by Esther Adeniyion May 18, 2019May 18, 20199 Comments on How to Increase your blog page views per visit
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It is one thing to have people come to your blog every day, it is another thing to get them to fall in love with it, stick with it and bookmark it eventually.
The plan is to make your first time blog visitors convert as much as they can. Do you know how cool it is to have them stick around long enough to subscribe to email notifications, subscribe to web push notifications and/or share your blog post(s)?
One way to maximize first-time visits is to get them to stick much longer. Having them read more than one blog post will not only increase your blog traffic but drastically reduce your blog’s bounce rate.
The truth is that there are different industry standards for these metrics. The number of page view/session varies from blog niche to blog niche. People are more likely to visit more pages on gossip blogs than they would for lifestyle blogs.
A lifestyle blog with pages/session of 1.5 above is considered normal. It should be higher for a perfectly niched blog especially if the blog has a lot of visitors from search engines. Here is a simple guide to help you understand the pages per session concept.
1. Sell your links
Yeah, sell that link and convince them to click on it. If you put links on words between sentences and hope that people will click on them because they have a different formatting, you might be wasting your time.
People have a short attention span, they want to get the information and be on their way. Something has to stop them short or keep reminding them to check another article as soon as they are done with what they are currently reading.
Here is an example of how to sell your link. I will write a paragraph and convince my blog reader to make sure to click on a link to get information about it or remember to come back to the link as soon as they are done with the blog post.
“Getting that smoothie wasn’t fun at all, fam. In fact, I literally had to walk in the sun to get to the venue. By the time I was done with the smoothie, walking back drained all of the goodness I had enjoyed.
This was why I wrote a blog post some months back on how to order smoothies online seamlessly, do you remember? If you missed it, you should stop here and read up or do so as soon as you are done. It is one very comprehensive article to get this process easy. It doesn’t make sense to have to suffer to enjoy, really.”
Look how I had to market that one link. Oh, yes, it took more words and all but I ended up increasing my word count, connecting with my readers like we were conversing and getting them curious enough to get a solution to their smoothie problem right there.
It would have been a totally different story if I just inserted the link somewhere within the post and left it there. The probability that they would even click on it is slimmer than if you went the extra mile.
2. Link to very similar articles
If you are going to have people click on that second link, it has to be something to reinforce the information they are already getting where they are.
Linking to very similar articles is one of the easiest ways to get them to look for more sauce on your blog. If you are all the way smart, even the next article they are clicking on has another very similar article linked within it.
I don’t want to read about computer keyboards if the article is about red lipsticks for black women.
It is also not enough to have these articles in the same category as you are writing on, they should be on the topic. It should flow seamlessly.
3. Use a different formatting
It is not enough to sell, or link to a very similar article, you should make the formatting of the link different.
I know that this isn’t a point to stress, you should know this, yet, I still find some Bloggers make this mistake. The link is of the same font, colour with the rest of the text.
Sometimes the hover colour, (that is the colour that shows as soon as you place your cursor on the link) is different. Sometimes, it is even not different at all.
This might be due to ignorance or just lack of care. So, use a different formatting. Having it in bright colours seem to work best. You can embolden, italicize, underline also.
If your blog doesn’t automatically give a different formatting for your internal link, you could speak to your blog designer to do something about it. I could also help you out, let’s get your blog in good shape.
4. Break up long posts into a series
If you have an interesting topic to write on, you can break it into different series, two or more. If it is interesting enough, you would have succeeded in making people follow the trail all through.
See how I mentioned “interesting” more than once. I already explained earlier, people lose interest quickly. If you are going to pull off a series in the first place, it must be worth it.
If you get it right, any single person that lands on any part of the series will be forced to check all parts.
5. Build an irresistible beautiful blog
So, I have landed on blogs in times past and I have not forgotten them ever since. When I landed on them, I kept on exploring the blog until I was tired.
Some of these blogs just had a homey, comfortable feel, others had a bright, full-of-life design. Whatever they all wanted to achieve, they achieved. They made me stay.
Part of having a beautiful blog is having beautiful pictures. I usually say to my clients, a blog is 50% design, 50% pictures.
If after your designer is done with your blog design, you go on ahead to make it shabby by placing low quality, not accurately expressive pictures, you have defeated the purpose of the design.
I have continued clicking on different articles on a blog just because I wanted to be mesmerized some more. I wanted to bask in the beauty of the online environment.
6. Install a related posts plugin
This is another way to have people check more articles. Put a segment for your blog archive, blog categories and all. Give them reasons to click on something else. Hopefully, what they click on gets them to click on something more.
7. Make more words your anchor text
Instead of just highlighting a word or two, you can try to highlight phrases or part of a sentence meaningfully. The more the surface area of your link, the better the chance blog visitors have at seeing your link and clicking on it.
Do you have other tips that have helped to increase page views per blog session/visit? Please share with us in the comments section.
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