The pogo stick is a fantastic toy for kids. It is not a very good tool for surfing the web. Unfortunately, a lot of websites are subject to constant pogo-sticking. It’s not a good thing. If pogo-sticking is a problem for your pages, it could be harming search engine performance by negatively impacting what people think about your site. The good news is that it’s preventable.
The SEO experts at Webtek Digital Marketing explain that pogo-sticking and bounce rate are two separate things. Bounce rate is a metric that measures how often people visit one of your pages but then don’t do anything actionable. Pogo-sticking is a metric that measures how often people bounce between search engines results and the pages those results link to.
A Practical Example
A practical example of pogo-sticking is easy enough to illustrate. Imagine you run a web search on the history of SEO services. You click on the very first result but instantly notice that the page is hard to read. Grey text on a white background doesn’t work for you. So it’s back to the SERPs and the second result. You click on that link but abandon it shortly thereafter because the page takes too long to load.
You go back and forth between results and linked pages five or six times before landing on a page that works for you. This is pogo-sticking. Google has said that pogo-sticking isn’t a metric they worry about, but it’s still important because pogo-sticking demonstrates that people aren’t interested in your pages. That harms your authority which, ultimately, is bad for business.
How to Prevent Pogo-Sticking
So how do you prevent your pages from experiencing the pogo-sticking curse? Here are five tips from Webtek:
1. Emphasize Speed
We already know that Google ranks page speed. They want to see pages load in three seconds or less. Anything longer and your pages are turning people away. If you want to avoid pogo-sticking, emphasize speed in your web design.
2. Emphasize Relevance
Web users want content relevant to the question they are asking or the problem they are trying to solve. If yours does not give them what they want, they will turn away and go elsewhere. Therefore, emphasize relevance. Make sure your content is relevant to the keywords people use to find it.
3. Emphasize Quality
SEO experts cannot emphasize enough how important quality is to content. Poorly written content rife with spelling errors, grammatical errors, and basic syntax doesn’t get read. People see that kind of content and automatically assume that the website owner doesn’t care enough about the site to put time and effort into quality.
4. Avoid Clickbait
Web users are increasingly tiring of clickbait. They cannot stand it. If you don’t want your web pages to be subject to pogo-sticking, don’t go down the clickbait road. Create accurate headlines that actually describe the content. As for the content, it should be forthright and honest.
5. Emphasize User Experience
Web developers who know how to get results put time and effort into creating a good user experience (UX). A good UX occurs when visitors actually enjoy using a website. The site is easy to read, easy to navigate, and informative. That is what you are striving for on every page.
Google may not measure pogo-sticking as a ranking metric, but the problem still affects search engine results by impacting site authority. If people are jumping on and jumping right back off, it is clear they are not interested in what you’re offering. You need to correct that problem if you want a productive site.