How to Get More Traffic on WordPress

How to Get More Traffic on WordPress (15+ Ways)

Updated: Jan 02, 2023
Author By Jolissa Skow Senior Content Writer and Reviewer
LinkedIn

Want to get more traffic on WordPress this year? Getting more traffic to your blog or website is the first step to increasing subscribers, revenue or sales, so doing what you can to bring in that extra traffic is a great first step.

It’s really easy to get overwhelmed, though, by all the different things you can do to bring in more traffic. And not every tactic will be right for you! So, we’re breaking our post into sections with a few ideas in each section. Try tackling just one thing at a time before moving onto another.

First, Gather Data

Before you start working on driving more traffic to WordPress, you’ll want to have some data about your website’s performance so you can measure your success. The easiest way to do that in WordPress is with MonsterInsights. We’ll be using some screenshots from MonsterInsights in our tutorial, and use it to help us put together some traffic-driving tactics.

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics so you can view all the data that matters most right in your WordPress dashboard.

MonsterInsights is the best WordPress Analytics plugin. Get it for free!

MonsterInsights Home Dashboard

Plus, with the click of a button, you can set up sophisticated tracking features such as event tracking, eCommerce tracking, video tracking, form tracking, custom dimension tracking, outbound link tracking, and more.

If you’re not ready to purchase a license, you can start with the lite version.

With that, let’s dive into our ideas to get more traffic on WordPress!

Ideas for Generating More WordPress Traffic

To make this post easy to navigate, we’ve broken down our ideas for getting more traffic into sections based on the marketing channel. Use our handy links to jump to the section you’re most interested in!

  1. SEO
  2. Content
  3. Social Media
  4. Referrals & Returning Traffic

Let’s dive in.

SEO Ideas

1. Perform Keyword Research

Before you start any other SEO tactics, it’s important to research the keywords you want to target with your content. If you don’t research them, you might unknowingly target a keyword that doesn’t have the search volume you thought it might, making your content way less effective than it could be at bringing in traffic.

The basic steps of keyword research are:

  1. Take a look at your current analytics to see what’s the most interesting to your audience already, or what you’re already ranking for. Maybe you could expand on the topic.
    Top Landing Pages Report
  2. Brainstorm a list of possible keyword phrases you think your audience is interested in. Visit competitors or similar websites for inspiration.
  3. Use Google search and a keyword research tool to determine search intent, search volume, and related search terms.

For a full keyword research tutorial, check out How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: Quick-Start Guide.

2. Set a Focus Keyphrase

In general, each page or post on your site should be built around one main search term, with some related terms (commonly referred to as LSI keywords) in the content. That main search term is called your Focus Keyword or Focus Keyphrase.

While you don’t want to overuse your keyphrase (that’s called keyword stuffing), you do want to make sure it appears in your headline, URL, meta title and description, in your content headlines, and your image alt tags. That’s a lot to remember and to check, so we very highly recommend using the best SEO plugin for WordPress: All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO makes optimizing your content so much easier with their Focus Keyphrase and page analysis. Just enter your keyphrase to find out how you can better optimize your content!

Focus Keyphrase Opportunities

AIOSEO has more WordPress SEO tools and features, too, like XML sitemaps, rich snippets, social media integration, and more.

You can even integrate AIOSEO with MonsterInsights to see your most popular Focus Keyphrases:

Focus Keyphrase Report Example

Get started with AIOSEO today!

3. Headlines

An optimized and compelling headline is the first thing a potential site visitor will see, so it has to be good. It should:

  • Contain your focus keyphrase
  • Be 60 characters or less to avoid getting cut off in search results
  • Contain power words when possible
  • Stand out from the competition

Want to find out if your headline is good? Use the MonsterInsights Headline Analyzer to quickly get some tips for making it stronger. If you have a Plus license or higher, you can analyze your headline from right inside your WordPress editor:

monsterinsights headline analyzer tool

For more headline writing advice, check out How to Write a Headline: 7 Best Practices.

4. Connect Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an essential tool for SEO. It can tell you a whole bunch of really important things, like:

  • What search terms (keywords) your site is showing up in search for
  • Which pages are getting clicks from search
  • Your average search position for specific keywords or pages
  • If your structured data is working correctly
  • If your site needs speed improvements
  • And more

This is a tool that simply cannot be missed. If you’re a MonsterInsights user, you can have your Search Console Search Terms report right inside your WordPress dashboard:

Search Terms Report

For a full tutorial on connecting Search Console to your site, read How to Add Google Search Console to WordPress and Analytics.

5. Build Internal Links

Internal links are links within your own content that link to another page on your site. They’re important because not only can they give your website visitors a natural way to browse your site, but they can also help your content rank better in search.

You don’t want to overdo your internal links, but up to a couple per paragraph is just fine.

To make building internal links ridiculously easy, check out AIOSEO’s Link Assistant tool:

AIOSEO Internal Linking with Link Assistant

For more on building internal links, check out How to Add WordPress Internal Links to Improve Your SEO.

6. Speed

An important but often overlooked aspect of SEO is your site’s speed. A slow website can not only make your visitors leave prematurely, but it can also make your site rank lower in search results. Yikes!

To monitor your site’s speed, you can use the Site Speed report in MonsterInsights:

Website Speed Reports in MonsterInsights

Website running slowly? Check out 17 Easy Hacks to Speed Up Your WordPress Site Performance.

Content Ideas

While performing keyword research should help you come up with a few content ideas, here are some tips for coming up with even more targeted ideas.

7. Competitor Research

Taking a look at what your competitors (or similar sites) are up to is a good way to come up with ideas for your own site. There are a few ways you can do this.

The first way is just to visit their sites, scroll through some of their content, and take notes about which topics it would make sense for you to cover, so you can perform keyword research.

The second way is to use a tool like Semrush to get a glimpse into not only what content is on your competitor’s site, but also which of those content pieces are ranking well in search.

Semrush Competitor Research Example

For a tutorial on competitor research, read How to Spy on Your Competitors and “Ethically” Steal Their Traffic.

8. Repurpose Content

If you already have quite a few posts on your site, you might be able to repurpose (or reuse) your content.

For instance, let’s say you have an article just like the one you’re reading now, about how to get more website traffic. The post is a pretty popular one on your site. How can you further take advantage of this great piece of content you’ve written?

You could:

  • Make it into an infographic for readers to share on social media
  • Turn it into a downloadable guide
  • Make smaller graphics out of single points to share over time

Or, let’s say you have a piece of content that you think is really good, but it’s not getting the rankings or traffic that you thought it might. In this situation, you could try performing keyword research again, tweaking or rewriting the article to better align with your research, and publishing it fresh.

For more ideas, read 35 Brilliant Ways to Easily Repurpose Content and Boost Traffic.

9. Add FAQ

Another way to boost a piece of content is to add Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to it. This is a great way to help your content rank better for both your focus keyword and related terms.

For ideas about what questions to answer, run some searches and check the People Also Ask box:

people-also-ask-long-tail-keyword

Also check the suggested searches box at the bottom of the page:

Suggested Search Google

To really increase your chances of ranking, add FAQ schema. For a tutorial on using the All in One SEO plugin to easily add FAQ schema, check out How to Add FAQ Schema in WordPress [The Easiest Way].

Social Media

10. Integrate with Your Website

The first thing you can try to get more traffic to your website using social media is to fully integrate it into your website. There are a few ways to connect your site with your accounts:

  • Make sure your social accounts link to your website wherever possible
  • Use a plugin like All in One SEO to connect WordPress to your accounts: All in One SEO Social Profiles
  • Use a plugin (again like AIOSEO) to set up how you want sharing on Facebook and Twitter to look:
    Twitter sharing example
  • Use a social feeds plugin like Smash Balloon to embed your social media feeds onto your website:
    Instagram Feed Plugin Example

Embedding your social media feed onto your website can help you gain followers, which means more people will see your posts and (hopefully) click through to your site in the future.

11. Make Sharing Posts Easy

If you want site visitors to share your posts and help grow your following, you need to make it incredibly easy to do. The best way to make social sharing easy is with a plugin.

Our favorite plugins for the job are Social Warfare and AddToAny.

Social Warfare share icons example

For more of our favorite social media plugins to help with sharing, check out 10 Best Social Media Plugins for WordPress.

12. Run Viral Giveaways

Another great way to increase your social media followers and website visitors is to run giveaways. We’ve got the best tool for the job: RafflePress.

RafflePress is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin for creating drag-and-drop giveaways. Give everyone entering the giveaway the option to get extra entries for following you on social media and watch those followers grow!

rafflepress-pro-online-contest-software

Get started with RafflePress today!

Referrals & Returning Traffic

13. Grow Your Email List

Email marketing is one of the very best ways to grow your business. Collecting email addresses is so important! Your email marketing audience likely consists of people who have signed up for emails, made a purchase, or interacted with your business already in a different way. So, they’re awesome, qualified leads and an engaged audience!

To build and continue growing that audience, there’s one tool we recommend: OptinMonster.

optinmonster best landing page builder wordpress

OptinMonster is the most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world. Build pop-ups, slide-ins, spin-the-wheel campaigns, and much more to engage with your visitors and capture their information.

demo of ebook popup for optinmonster review

Get started with OptinMonster today!

14. Email Marketing

Alright, so you’ve captured email addresses. Now what?

Email marketing can be intimidating, but don’t let that deter you. Read some email marketing advice and best practices, set up your first campaign, and go from there.

If you haven’t set up an email marketing account yet, our recommendation for a provider is Constant Contact. Choose from hundreds of templates to get started designing your campaigns, track your campaigns with comprehensive reporting, and send up automated campaigns.

Constant Contact

Get started with Constant Contact today!

15. Push Notifications

Push notifications can be such a powerful, high-converting marketing channel. The only way to get onto your push notification list is to click a button to allow them, so you know that anyone signed up for your notifications is genuinely interested in what you have to share.

To send push notifications to your subscribers, we highly recommend using PushEngage.

PushEngage Plugin

PushEngage is the best push notification software for the web. Use it to alert your subscribers about new content, new products, sales, videos, abandoned carts, or anything that makes sense for your business.

With PushEngage, you can send automatic notifications, set up a drip campaign, try some A/B testing, and more.

PushEngage Example

Get started with PushEngage today!

16. Partner with Referrers

Do you know which other websites are linking to yours? Are any of them sending some referral traffic your way?

If you’re a MonsterInsights user, quickly find your referral traffic right in your Overview report:

top referral sources

If you’ve got a couple referrals there who are sending you some traffic, it would be a good idea to reach out to them to see if they want to do some further collaborating. They might want to link to another piece of your content, or maybe exchange a guest post of some kind.

17. Link Building

Link building can be hard to do, but it can be very impactful. Creating backlinks to your site not only can send you referral traffic, but also improve your SEO and search engine rankings.

One fairly easy place to start is with forums. Make sure to read all rules so you don’t get banned for including a link to your site, but many forum sites like Quora do allow some linking. Forum links aren’t as good for SEO, but they can definitely send traffic.

For more link building ideas, read How to Get Backlinks (15 Quick and Simple Strategies).

That’s the end of our list!

Of course, there are other marketing ideas out there that can help you increase the traffic to your site, but these are all a great place to start.

Want to know how users are finding your site in search results? Read How to See the Google Analytics Keywords for Your Website.

Not using MonsterInsights yet? What are you waiting for?

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for more helpful reviews, tutorials, and Google Analytics tips.

Want to Try MonsterInsights for Free?

Enter the URL of Your WordPress website to install MonsterInsights Lite.

Comments

  1. What an amazing blog post about how increase a WordPress site traffic in 2022.

    The tips you’re sharing are very interesting for online business.

    Thanks for sharing these helpful hacks.

    Best regards

    Reply

      1. SEO has been better at driving traffic to my sites. I try to curate articles to trending words, and study the data for my site. I want to know who is visiting and where they’re from.

        Reply

  3. This blog post was very helpful. As a beginner in SEO and Link building, this article has set me in the right direction. Thanks, Monster Insights.

    Reply

    1. This was so truly helpful. My favorite tip is about the push notifications. I think that would help improve so much of my marketing.

      Reply

      2. This was a fabulous article. I have to admit I started reading solely for the extra entry but there is a ton of valuable information in this. I just might change my SEO.

        Reply

  11. I loved their products . specially i am using their AIOSEO , Monster insights plugin more than 8 years for my education blog

    Reply

  55. There a lot of useful tips in this post, I plan to bookmark this page and use it to go through my site, and the things I’m doing, to make sure I’m using these tools and strategies.

    Reply

    1. Very Well Explained In Detail. We Can Definitely Increase Targeted Web Traffic By Following These Steps. Highly Recommended.

      Reply

  73. I really liked your strategy of getting more traffic to your blog having the title “How to get More Traffic on WordPress in 2022 (15+ ways). You’ll get data to show people how you actually drove traffic to your this blog content.

    Thumbs up👍

    Reply

  76. Wow, finally information is simplified without fluff or beating around the bush. I now see where I have been going wrong with my personal blog.

    Reply

  82. Super useful piece on gaining more Wordpress traffic! That’s definitely a goal of mine with my business. Gonna bookmark it to come back to for these tips… Thanks a lot!

    Reply

  87. SEO is always the hardest thing for me to figure out. I’m glad there are articles like these that help the process.

    Reply

  88. What an excellent source off knowledge. EVERYTHING you always wanted to know, and more you didn’t realise you NEEDED to know.

    Reply

  94. Really interesting read, I’ve struggled in the past to find decent guides on SEO and this is a great one!

    Reply

  99. This is very helpful, however, I would like to see a comparison with other plug-ins especially being that NPOs usually have limited budgets.

    Reply

  108. I have been using monsterinsights on my websites for years and simply put, they are the best. The cool thing about it is that other than giving helpful insights about the traffics on your site and great analysis reports . The blogs section teaches you how to bring more traffic and use the software to your advantage.

    Reply

  169. Thank you for this informative article.Excellent research well presented.A thorough and conscientious review.Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

  172. This is very useful! Especially for someone just starting out and trying to reach more people! Thanks for sharing!

    Reply

  182. A little long winded,but overall a really great and informative article. I just wish it was a little shorter.

    Reply

  184. It’s really funny, just this week one of my friends was discussing starting a blog on WordPress. I will have to introduce her to this article as I think it would be a tremendous help. Thank you for posting and it was actually perfect timing!

    Reply

  190. I have had various WordPress blogs that I have abandoned due to the lack of traffic they received. I’m considering starting a new blog soon and will keep these ideas in mind.

    Reply

  194. I’ve always loved the way MonsterInsights integrates with the sites I build. Great blog post. Thank you for the read!

    Reply

  208. We have been using Monster for a few months. The free version is good, but the paid version is worth the investment! We love it.

    Reply

  223. a consistently valuable tool for effective and timely insights as to how to best optimize each site that I build for optimum SEO efficacy as well as security

    Reply

  225. This was super helpful! My main takeaways are to set up giveaways and start growing my email list – those are the two things I’m not really focusing on and I think it’ll really grow my business.

    Reply

  229. Currently using MonsterInsights and it works great! We are now able to see how are WordPress site performs with our visitors and adjust to improve sales conversion. Good stuff!!

    Reply

  234. This blog post was very helpful. As a beginner in SEO this article helped me get on the right direction. Thanks, Monster Insights.

    Reply

  240. Using Monster Insights is a great help in managing SEO and the articles/blogs they have are great for learning.

    Reply

  245. I should have read that a long time ago!! Thanks to that MacBook Air competition I actually learned a lot. Win or lose, I won anyway😉😉😉

    Reply

  270. I’ve been learning about SEO this week and your article popped up at just the right time to reinforce what I’ve already learned and gave me some new points to ponder.

    Reply

  275. Thanks for this invaluable information, it will go a long way to helping me get the best out of my website.

    It is very exhaustive and as rich with quality information 👌

    Reply

  278. This is a helpful post and very insightful. I’ve been considering MonsterInsights for a while, and now I may need to subscribe.

    Reply

  280. Uno de los mejores plugins para wp, uno de los mejores blogs con contenido de calidad y útil para tu día a día.

    Reply

  282. Perfeito! Muito obrigada, “Monster”! Além de ser o melhor plugin para nos conectar ao Analytics, ainda dá dicas especiais para crescermos no Wordpress!

    Reply

  327. Thank you for the article! On of the most interesting thing is the Link Assistant, I didn’t know about that and I’ll start to try it!

    Reply

  339. This article reigns supreme among its foes. Any future content on the topic should consist of nothing more than a link to this page.

    With dexterity,

    J

    Reply

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