How to Increase Page Views of Your Blog - Nia M Wardani | A Logbook of Life Discoveries

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Have you ever heard the term Page Views or PV? Pageview is a term that I am not familiar with, until last Sunday I got the opportunity to join Webinar Marathon Coaching Growthing on October 25th, 2020. Page View is, in fact, one of important indicators of a blog’s success. Curious? Dig deeper below.As I mentioned in the previous post, that we got a week off from Blogspedia coaching program, but instead we are asked to make resumes about the materials given in Webinar Marathon Coaching Growthing, or shall we actually call it Growthing Coaching Marathon Webinar series in English? (This one actually makes more sense). Which actually means that we must attend all sessions of the webinars. It was a good thing, though, because then we get to know more people in this blogging world, hear more terms, and get more knowledge about blogging.

The webinar is held in three days via Zoom with several different speakers. On the first day we had Rini Novita Sari talking about how to increase Page Views of your blog, and Bahrul Ilmi talking about studying traffic from Google Analytics. I am going to write shortly about what I learned from their explanations, but before we go to page views, let's discuss several terms that might be unfamiliar to a new blogger like me. If you are an expert, you can skip to the next part.

Rini Novita Sari : How to Increase Page Views

Several terms in Google Analytics

• Page Views or PV

Page views is the number of pages that is viewed by users in your blog or website, or the count of views to pages of your blog. You can see page views in many blogging tools, however Google Analytics, according to coach Rini, is more valid.

• Unique Visitor of UV

UV is the number of unique visitors that visited your blog according to their IP address. For example if you opened several pages, the number of unique visitors is 1. But if 5 people with different IP addresses are visiting 1 same page, the UV is 5. So 1 visitor can give you more than 1 PV if he/she opens more than 1 page in your blog.

• Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your page without doing any action such as clicking your link or opening your other pages on the sidebar. The higher bounce rate of your blog means that the visitor only visited your blog, but they are not interested to know further about the topic you are discussing or not interested about what other post you write. So, you better have a low one.

Why is Page Views important?

There are several points that could give you an insight why PV is important:

• Every Adsense blogger is hoping for high PV because you will get a commission only if the visitor is clicking the link in your page.
• To increase your conversion rate
• High page views means the quality of you content is high
• To increase your rate card, a fee given to you by somebody for writing them a requested article
• Increase the chance of getting another job offer. Several company gives certain PV limit to blog they want to cooperate with

What is the best traffic source?

To increase the number of views of your pages, obviously you must understand where does your traffic come from, is it:

• Organic? means direct search from Google
• Direct? means directly entering the name of the url to the browser. This usually coming from people that already know our blogs well
• Social media? Like twitter, instagram, facebook. These days bloggers also use social media to direct people to their blog. Social media is very effective in reaching out to people but they have many limitations compared to blogs. That’s why the combination is used to reach more people but also to get the advantage of blogs

How to increase Page Views of your blog?

Now, let’s go to the main topic. Here are several ways to increase page views of your blog:

Pay attention to research keyword

Write articles that people want to read. Several ways that you can use to find the keyword as mentioned by coach Rini are using intuition when looking for a research keyword (maybe this one is for the experienced blogger. Read the book Blink by Malcom Gladwell if you want to know more about what I mean), using Google Keyword Planner or the combination of it with Keywordtool.io, Keywordfinder.io, or Neil Patel

Write SEO friendly and human friendly articles. 

One tip here: study Google search result page 1 and 2, and try to write articles that are not very far away from those articles.

• Choose comfortable language

Yes, you want to your articles to be easily found by search engine, but don't forget that in the end human readers will read your article.

• Choose correct keyword, as I mentioned above
• Choose a title that contains keyword
• Pay attention to URL

URL has maximum characters, so make sure that it is not cut in the middle of a phrase and still show the main idea of the topic.

• Number of words
• Keyword positioning

Make sure to use keyword the tittle, first paragraph, last paragraph, and the content of the article.

• Number of keywords
• Heading & subheading
• Internal and external link

Internal link is the link that will go to articles within your websites, while external link is the link that will go to other websites. If you have high bounce rate in your blog, adding more internal links can help to reduce it.

• Image optimization

Renaming your image before uploading to your blog is important, because people who search for image of certain topics can end up visiting your page that has the image he/she needs. Also, don't forget to add caption, image tittle, and alternative tittle to your image.

• Meta description

Meta description shows a preview of your articles when they are shown on search engine result page. It is suggested that you put a description that contains the keywords and shows the main topic of your article.

Link building

Link building is a techniques so that other website is willing to put our links to their websites, eg, use communities or cooperate with other bloggers

Making trending/viral articles

Follow the trends. You can check the trends from this website: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore

Blogwalking

Visit other blogs often. Check your reading lists, leave a positive comments, but remember never spam.

Page speed optimization

Would we ever want to read a slow responding website? People wants to get their information quickly. Be careful with your choice of template, your uploaded image, etc.

Do you think my blog here is fast enough? Please comment below.

Eye catching blog design and clear navigation

Your choice of template and blog design matters here. Choose a clean one with clear navigation, give comfort to readers while they are reading. In addition, clear navigation will lower your bounce rate because readers will then be invited to read other similar posts in your blog that they are currently reading.

Study your Google Search Console

Google Search Console is used to understand the performance of our website in search engine. This can increase your organic traffic source. 

You know when you want to get information about something, then you will type a keyword in Google. Then each page of the search result, you will find 10 relevant websites. Blogger can find the position of their page on the search result from Google Search Console.

Study your Google Analytics

If you find a specific article that has higher page views, you can write another article of the same topic
In addition to this, you can always make your own target of PV, optimize old articles, etc.

Bahrul Ilmi: Studying Traffic from Google Analytics

Unfortunately when I am writing this I haven't put Google Analytics to my blog. But I have got several insights about what Google Analytics is. I will try to explain what I understand.

Why use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that we can use to understand the traffic of our blog or website. Using Google Analytics, not only we can understand the blog’s traffic and the source of traffic, but also we can evaluate our content, understand our audience, and we can give easy report to a company if we have cooperation agreement with them

Several important items in Google Analytics

• Real time shows your visitors activity in your blog at that moment 
• Audience, you can use to get to know your audience. For example, in which age group is majority of your audience or what is the gender ratio of your readers 
• Acquisition, to see summary of traffic in the blog and the source of it. Is it mostly organic, direct, from social media, referrals from other websites, or other.
• Behavior, see the online action/attitude of your visitors. What is the page view, what is the bounce rate, etc.
• Insight, gives user data in the blog, when they are active and not. This can give us insight to what time we should publish our posts and what time it is okay to have maintenance in our blog. Not only that, it can also show you which countries readers come from and from what type of device they are reading, is it from browsers or mobile.

Understanding statistics of your reader is important to communicate well with our audience. Above are only several points from a wide range of strategies to increase the quality of your blog. In the next post, I am going to tell you about what I learned from the second day of Growthing Coaching Marathon Webinar series. Feel free to comment below about how to increase page views of your website. Do you have any tips about increasing PV?