How To Create Content That Keeps Your Readers Coming Back

Publishing content on a regular basis is a great strategy to increase your website’s organic traffic — website visitors who didn’t get to your site by clicking on an ad. But getting those readers is only half the battle.

If you want visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, make a purchase, or engage with your content in any way, you have to keep their attention long enough for a meaningful interaction.

Here are three tips that will help you publish engaging content.

Focus on quality over quantity

The best way to make your site attractive is to have high-quality content. This begins with publishing information your audience wants.

If a visitor doesn’t see what they’re promised after clicking on a search engine result, they’re going to leave. In the world of online marketing, that’s called a bounce.

To avoid bounces, offer tips, tutorials, guides, and instructional information that will help readers achieve their goals and solve their problems. Investing in useful and relevant content will gain your reader’s trust and build your reputation as a source for new and insightful information. Not only will you keep them around longer, you might gain a loyal follower.

squirrelsandbears.com offers inspirational content for entrepreneurs.

By publishing content your readers want, you’ll avoid a common mistake in writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO): sounding like a robot. While it’s important to choose clear titles and include keywords relevant to your industry, writing content for the sake of SEO alone doesn’t benefit you or your readers. Rather than publish a post about “One weird trick that will make you millions”, aim for content that is straightforward, useful, and sounds like a human wrote it.

Keyword-heavy content might cause a surge in traffic, but you could also experience an increase in bounce rates since your visitors are leaving as soon as they hit your page. If you focus on quality content that provides value to your readers, you’re much more likely to get the engagement you need to make your site successful.

Want to write more but don’t know where to start? Try gathering a list of your audience’s most common questions and answer them in your content. Think about what you’re offering on your website and write in-depth descriptions, guides, and posts that make you shine. If you need help or inspiration, visit The Daily Post for tips, ideas, and blogging prompts.

Make it beautiful

Draw your reader in with striking photos and videos. Add engaging media to your blog posts and pages, and you’ll increase their appeal to visitors who might be intimidated by a wall of text.

Images will visually support a statement or illustrate a point. Videos showcase tangible products so your visitors can get a better idea of what they’re buying. They’re also shown to increase purchase intent.

Images and videos are great but only if they load. If you have Jetpack on your website, you can use all the media handling and display features to make your website faster and more enjoyable to browse. Jetpack includes an image acceleration service called Photon. That means less load on your host and faster images for your readers.

blog.ruffwear.com uses action shots to showcase their products.

Some more ideas: the Gallery Widget provides you with a simple way to display a photo gallery or slideshow in your blog’s sidebar. Tiled Galleries allow you to display your image galleries in three new styles: a rectangular mosaic, a square mosaic, and a circular grid. And if you have videos, the VideoPress module allows you to upload videos from your computer for hosting and playback directly within your site.

Tiled Galleries work great on all sorts of blogs, even en.blog.wordpress.com.

Whatever you choose to add to your site, Jetpack makes it beautiful and fast.  

Track your results

If you already have posts and pages, this is a good time to take inventory of all your content. Identify what’s working well and build on that success.

If you have Jetpack installed on your site, you have access to tools like Stats to measure your traffic. View which posts and pages are getting the most traffic, where your readers comment the most, and how people are getting to your site.

Stats is an easy way of keeping a finger on the pulse of how your visitors are engaging with your site. If you know what your readers like, promote that content on the homepage or social media to attract even more readers.

Use your Stats to inform your content strategy and to make decisions on what types of articles to write next. For example, if you notice that interviews are consistently receiving more attention than top 10 lists, focus on writing more interviews and linking to them in visible areas on your site.

Sites with the Professional plan can connect to Google Analytics for a more in-depth reading of who’s visiting the site and what content is getting the most attention. You can also view how much time people are spending on each page, so you know if your articles are being read or skimmed over.

By building analytics into your workflow, you will keep a close watch on how your audience is responding to your content.

Make a plan

Whether you post on your blog once a day or once a month, make it count. Plan your next blog posts so you always have a few ideas in the bank. Focus on providing accurate and valuable information for your readers and build trust so they stick around and want to come back!

What about you? What tips do you have to publish great content?

Andrea Zoellner

Marketer, entrepreneur, and travel blogger. I'm obsessed with French expressions, English puns, and packing the perfect carry-on.