WordPress is a fantastic platform for designing, configuring and maintaining a website, but it can’t bring in traffic for you. That’s something you need to figure out for yourself, taking manual steps to identify obstacles you can overcome and opportunities you can seize — and if you’ve never overseen a website’s growth before, you’re in for a major challenge.
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Coming back to WordPress traffic, even if your site concerns a very specific niche, you’re going to be competing with numerous other sites that have already had time to get established. You’re the interloper, appearing on the scene and trying to supplant them, so you need to give it maximum effort.
But how can you take your WordPress site from a fresh-faced contender to the king of the jungle? Let’s run through what you need to do to win the traffic war:
Polish your technical SEO
WordPress has a solid technical SEO baseline, so you won’t need to worry about your pages being indexed, but you will need to make sure you follow best practices for your URL structure, your content formatting, your metadata, and your loading speed.
This is because organic traffic (from search engines) is the best kind you can get — it’s free, plentiful, and varied — and you’ll struggle to rank if your SEO is poor.
Follow these tips:
- Make your URLs easy to understand. Edit your URLs to use your primary keywords (more on those shortly) and keep things short. Avoid alphanumeric strings and confusing hierarchies: a tech article on data security should be at something like /articles/tech/data-security.html, for instance.
- Include meaningful metadata. Page titles are important for search and usability, so keep them simple and to-the-point. Alt text is necessary for accessibility. And meta descriptions, while not significant for rankings, can make a big difference in click-through rate — so make them good.
- Keep your page speed up. Google already uses page speed as a ranking factor on mobile, and it’s going to hit desktop search eventually. You’ll also lose visits if your site is very slow because people will leave before it’s done.
- Format your content to be digestible. Your site needs to provide a good UX to keep people visiting, and that means chunking your content so it looks good on mobile screens.
Test your site extensively across different platforms, browsers, and devices. It should look great on everything. If it doesn’t, that’s something you need to address.
Use keywords very effectively
Keywords aren’t the quick traffic-boosters they used to be, but they function in a much more natural way now. Gone are the keyword-stuffing practices that used to win awful websites top rankings. Today, it’s all about semantic matching.
Instead of trying to include a specific term because you think it might rank well, you should include terms that are relevant to your target audience and selected topic. Every keyword you use should be justified purely by the context.
Take “organic search”, for instance — that’s a big keyword for traffic, but I didn’t need to force it into this post because it came up naturally. Organically. And if the biggest keywords out there aren’t coming up organically, that suggests that you’re not writing about the right topic, or not structuring your content correctly.
Do what your rivals do (but better)
Many smart marketers today produce content very smartly. Instead of getting creative and hoping it will win traffic, they identify the content that’s already winning a lot of traffic and specifically create content that’s at least slightly better while covering the same ground.
This is known as the skyscraper method because it’s like picking out the tallest tower on the horizon and building yours to be marginally taller, rapidly assuming its dominance. It’s far from easy (it won’t work unless you can genuinely beat your rivals), but it is relatively straightforward.
To begin with, figure out which sites are getting a lot of traffic for the terms you’d like to rank for. Search for those terms and look at the top results. How good are the sites? What could you do better? If you can tweak your site content to make it a better candidate than the top result, you’ll have a chance of supplanting it in the near future.
Build (and push) great landing pages
Landing pages are hugely important for bringing in traffic, because they’re easier to tightly optimize for specific visitors. Regardless of what channel your traffic is coming from, directing it to landing pages will make it easier to run A/B tests and achieve conversions — they’re ideal lead magnets.
Firstly, think about which page on your site is going to be the best destination. A product page? A service page? A tool you’ve created? Whatever it is, make it very simple and action-oriented so it’s a suitable link for PPC. You can also generate landing pages through reworking existing copy using flipbook creators like this or by recording pages of content as free podcasts.
With your destination pages figure out, you can start pushing traffic in their direction through mentioning them wherever you can, earning backlinks, and running ads. The better the page, the best loading speed page it is, the more conversions it will drive, and the more traffic it will attract.
Engage in omnichannel marketing
If you want to maximize your traffic, you need to go omnichannel with your marketing, because sticking to one or two channels isn’t enough today. We all have so many options online that we go back and forth between social media platforms, websites, stores, apps, games, streaming services, and numerous other avenues.
Come up with a marketing strategy that targets your desired audience wherever it goes. If your demographic is young men, for instance, you might do some social media work on Reddit, advertise on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch, and create content likely to be shared on Imgur and Twitter.
Take another look at your competitors to see which channels they use. There’s a good chance that they’re overlooking some opportunities, leaving you with room to outperform them. Have the most well-rounded strategy and you’ll have a great chance of achieving some steady improvements in your traffic acquisition.
Building up traffic is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t worry too much if you don’t get many visits to begin with. Follow these steps as you build up momentum over the months, and you’ll start to see results soon enough. Otherwise, you can hire me (Malaysian Freelance) to help you on speed up your WordPress traffic to another level with On-Page SEO optimization.
