headline is important to allow search engines to find your blog article. This practice will also help you rank higher in the search results.

Build a connection with your audience

Building an instant connection with your target audience is extremely important to get clicks. Your article headline must trigger an emotional response in any form. Whether it is excitement, shock, curiosity, or surprise; you must consider including some emotion in your headlines.

All the above strategies for article headlines will help you capture the attention of an audience interested in your blog’s niche and bring in more traffic to your WordPress blog.

Write Quality Content Regularly

It is truly said that content is the king in the online world. No matter what you do, if your blog content is of poor quality, you will never see any growth in visitors.

Regularly creating original and high-quality content will help you rank better in search engines. It will, therefore, bring in more traffic to your blog, that too, consistently.

What is high-quality content?

Content is considered to be of high quality when it provides some value to your blog readers. Bringing in something new from your experience or explaining different aspects of a topic in simple language for better understanding are some examples of creating quality content.

Improving your grammar knowledge

Additionally, you must also focus on improving your language skills and producing an article free of grammatical errors. Google considers a blog to be of low quality if it finds grammatical mistakes and does not rank it. Grammarly is an excellent tool to make each of your blog posts error-free.

Keeping your articles plagiarism-free

High-quality content is always original that comes straight from you. It cannot be copied from some other blogs or websites. Why would someone visit your blog when the same content is already available with another blog? Even Google doesn’t like it and won’t rank your articles.

So provide something unique to your visitors. Even if you are curating content from other blogs, add some value to it so that your blog visitors get to learn something new. Always pass your articles from the Copyscape test before posting.

Build an email list

Bringing in new visitors is important but making them visit your blog again is much more important for growing your blog traffic. The fastest and simplest way to do this task is by building an email list.

Consider offering your visitors a newsletter signup form through which they can subscribe and get notified about new posts on your blog. You can offer them an incentive for free to persuade them to subscribe to your blog. It can be anything ranging from an e-book, membership, useful templates, or an e-course.

Here is a freebie offered by the food blog “Pinch of Yum” to new email subscribers:

Building an email list gives access to the inboxes of your visitors. You can share your blog content with this prospective audience every time you post a new article. This will help you get consistent traffic to your WordPress blog.

Use Free Giveaways and Contests

Running contests and free giveaways on your blog will help you boost your blog readership. People find contests interesting and competitive so the engagement on your blog increases.

Additionally, free giveaways work as an incentive for your WordPress blog visitors. To offer an entry to your blog’s free giveaway, you can ask your visitors for an email subscription, comment on your blog posts, share it on their social media channels, and ask for other such things.

The trick is to think about the actions of your visitors that will increase traffic to your blog and provide them with one or multiple giveaway entries for such actions.

Optimize for keywords

All successful bloggers optimize their content for keywords. You need to perform proper keyword research to find sentences and words that your target audience is typing in Google and other top search engines.

Instead of guessing the keywords for your articles, consider using some helpful tools like SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool and Google Ads Keyword Planner. This way you can find the terms people are truly interested in and the keywords that do not have too much competition.

Optimize all your blog articles for the focus keywords. Including the focus and other keywords in your articles, URLs, headlines, meta titles, and meta descriptions will help you rank higher in search engine results and bring in more traffic to your WordPress blog.

You must ensure to choose the keywords that have some good traffic volume but at the same time, have less competition. Such keywords will help in the better ranking of each of your articles.

Optimize WordPress site Speed

The speed of your WordPress blog is extremely important for increasing its readership. A page load time of up to 2 seconds is considered good but it is better to keep it as fast as possible. Nobody likes to wait for a website page in today’s fast-moving world. We all jump to another blog if one doesn’t load in a second or two.

Additionally, it has been proven that the loading time is a ranking factor now in SEO, as google tends to take that as a good signal that will help improve your rankings over your competitor’s slow sites.

Get a fast WordPress hosting

Signing up for a hosting provider that specializes in WordPress, guarantees you to get the best optimization features for your WordPress site. However, that alone is not enough, because you need a hosting provider that can also handle a high traffic volume of visitor’s simultaneously.

To help you get the right WordPress hosting, here is an excellent ranking article listing some of the Top WordPress hosting providers that are well optimized for large traffic sites.

Optimizing images

Optimizing your WordPress website will help in the faster loading of your blog pages. Images are generally the biggest culprit in slowing down your website. So you must first optimize them through an image optimization plugin like Smush, Imagify, or Optimus.

Cleaning WordPress database

Cleaning your database and enabling website caching is also an important part of blog optimization for improving its speed. With continuous use, your WordPress blog’s database gets clogged up with unnecessary files.

You can automatically clean your database with WordPress plugins like Advanced Database Cleaner or WP-Optimize that work in the background and keep your database clean.

Enable caching

Enabling caching on your WordPress blog will considerably improve its speed. You can store your website data locally with caching, thereby reducing your server load to a large extent. Your website will, therefore, load faster on your visitors’ end especially when they are repeat visitors.

 

Consider using W3 Total Cache, Cache Enabler, WP Super Cache, or other such top caching plugins compatible with WordPress. They will automatically generate static files for your blog and improve its loading time.

Take advantage of Social Media

Social media platforms have become a huge thing in recent times. The top platforms have millions of daily active users with varying interests. You can take advantage of this huge user base of different social networking websites to get traffic to your WordPress blog.

Try building your presence on some of the top platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Post multiple times a day on these websites and share your blog articles as well.

Use relevant keywords and hashtags when posting on social media sites to build a following on these channels. Also, interact with your audience and fellow bloggers to remain social and increase your presence.

You must also include social sharing buttons with each of your blog posts to make sharing easier for your audience. It will allow your blog visitors to share your post on different social platforms. This greatly increases the chances of your blog post going viral.

Here is an example of social sharing options on an article posted by Mashable:

Internal linking Strategy

Once you create multiple posts on your WordPress blog, you can link the content of a new post to a previously created post. This type of linking between articles is called internal linking since two or more posts on your blog are linked to each other.

Apart from adding value to the new article, this strategy reduces your blog’s bounce rate. It increases the overall engagement of your website.

The only key is to link articles that are closely related to each other. Your visitors might be interested in such related content and read more of your blog posts, thereby increasing your page views. It also increases the chances of visitors sharing your blog content since they find it valuable.

Here is an example of a post from TechCrunch that uses internal linking to a related, previously-posted article:

Developing a good internal linking strategy can change your visitor behavior from “read and exit the blog” to “read, find another useful post, read, and repeat”.

In addition to the above benefits, internal linking also helps in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your blog content. This cross-linking allows Google and other search engines to understand the relationship between different posts on your blog. Such information helps index your blog content and is used for ranking purposes too.

Be a guest blogger

Guest blogging is a technique of creating content for other websites for mutual benefits. It helps you establish your authority in the blogging world while bringing in more visitors to your WordPress website.

Becoming a guest blogger allows you to spread the word about your blog to a new set of audiences and bring in organic traffic. It expands your work portfolio and helps in building or enhancing your online reputation.

In addition to the above benefits, guest blogging is also useful from the SEO aspect. You can create external backlinks to your blog through this technique. Consider creating relevant backlinks to your blog posts in the guest posts you create. Always ensure to add value for the readers when linking your blog posts, only then will they click the link and visit your blog.

Note: Google ranking relies on context as far as backlinking is concerned. So avoid linking your guest post on a sports equipment blog when your blog has nothing to do with that niche. Guest posts on non-related blogs are only useful for establishing your authority and not for backlinking purposes.

Pay for Traffic

Where SEO is a long-term strategy to bring visitors to your WordPress blog, paying for traffic will help you expand your reach in the short term. Paid advertisements for your target audience on different platforms will ensure great results.

How does paid traffic benefit new bloggers?

When you are launching your first blog, paying for traffic will help you establish yourself faster in the blogging world. It helps you build the name and reputation of your WordPress website by spreading the word online.

How does paid traffic benefit established bloggers?

When you have an established blog, paid ads will expose your blog to a new set of audiences who are interested in your niche. These advertisements can also be used to retarget your previous blog visitors.

Several online platforms allow you to advertise your blog to the people who have earlier interacted with your WordPress blog in any manner. By targeting such internet users, you increase your chances of building a loyal following of repeat visitors to your blog.

Best online advertising platforms and how to use them?

Consider using Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Microsoft advertising, and other such top advertising platforms when paying to bring traffic to your blog. Be aware of your blog audience and use the most suitable criteria to target it.

I’d recommend setting a weekly budget for paid ads and tracking the ad performance at the end of the week. If you are satisfied with the traffic results, use the same criteria for the next week. On the other hand, if the ad performance is not as per your expectations, try different criteria to reach your target audience.

Conclusion

Getting traffic to your WordPress blog is an incentive for all the hard work that you do in creating content and managing your website. It builds a name for your blog and improves its search engine ranking. All this leads to better user engagement and revenues.

Apart from following the above techniques to get traffic to your WordPress blog, you must also notice which of your blog posts perform better. It will help you understand what your audience wants, so you can produce your blog content accordingly.

Satisfying your audience consistently will make them visit your blog repeatedly. It will also establish your blog as a brand in the online world.

Do you know some other ways to get traffic to a WordPress blog? Share them and I’ll update this article with your ideas as well!