8 Tips to Making Your Blog Sticky & Keeping Readers Engaged

As we dig into creating great content, we need to talk about keeping your readers engaged. Besides creating the types of posts people flock to, it’s important to that we make our blog sticky. What in the world does that mean though? A Sticky Blog means that you’re keeping readers on your blog.

You want someone to visit, stay and engage on your blog versus clicking the back button quickly. This helps build your readership, email list and improve your search engine optimization.

3 Reasons Why a Sticky Blog is Important

1. Sticky blogs are seen by search engines more often.

If you’re able to show search engines that people are staying on your content and engaging with it, the more likely they are to rank in searches. It’s important to note that search engines like Google track how long someone is staying on your site with analytics and robots that crawl your page versus a real person checking it out. You’ll be able to track it yourself with Google Analytics.

2. Sticky posts allow you to interlink other content that rocks.

If someone is loving what you’re writing, they are probably going to want more of it! By creating great content, you can begin to link to other relatable posts inside of a post. For example, on our editorial calendar post, I also suggest learning how to batch content because they work hand in hand.

3. Sticky content is often long, offers a ton of value and is keyword rich.

Keywords are that powerful tool to help you rank on search engines. In normal people terms, keywords are the topic of your post. As you blog on a topic and offer a ton of value readers connect with – the more sticky it will be. This can also help a blog post you wrote 6+ months ago continue to see traffic!

How do I make my blog sticky?

So yeah, sure this whole concept sounds great – but how do you make it work for you? These tips will help you create a sticky blog that generates more traffic and engaged readers.

1. Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

This may include creating menus, interlinking related posts, and including a plugin that generates related posts the reader may like at the bottom of each post.

2. Create a Start Here Page

If you already have a lot of content on your site, a start her page can be helpful to a new reader. This page should include a brief summary of your about page, links to your best posts and where you or your content has been featured. Any awards or free lead magnets could also be featured here.

3. Use Powerful Headlines

Headlines allow your reader to immediately decide if a post is worth reading. You want to engage them from the start with something irresistible. Numbers, adjectives, and nouns like “tricks, tips, secrets, tools” all work well.

4. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

The numbers of people using mobile devices to surf the web are going like crazy. We talked earlier about using a mobile friendly theme, but it’s worth mentioning again! If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it can hurt your search engine optimization and keep people from digging into your content.

5. Interlink Your Content

If you have a series like our Start a Blog series, make sure you’re linking to those series and posts within new posts. This will help readers dig into similar content. Another way to interlink content easily is to choose a theme to talk about each month. Then you’ll have relevant content to link to within new posts!

6. Make your content scannable

When you’re writing content, make sure it’s written in short sentences and paragraphs. Headers can also break up your content and make it easier to read.

7. Create the next step

After someone has read a post, what do you want them to do? You want to guide them to more content whether it’s on the blog or a newsletter.

8. Always include a call to action at the end of a post

A call to action is the action you want them to take next. Don’t leave what the do next up to them, give them a call to action. This may be signing up for your newsletter, getting a freebie or checking out a new post.

Do you think you have a sticky blog? If so, how did you do it?

Head Back to Our Start a Blog Series