There’s a few ways you can increase website hits. You can create more content, share it more frequently, build back links to it and promote it via paid advertising. You can also create content which offers less SEO competition than the more competitive keywords. This can be done by targeting the “low hanging fruit”; the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
There’s several plugins you can use too to help you increase the visibility of your website. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Here’s a few ideas of plugins you can use:
- Yoast SEO – helps you optimise content for the search engines
- Social media share plugins – lets your visitors share your content more easily
- Revive Old Posts – lets you automatically syndicate content to social media
- Push Engage – lets you alert previous visitors to your new content
You can also auto post your content on social media from WordPress using software, and automate this process.
Increase Website Hits – Your Content
Your content is of course the most precious thing you have. Good content will help you get shares, likes and return visitors. Google (and other search engines) will rank you better if your content is good, and if your social profile shows this. As more people share and like your content, and spend time on your site absorbing it, the search engines will use this as an indicator to judge your website.
If people click away, don’t share and don’t link to your content, this too will be used to indicate the value of your site. So content is king! Without great content, your site will struggle to get more visitors. Even if you spend a lot of time promoting your content, the social media signals (and social interaction) don’t lie!
Even though content is king, you should spend an equal amount of time in the promotion of your content as the creation of it. Most of your content won’t go viral! So you’ll need to promote it heavily just to get eyes on it.
Increase Website Hits – Promote Content
To promote your content you can do a lot of different things:
- Autopost on social media – see this article
- Use PPC (pay per click) advertising
- Use press releases
- Link build with forum commenting or blog commenting
- Link build through article guest post writing
- Backlink from article marketing sites: e.g. ezinearticles.com
- Upload videos and other content to sites outside your own e.g. YouTube, TikTok
- Use article writing sites: Medium, Hubpages, etc.
Content promotion is easier if you have a large budget and can afford to pay for marketing. If not, you’ll need to build back links and other content pointing people back to your content. Link building has a two-fold benefit in that it improves your SEO (search engines optimisation) and brings in visitors directly from the sites you link from.
The Right Traffic
Of course website hits is only part of the story. Most website owners want more hits because they are monetising their website. No hits equals no income from your website. However, depending on how you monetise your site, you may need a certain type of visitor. Especially if you’re monetising with affiliate products and services. Not all visitors are buyer visitors. In fact most of them won’t be. So it’s worth considering the type of visitor you’re attracting with your content. For example, if your content explains free traffic strategies, you’ll likely be attracting the type of visitor who isn’t looking to buy. They’re looking for something for free!
Conversely, if you write product reviews on your website, you’ll be attracting people who are looking to buy a certain product. Comparing the two different pieces of content, which do you think will sell more products? Of course it’s the product review.
So it’s worth considering the content you’re writing before you start generating it. Creating content is time consuming and labour intensive. Imagine working for several months only to realise afterwards that you’ve attracted the wrong audience for your products. See also how to know your target market.
Traffic Into Sales
Turning traffic into sales can be done much more effectively if you get them to subscribe to your email list. If you don’t already have an autoresponder, you can get one for free here.
On a website, a visitor will generally only hang around for a few minutes if you’re lucky. To get their attention, offer something of huge value that they can access by giving you their email address.
Once on your email list, you can follow up with them over a long time span. Often people who join my email list will purchase something months or even years after joining it. If I only sold directly from my website, I would miss out on all these opportunities to monetise my website.
Using Long Tail Keywords
Many bloggers find long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty in the SERPS – search engine results pages. You can do some keyword research using Google’s keyword planner. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, look for the keywords which offer less monthly views and which ave three or more keywords. Then compare the keywords with others with a quick Google search.
By targeting the longer tail keywords, you can more easily rank your content in the search engines. It’s much easier to rank an article for three or more keywords, for example, than only two. Since those keywords are hugely competitive.
For more on this topic see also how to increase website traffic organically.