Even though most guides list the quality of content as the utmost paramount for your blog, they sometimes tend to neglect other important factors. Speaking of which, one of the principal is the organization of your WordPress (WP) blog.
Why?
Well, simply because it allows your visitors to navigate your blog with greater ease and in this way have a better overall reader experience. With this in mind, here are few tips on how to organize your WordPress blog. The Blog covers 17 steps to improve user experience on your blogs. Apply blog user experience factors to improve engagement via user experience.
Table of Contents
Tips to Improve User Experience on Your Blog
1. Reduce Bounce Rate
The first thing you need to learn is what is the infamous bounce rate and how to fight it. You see, when someone enters your blog, they have a choice in front of them. They can either stay and explore further what your blog has to offer or they can simply leave (bounce back). You see, there is a statistic claiming that you have about 8 seconds on average to persuade a visitor to stay on your website.
If at first they don’t see what they should click on next, your visitors are much more likely to bounce than stay and explore some more. Keep in mind that there are 644 million active websites online and even if you fail to deliver, your audience can always hope to find what they are looking for someplace else.
2. Avoid Dead End Pages
One of the things that a lot of people fail to include to their website is the return to the homepage button. This unfortunately results in a dead end page, which is something you want to avoid at all costs. Sure, a visitor can instead repeatedly click back button until they finally return or look for your homepage in a fresh Google search, but this method is both impractical and annoying.
3. Provide Better Navigation
In order not to make a previously mentioned mistake, you need to put a lot of thought into improving your website navigation. From the beginning, you need to set the starting point (your homepage) and try to branch it out accordingly.
For example, from there, you need to have sections like: about, blog, testimonials, offers, etc. As for the cornerstone of this navigation, you have two methods that have so far proven to be the most efficient. You can either go with a) sitemap or b) intuitive navigation, whichever you believe will serve your website the best.
4. Keep Navigation Simple
Here’s the thing about building a great main menu. At first, you will be tempted to include as many links, information and features to it. Needless to say, this is not such a good of an idea. In order to build a better WP blog, you need to learn that sometimes less is more. This kind of a minimalistic approach allows your audience to focus on elements that really matter.
5. Manage the White Space
Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the white space is an element of your website. There are several uses of it, one being a fact that it actively increases your chance of conversion. Furthermore, it makes the rest of your design look more pleasing to the eye, which on its own isn’t a small thing.
6. Organize Categories
Finally, we reach to the probably most important item on this list, making and organizing categories on your blog. Luckily, this is something that WP excels at. All you need to do in order to get started is go to the categories link on the posts menu and go to the ‘Add New Category’ heading.
Here, type in the name of the category you want to include and even add a brief description of it (optional). From this point onwards, all you need to do is categorize your posts as soon as you upload them. It really is that simple.
7. Manage Tags
As for the tags on your blog, well… cleaning them up can sometimes be as important as finding the right ones to begin with. Why? In order to make your blog easier to navigate, you may start adding irrelevant, redundant and even worse misspelled tags to your website. Luckily, deleting them is not a complicated thing.
Still, in order not to lose audience due to the 404 errors and broken links, you need to learn how to make a 301 redirect first. Finally, you need to start choosing which tags should be deleted and which could be merged instead.
8. Fix Internal Linking
In the end, internal linking is a common blogging practice that leads to a much lower bounce rate and easier internal navigation. Still, keep in mind that this internal linking needs to be organic and not just a shameless promotion of your own content.
Keep in mind that this is also an SEO friendly practice, since it gives Google’s crawlers an easier navigation of your website as well. Think of it as a form of leaving digital breadcrumbs for these google bots to follow.
Adding a blog to your website is one of the best ways to show your expertise and spread the word about your brand. But if you want your blog to be successful, you’ll have to do more than just posting articles every day.
9. Work on Website Structure
Blog writers often disregard the importance of article structure. Considering the fact that the average attention span of Internet users is 8 seconds, most people will only scan your article.
Organizing your thoughts into subheadings and smaller paragraphs helps readers to go through the main points quickly and decide if they’re interested in reading the whole article. Your article may be great but if readers see large blocks of densely-written text, they’ll probably leave without reading a single sentence.
In addition, structuring your article allows you to express your thoughts more easily. It creates a sense of organization and provides an easier flow for the reader.
10. Keep the Headlines Catcy
The headline is your chance to grab people’s attention and make them want to read more. It has to let them know what your article is about without sounding plain or dull. What makes a headline catchy? Here are a just few ideas:
Numbers and listings:
People simply love numbers in headlines. Numbers seem familiar and make us feel comfortable. They let you know how long the article will take to read, i.e. how many points it covers. For instance, “10 Reasons Why Customer Satisfaction is Important”.
Emotional adjectives:
Use emotional adjectives to describe the reader’s problem like fun, effortless, essential, strange, incredible, etc. After reading the headline, readers should believe that you can solve their problem.
Trigger words:
Use trigger words like why, what, when, or how to enable or persuade. If possible, avoid using them together with numbers in the same headline.
Bonus:
Try to include a ‘focus keyword’ in your headline to make it easier for search engines to find your article. If you don’t know where to start looking for the best keywords, start by monitoring competitors and see which keywords they’re ranking for. Another way is to do a thorough keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs.
SEO optimized titles have more chances to rank higher in search results. Make sure that your headline contains a maximum 70 characters; otherwise, it will be too long for search engines to index.
11. Compelling introduction
The first sentence or paragraph in your blog post is the introduction. It is your chance to persuade visitors to continue reading, so make sure it is short, clear, and concise. Make your point fast and add enough information to tease the readers and make them want to know more about what you have to say.
12. Enough subheadings:
Use subheadings for each point you want to make. Here’s what subheadings serve for:
13. Offer Compelling Content
The body is the most important part of the blog post. Make sure it is unique and that it offers an original approach or angle. The content itself should be unique as well, i.e. it mustn’t be copied from other websites.
Unique content is more likely to get shared and liked, but it is also beneficial from an SEO perspective. Plagiarized content, on the other hand, can get you penalized or even banned from search engines.
Speaking of SEO, make sure to include enough keywords in your article’s body. It’s worth mentioning though, that keywords are not as important as they used to be. Google’s algorithms get smarter and smarter and now they can understand what the article is about even without you repeating the keyword.
This is good news since writers can focus solely on producing high-quality, legible, and readable texts for human readers only.
Bonus:
The length of your article does make a difference. And yes, the rule is: the longer the better. Longer content performs better in terms of SERPs ranking, social sharing, traffic, and conversion rates. Whenever possible, your blog posts should be at least 1000-1500 words long.
14. Add Great Visuals
Great visuals break the text and make it more visually appealing, thus encouraging readers to spend more time on your blog. And since search engines measure the time users spend on your pages, adding visual elements will pay off in terms of SEO as well.
Make sure to use high-quality images that are not only appealing to the eye but also relevant to the article’s topic. Besides images, you can also add videos and infographics. Finally, pay attention to your blog’s color scheme and typography in order to make sure your site offers a complete visual experience to readers.
15. Add Easy Call-to-Actions
Each one of your blog posts should have a call-to-action (CTA). CTAs come in different forms, depending on the action you want your readers to take. For instance, do you want them to go to another one of your blog posts, leave their email address, write a comment, download an ebook, or buy your product?
After you’re done writing your article, end it with a clear conclusion and add an explicit CTA which invites them to take the next logical step. If done right, calls-to-action will bring you more conversions.
16. Pay Attention to Grammar
Poorly written articles can make readers frustrated and cause them to leave. No matter how intriguing the topic is, no one will want to spend an hour decoding your illegible sentences. Of course, anyone can make mistakes but it helps if you proofread and edit your article before publishing.
17. Quick guideline to write impeccable articles:
Improve User Experience on Your Blog: Conclusion
Simply posting article after article on your blog is not a recipe for success. The above-listed points will help you create blog posts that are high-quality, unique, and well-written. Follow our tips and you’ll soon see significant changes in the success of your content marketing.
Once you’ve mastered these techniques, you can further boost traffic and brand building by deploying growth hacking tricks. If you have no idea where to start from, seek a help from a growth hacking mentor.
- 17 Ways to Improve User Experience on Your Blog - December 29, 2019