We’re big fans of tools and techniques for publishers that improve reader engagement. PostRank Analytics is the best way we know of to measure that reader engagement, but of course measurement is just the beginning. You will need to do something to move your reader engagement “up and to the right”. So what can you do? (We are getting more and more inquiries about that.)
One of the simplest and most effective ways is by offering archive search directly on your site, and the best way to do that is by installing the Lijit Widget. Lijit has long been an advocate for publishers and their readers and using the free Lijit widget is a great way to improve reader engagement.
The first step in reader engagement is discovery. Readers need to find your content in the first place, whether that is by search, from an RSS reader, or increasingly from a social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Local search is helpful to readers because it allows them dig deeper into content you may have written previously on a similar or related topic.
If you’re an expert in an area often visitors will come for a timely post of the moment, but you can highlight your expertise by making it easy to get at your great older content via search. Given the deluge of content available online, local search is a great way to recirculate that great post from two months back that you spent hours on!
Of course, local search is just the beginning. Lijit supports searching for your other content that’s not even hosted on your site, like YouTube videos, Twitter, and Delicious, just to name a few. If you are part of a blog network, formal or social, you can include your network’s content in search results as well, helping to expand your audience’s exposure to your network’s content.
Lijit also offers a statistics dashboard of its own, including some PostRank magic to showcase your recent top posts. One of the coolest features of the Lijit statistics is the tracking of search queries, including queries that ended up with zero search results. This is magical data since it tells you what your audience thinks you should/would write about, and what they would be interested to read. This is a great source of inspiration for future posts. There’s a more complete description of what the widget can do on the Lijit Widget Features Page.
So, here is a great experiment to try for PostRank Analytics users:
- Baseline your engagement, get a feel for what “normal” is with PostRank Analytics’ Engagement Overview
- Sign up for Lijit and install the Widget on your site
- Measure the impact of the Lijit widget on engagement and pageviews after a month in PostRank Analytics.
Clearly your mileage will vary, but by using your site’s engagement as a primary measure for feedback you can experiment with tools like Lijit, as well as writing styles and topics to see what will keep that audience engagement moving up.