You probably spend a lot of time and effort trying to get new readers to visit your site and read your writing.
With all the AI changes to search engines and social media, getting your writing noticed now can be a bit of a challenge, but readers are still out there.
Whether you rely on organic search traffic or social media platforms, any new visitors you get are always welcome.
But do they only visit once?
One visit is nice, but returning readers are gold
The internet is the land of rapid clicks and five-second scanning. If you have access to analytics for your site, you must have noticed how many short visits your site gets.
That’s fairly common behavior. You might get new readers, but many quick visits are usually from users looking for a quick answer or information, but don’t find it in the first couple of paragraphs, so they click away.
Another source of brief visits is automated bots, which are now prolific.
But if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll find the visitors that really count.
I’m always pleased when I see pages on my site with average session times of one, two, three, or even more minutes.
That’s plenty of time to impress a new reader, and a pretty good indication that the content is useful, helpful, or enlightening.
It’s also plenty of time to give these visitors options to continue reading other posts or articles. Perhaps a related articles widget or internal links to similar topics.
But the gold in your analytics is returning visitors.
If you use Google Analytics, you can quickly find your returning visitors in Reports > Retention > Returning users.
If you have a reasonable proportion of returning visitors, you’re doing something right. But whatever your current number, you can always try to improve it.
What do your returning readers like?
The starting point is to look at your top ten pages. Why are they more popular than the rest?
Very often, it’s not the topic itself, but how you presented it.
Are some of your top pages listicles of resources or 2,000-word articles with deep coverage of a subject?
Or are they “how-to” articles that offer new skills to your readers?
You can check your site data to see if visitors are returning to your top pages.
Google Analytics is a bit of a monster to use, so I create reports in Data Studio to make it much easier to find the data I want to see.
One data point I always track for my top pages is total views compared with new users.
This gives me a quick indication of which pages are attracting new readers and which are generating a lot of repeat activity.
But more importantly, you can identify the ones that are getting return visits.
Are they resource pages, how-to guides, or advice articles?
When you know what’s popular with your readers, you can lean into creating new content that is similar.
Another benefit of identifying your best-performing pages is that you can add new internal links or a related article call-out to them to encourage your readers to stay a little longer.
When you have a good idea of which of your pages are gaining the most return visits, you might have a little recipe for success.
But that’s not all you can do.
10 ways to encourage more returning readers
You’re always trying to get new readers to improve your site traffic. Never stop doing it.
However, you can also work on ways to get readers to stay longer and return. Here are ten ideas you can try.
1. Make your site easy to explore: Is your main menu organized and useful for mobile and desktop visitors? Can visitors quickly explore categories? Do you have links to your top pages on your homepage?
2. Can readers follow you elsewhere? Commenting on blogs is now far less common. But social media interaction is still working well. Share your content on social media, but don’t forget to reply to any comments you receive to get the most benefit.
3. Create clusters: If one article proves to be very popular, find closely related topics for new articles to build a cluster on the subject.
4. Develop your writing voice: Readers are often more attracted to how you write than what you write about. Try to maintain your unique writing style.
5. Update your best content: If you can, try to give returning readers something fresh by updating your best pages with extra content or resources.
6. Publish something worth bookmarking: Can you add tools, resources, or reference pages to your site? Assets like these are high-value return pages.
7. Create a series of articles: Instead of writing a 3,000-word monster, write five articles on the same subject, each taking it one step at a time.
8. Don’t overwhelm them: You should always have a couple of internal links or a related article widget. But don’t fill your pages with links, pop-ups, and flashing ads. It looks spammy and untrustworthy.
9. Write for the next visit: Why not occasionally point toward what you’ll be covering next in the last line of an article? You can turn it into an internal link once you publish the new article.
10. Give readers something they can’t get everywhere else: Write about your experiences, perspectives, or thoughts, but always maintain your voice and personality.
You can always improve or update an existing article with some of these points in mind.
They can help you get new readers, but also turn them into those golden returning visitors.
Summary
The best way to improve the number of visits to your site is to encourage people to return.
Once someone returns a couple of times, they are likely to keep returning.
You don’t need to change everything, just little tweaks here and there that might make it worthwhile for a reader to come back again.
Keep writing and publishing regularly, but give your readers plenty of reasons to come back and read your next article.
Related Reading: Promote Your Writing In The Age Of AI Search
English teacher, writer, and author. Passionate about grammar, creative writing, and self-publishing. Always exploring new tools and tech to help writers succeed.
