Beyond page views: Building reader loyalty and engagement with content

Page views are becoming less and less of the sought-after metric as more organizations prioritize content that converts readers to subscribers and members and centers on engagement.

It’s a path that should be well received, not only from readers but also from editorial teams.

Don’t get me wrong, page views are still an important way that many news organizations sell by. But they clearly aren’t the only way and in a world where one-and-done traffic is not preferred, creating content we know readers love and will come back for more, is where our focus really should be.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering how to create loyalty and return visitors more consistently with your content:

🔎 1. Find your niche within a niche

One of the best ways to write for users is to focus on the very specific things that readers show they have an interest in. These aren’t general topics, but very specific niches. Here are a few examples from actual clients we’re working with:

• A county government reporter discovered that readers loved reading guides about her state’s unique animals and how to detect specific ones. So she has created guides on snakes, wild animals, wolves and now bats for October. These stories are natural for her beat because they tie to county services and programs. A little encouraging to try an animals guide a few months ago has opened up a world of possibilities for her.

• A TV station saw lots of engagement around its crime blotter so it developed monthly features that mapped specific crimes to certain neighborhoods and talked to police about the trends they were seeing. It moved the content from just a general crime list with not a lot of context to now showing how the crime impacts me in my neighborhood and what I can do and should be aware of.

• An editor who has focused on creating school calendars in her market, discovered that they were so popular she’s now creating break out stories on when winter break, spring break and the key dates for teacher conferences are. This is all being built from the overall school calendar for each school district.

Find what interests your readers — go beyond just saying readers like crime or government content — and get specific on the niches and own them.

❓ 2. Be useful and answer questions

Writing for users isn’t just about creating content that your current loyalists want but it’s also about developing new loyalists.

One way to do that is to be super useful. And you can do that by establishing things readers are seeking answers for and turn the content into formats that help provide direct answers.

It’s become pretty public per Google’s last major SEO update that writing long for the sake of SEO doesn’t work. Give the reader the information they need and let them move on.

When you consider the job that the reader wants to get done when they do that search — and create your content around that solution — you not only are making Google happy, apparently, but you are giving the reader what they came there for.

Using Google’s tools — their site and type in a query as well as their Google Search Trends — in addition to other tools like SEMRush and Ask the Public, are simple, but effective ways to write about topics that will build loyalty.

🗞️ 3. How to hold your audiences’ attention

One of the key metrics when it comes to writing for users is the time that someone spends with your content.

There are a few ways to make sure someone stays with your content:

• A great story: We’ve all read a story that we’re so encapsulated with that we just can’t put it down. Clearly this is the holy grail of writing for readers. Find those stories, those writers and do this over and over.

• Use elements: Interactives like timelines, maps, polls, data sets and quizzes are all ways that you can create more time with your stories.

• Use formats: Alternative story formats — Q&As, lists, by the numbers and more — are very effective in holding someone’s attention. Research shows us over and over that stories that have multiple entry points do a great job on maintaining attention and scroll depth.