Understanding the user’s journey

All good site owners should consider their user when creating or updating a website. Your audience is what drives up engagement for your site, so naturally, you should be led to create what will be most relevant to your users.

While a good website’s user interface will guide a user directly to the answer or information they’re searching for, a great website’s user interface, coupled with engaging content, should draw your user in and send them down other avenues within your site. Overall, this increases dwell time, boosts engagement, and can lead to better numbers month over month. We’ll explore the beginning, middle, and end of a user’s journey across your site, and detail ways to keep your users coming back for click after click.

The journey begins

How is a user coming to your site? Are they finding your page via social media, a shared link in a Discord forum, or a feature in a fan newsletter? Or are they trawling through search results and wind up browsing your back catalog of content? Understanding how a user ends up on your page is the key to finding out how to keep them there.

If you see users coming from social media or from forums, examine your site’s presence. Do you have attached social media accounts? Are there hashtags around your niche that are currently trending? Is there an event or anniversary happening that could be drawing more traffic to your site?

If your user is finding your site through search results, do some keyword research to discover what terms they might be searching for to land on your site. Check out the competition. How high or low do you rank for your targeted keywords? Performing a search diagnostic on your site can help you drive more traffic by presenting search opportunities you can aim for with future content.

A fork in the road

To ensure a low bounce rate, it’s in your best interest to avoid clickbait titles or content, and to make information easily accessible across your site. While it may seem counterintuitive toward the goal of keeping users on your site, sending users away in search of the information on a different site is a great way to lose a potential member of your audience.

This doesn’t mean that users will quickly click away from your site after finding what they’re looking for. By providing links to other relevant articles of interest in a ‘Suggested content’ section below your blogs or features, you can send the user to another point of interest. It’s a way to create an organic path for the user to follow through your site.

Not sure which articles to suggest? You can also link your newest or most popular content instead of similar articles. Be sure you keep things organized with dropdown menus, and make things easy to find on your site with a search function.

The quest concludes

Just because a user has found what they’re looking for or left the site, doesn’t mean they won’t return. Faithful audiences will always come back for new content, so it’s important to keep up a consistent posting schedule. Alert users about new content with a newsletter, and make sure to broadcast on social media when you’re releasing new features.

Getting to know your audience is another great way to find out what’s important to them, to keep them coming back to your site. Why not start up a Discord or chat to fans of your niche on Reddit or X? You might not just find new users, you might make friends or even come across potential collaborators.

The user’s web journey doesn’t begin and end with your website, but you can bring them back with great content, a stellar UI, and features they’re asking for. Want to know more about running a successful site or monetizing your content? Check out our blog for weekly updates, and our Resources page for free, downloadable content.