Summary
If you’re at the top of the SERPs, don’t get too excited just yet. You still have to deal with Pogo-Sticking. The battle for position number 1 on page #1 is fierce and will require a lot of research, analysis, and great content to combat your competition.
Often, we are making a lot of small, insignificant changes to our site repeatedly instead of taking the time to make a few big changes.
This is a huge mistake because search engines will take one look at our website and see that we are trying to manipulate them. They will then penalize us for this behavior by lowering our site’s rankings.
This post will help you understand what is Pogo sticking and how you can fix it.
Are we attracting enough users? This is always a vital question for every site owner.
As technology progresses, the digital competition gets tougher. So, what should we do? We have to level up our game!
Remember, page interactions matter to us. Many people use the same search term to find different results.
Avoiding pogo-sticking can serve as evidence that our site has engaged an audience.
Pogo-sticking is the practice of switching from one website to another to find information. Ideally, they click on the top result.
Users put in a search term and click on the first result that pops up before they know it; they are already clicking back only moments later because it’s not what we were looking for. Yes, it is a common mistake.
In a nutshell, pogo-sticking refers to the act of hopping from one search result to another because users are dissatisfied with the first website. This is an indicator that the website was not relevant to the user’s search queries.
That’s right! Pogo-sticking is bad for our SEO because it tells search engines that people leave our pages because they didn’t find what they want.
Don’t worry; in this post, we’re giving us a handful of techniques we can start to know more about pogo-sticking and best practices to avoid it.
Common Reason for Pogo-Sticking
Pogo-Sticking occurs for several reasons; it refers only to the latter cause of high bounce rates. High bounce rates might be a sign of success, but pogo-sticking never is.
Search engines are designed to satisfy users, so we may soon find our entries at the bottom of the list due to pogo-sticking.
To avoid such unfortunate events, it is always important to educate ourselves on the reasons behind them and know how to avoid them.
There are a few common causes for pogo-sticking. It can be caused by poor website design and targeting the keyword and phrases either irrelevant or too broad.
These causes can be either content-related or non-content-related. Learn to determine which is which.
Speed of the Website
Who wants a lag website when searching, right? Even for me, this isn’t very pleasant.
Speed plays a big role in the search engines as well as our experience as a user. If we click on the result of the website, it takes time to load.
As a user, we might lose interest or waste our time so that we might click back.
Number of Ads
If we use multiple ads on our webpage, it will spoil the user’s experience. If I am going to be the user, I may leave before I can read it.
So, avoid putting in many ads.
Autoplay Video
If I am a user and I am searching for something on our website. Suddenly, something played on it, a video or a sound.
I am going to be surprised if that happens, and I’m going to click back.
If we want to put a media file with our website, put it upon the user’s request. Bad experiences will result in pogo-sticking.
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Disable clicks or copy-paste
If we disabled clicking on our website, it would irritate the user. For example, if I am the user, I will leave our website without checking it first.
We can’t protect the content on our website by that method. If anyone wants to copy our content, we can strike a copyright notice.
Incomplete Content
If we made content on our website, make sure to put the complete details of it. For us, we think that it’s already complete.
But to some users, it may not. My advice: try to study another page and take it as an example for making content.
We find that our content isn’t indexed in the listing of a search engine. We should write a good amount of content like blogs and articles to get Google’s attention.
Just remember to use a theme that supports HTML5 because Google is a computer-based program.
Difference Between Bounce Rate and Pogo-Sticking
Many times, people get confused by the two. After reading the pogo-sticking, we might get it mixed with the bounce rate. But what is the difference between the two?
Bounce Rate
A bounce rate is the percentage of a page that enters a certain website; they leave it from the same page without any action. And it is another vital metric for digital marketing strategies.
We can bounce a reader or a user like me from a website by just typing the URL. Then open a tab, click on another site, or maybe click the back button to leave the site.
It is essential to keep our bounce rate manageable. A high bounce rate indicates that our website has a low relevance.
It will lead to a poor user experience, and for me, it is really bad publicity for our page. Our page is not that convincing yet for the users to stay.
A low bounce rate can indicate that more page views and engagement will lead to more conversions.
Pogo-Sticking
Pogo-sticking occurs when a user performs a search, clicks on the result available. But suddenly, the user will quickly click the back button.
The user will go back to be redirected to the search result page. There’s a huge possibility that the user might find another site.
Best Practices to Avoid Pogo-Sticking
As I mentioned, pogo-sticking is bad. It shows that the user did not find what they needed on our site, which concludes that our website is irrelevant for that keyword.
There are many causes of a pogo-sticking problem, but there are lots of practices to avoid it.
Google and other search engines only want to show their users with the best users for their queries. It analyzes the content for the users to read.
If that happens, it will simply downgrade the ranking of our page for future users. They will show a better one available.
In the image above, let’s say that I made a query with a certain search engine. The search engine responded with their top 4 results that were relevant to the keyword I searched.
We will label the results as a, b, c, and d and position them on their rankings 1, 2, 3, and 4. These a, b, c, and d are unexpected results of our queries.
The letter a is better than b, and b is better than c. Suppose that our website lies on position 3, letter c, and our content satisfied my query.
When I click on the website with the rank 1, letter a, I am not satisfied and click back. I will repeat the process with the 3rd result, letter c. I read the content, and it satisfies me; I will stop searching for that particular keyword.
If the same thing happens to many users out there, that’s pogo-sticking.
In this case, the search engine will find that the 3rd result or letter c is more relevant than a letter a. But we can’t say that this is more relevant with only clicking and reading with one user, me.
It needs more data to analyze if it is relevant.
Different search engines want to give the users their best experience. They might downgrade the letter a and improve the rank of the letter c.
We don’t want that to happen to our website. Here’s some advice to avoid it.
Create Relevant Content
Maybe the reason why some users click back is that we provide incomplete details on our website. We need to ensure that the content on our page is crafted with information related to the target keyword.
It should cover the important information the user is searching for.
Use the Right Font Size
Make sure that our website is readable with not less than 16px. Some people rarely read the entire text. We can provide them with headings and subheadings.
Update Old Content
Updating our old content with new information can freshen up our website. Many things change from time to time. It will make the users excited because of the updated information.
Improve Page Loading Speed
Speed is an important aspect of scanning a certain website. If we are unsure how to improve our page loading speed, there are various online tools for checking our loading speed.
Pogo-Sticking Problems is Easy to Solve
One factor we should not neglect is pogo-sticking. This isn’t just frustrating; it may hurt our SEO.
With this post as your guide, I hope your site is now more usable, which will increase user loyalty.
In addition, no more wasted clicks as our site is not annoying our users anymore. With enough tools, ideas, analytics, and driven by improved usability, this will get people easily to find what they’re looking for.
Let me know in the comments below if you have experienced pogo-sticking and how you overcame it.
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