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Here’s a hard pill to swallow: You can’t build a WordPress website and expect visitors to come flocking in by the hundreds within a few months of launching it.
While WordPress is one of the best website builders in the market with built-in search engine optimization (SEO) features, you’ll need to put in some hard work to drive traffic to your site using the right strategies.
This includes publishing engaging content, maximizing search engine optimization, and more to boost your site visitor volume and, in turn, your conversions and sales opportunities.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to draw visitors to your website, but there are tried and tested tips for building a traffic-generating WordPress website, and that’s what you’ll learn in this guide.
1. Create a user-friendly website structure
The easier your website is to navigate for both your visitors and search engine web crawlers, the better your chances are of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This increases your site’s visibility and, in turn, your traffic.
Organize your WordPress site to set up a clear navigation path from your menus down to your web pages and posts, and back.
Consider these tips for creating a user-friendly website structure for your WordPress website.
- Ensure your website navigation is simple. Your website should allow your visitors to get to the page, section, content, or product they’re looking for in two to three clicks.
- Establish a hierarchy. Ensure your website is easily navigable by establishing a logical or predictable order starting from the homepage menu, categories, subcategories (for larger websites), and your pages and posts.
- Include internal links. Place internal links strategically across your WordPress website to create a network of all your pages and easily redirect visitors from one page to the next.
When your visitors can confidently navigate your site, you’ll increase the chances that they’ll explore more of your content and drive up your conversions and sales.
2. Publish engaging content
Creating relevant content such as articles, blog posts, and videos is one of the most effective but low-cost ways to drive organic traffic to your WordPress website.
Through posts that offer your audience advice, insights, how-to’s, and solutions that address your visitors’ pain points, you’ll engage and build trust with them, making it easier to convert them into paying customers down the line.
However, one of the biggest WordPress mistakes every webmaster should avoid is not creating a content or editorial calendar.
Without an editorial calendar, you risk losing your brand’s voice, or your content will appear disorganized and confuse your visitors.
Install plugins such as Strive Content Calendar on your website to help you create engaging posts and plan, create, and publish your content with ease.
Strive includes a content calendar that makes it easy to visualize your publishing schedule including both post updates and new articles.
Strive also lets you create checklists you and your writers can use directly in the Gutenberg editor. This can help tremendously for keeping quality up across the site.
Drive more traffic to your WordPress website by ensuring your content resonates with your visitors’ interests, answers their questions, gives them value and keeps them wanting more and coming back. This will also help your site rank higher in SERPs, boosting your organic search visibility.
3. Make a blog
One of the best ways to attract the right people to your business and generate and direct high-quality traffic to your website is through blogging.
Blogs help boost your SEO efforts since they can help position your website and web pages as relevant answers to searcher queries.
Optimize your blog for search engines to increase your opportunities of ranking higher in SERPs, and in turn, increase your website traffic.
Start your first blog by knowing your buyer persona first.
Doing so gives you a good idea about your target audiences’ interests, demographics, their pain points, etc., allowing you to tailor your blog posts to what your readers find relevant.
Once you know your buyer persona, consider these tips to help you create a traffic-generating blog.
- Perform SEO research. Know the topics your target audience is searching online to create content that is valuable to your readers. The more relevant your blog is, the more chances you’ll have of drawing in website visitors and increasing traffic.
- Use catchy headlines. Use relevant but attention-grabbing headlines to help convince readers to go to your website (or blogging site) and consume your content.
Free online tools such as the Sharethrough Headline Analyzer helps you come up with engaging headlines.
Enter your headline and the tool will score it based on a multivariate linguistic algorithm that takes 300 unique variables into account, including Natural Language Processing.
The tool also shows the strengths of your headline and provides suggestions to improve its engagement and impressions scores.
When writing your first posts, you can follow these tips for writing on the web to create highly engaging articles.
- Promote your blog. Spread the word about your blog by promoting it on various channels, such as email newsletters and social media. The more traffic your blog generates, the higher your chances of raising your SERPs ranking.
Leverage blogging to help you draw in relevant website traffic to your website, increasing your conversions and sales opportunities.
4. Build an email list
Email remains one of the best ways to reach your audience. It allows you to nurture relationships with them and run email marketing campaigns that keep them coming back to your WordPress website.
Capture leads and grow your email list right from your WordPress website using plugins such as the Official MailerLite Sign Up Forms that help you build compelling web forms.
The plugin integrates your WordPress form with your MailerLite account, giving you access to pre-built web forms, or you can create new sign up forms from scratch.
With the plugin, you’ll capture your visitors’ emails in exchange for free content, exclusive offers, and others, helping you engage them and increasing your site traffic and conversions.
This allows you to keep a list of contacts you can send your email newsletters and other email marketing campaigns to and lead them back to your WordPress website.
The platform also offers drag-and-drop editors to easily build your email newsletter and highly customizable pre-built design blocks or templates that help you create professional-looking newsletters quickly.
5. Implement on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
On-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to improving your WordPress website’s organic search visibility and SERPs ranking.
Essentially, on-page SEO makes it easy for users and search engine bots to find your web pages, increasing your chances of generating tons of high-quality traffic to your site.
Ensure effective on-page SEO for your WordPress website by optimizing the following elements.
URL
Make your WordPress website URL SEO-friendly by ensuring it is relevant to your target audience and describes what your page or post is about, not too lengthy, and doesn’t include unnecessary characters or words.
For instance, your URL should appear as https://myblog.www.wordpress.com/top-ten-blogging-tips instead of https://myblog.www.wordpress.com/sessionid=123&var=1&content=blogging.
Page title
The page title helps search engine crawlers know what your web page is about, allowing them to determine the relevance of your content for your target audience.
The more relevant your page title is to search engines and your audience, the better your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs, which is why you need to make it SEO-friendly.
Consider these tips on creating SEO-friendly titles.
- Keep your page title within 45 – 60 characters. Ensure your title doesn’t go over 60 characters since that’s the maximum number of characters that SERPs will display, but avoid making it too short either, or it might not provide enough unique value to viewers.
- Ensure your title is relevant. Make sure your page title accurately describes your page’s content or your audience won’t think it’s valuable to them and won’t click on your page.
- Include keywords. Add keywords that are both relevant to what users are searching for and your page content.
Media elements
Including videos, images, screenshots, GIFs, and other media elements can make your web pages and content easier to read and more engaging.
However, you need to ensure that adding all these elements doesn’t impact your website’s performance, loading speed, and on-page optimization efforts.
Adding too many media elements or videos and images in large file sizes will slow down your site’s load speed and turn off your visitors, leading them to abandon your site in seconds.
You can optimize your web images using tools such as Compress JPEG.
The tool will compress your images, reducing their file sizes to keep your web pages loading at optimum speed.
6. Track the success of your changes
After you’ve put all this hard work into growing your site, you’ll want to make sure it’s working.
An easy way to track your WordPress site’s performance is to install the Independent Analytics plugin.
Independent Analytics is a lightweight, GDPR-compatible analytics plugin for WordPress. It starts tracking your views the moment you install it, without the need to copy & paste any tracking codes yourself.
Once you get some data rolling it, you’ll have a clear picture of how well the promotional steps above have worked for your site.
Final thoughts
Gaining a significant amount of website traffic for your newly launched WordPress website doesn’t happen overnight.
It takes time and commitment to create a traffic-generating site, but the tips and tricks in this guide can be your springboard to gaining tons of high-quality visitors, boosting your conversions and sales opportunities.
