Pogo Sticking and Bounce Rate: What They Mean For Your Website

Have you ever wondered about what “pogo sticking” is and how it might impact your online business? Pogo sticking is becoming more and more common in many cases, which has left many website owners concerned about whether this could affect their website’s overall performance.

With this in mind, today, we’re taking a look at some of the key things you should know about pogo sticking search behaviors – and how these might influence your website’s performance overall. What’s more, we’ll also briefly compare pogo sticking and bounce rate to help you understand a little more about the different factors that go into search engine rankings and algorithm calculations overall. After all, this is an incredibly complex field – but, with a little time, it’s not impossible to wrap your head around.

What is Pogo Sticking?

First of all, before looking any further, we need to consider what pogo sticking actually is. Though it’s a pretty loose and general term, it typically refers to specific user behaviors that many website owners worry may impact their site’s SEO metrics.

Pogo sticking occurs when a search user rapidly opens and closes a website from the Google search results. There are countless potential reasons for users to pogo stick between pages, but it’s nevertheless a surprisingly common action.

With this in mind, if you notice that your organic users’ have a very limited average page duration, the cause may be due – in part, at least – to pogo sticking. This can leave many website owners feeling concerned about the potential blow this might represent for their website’s performance – but don’t panic, as we’ll address this in a moment.

How to Reduce Pogo Sticking for your Website

At this point, you’re likely still wondering what means pogo sticking can be reduced by. Fortunately, there are several different ways you can try to reduce pogo sticking from your website, which may boost session duration in turn.

Ensure All Content is Valuable to the Reader

The most crucial factor for reducing pogo sticking for your website is simple: ensure you’re offering new, valuable, and informative content. Most search users are only looking for a very specific piece of information; once they’ve found it on your page, they may be likely to leave quickly.

As such, you should always strive to offer valuable information that keeps them reading on – for example, offering follow-up questions that users might not have known they needed answers to.

Keep Content Engaging and Eye-Catching

In addition to this, you may also be able to reduce pogo sticking by ensuring your content is engaging, vibrant, and grabs readers’ attention. Including images and infographics may be a good option, in this regard, helping to keep the reader engaged and reducing the chance they’ll leave as soon as they find the necessary information.

Make Sure Descriptions Match Your Content

Finally, if you have set a custom meta description and title for your content, always ensure that this matches your article’s content. If the meta and the article don’t match, you’ll often experience unnecessarily high rates of pogo sticking; instead, by ensuring your content matches the reader’s expectations, you may have far better results overall.

Does Pogo Sticking Impact Your Website’s SEO?

Thus far, we’ve considered what pogo sticking is and how you might be able to reduce it for your website. However, one crucial question remains: does it actually impact your website’s SEO?

It’s often easy to assume that pogo sticking would significantly impact your website’s SEO. However, the truth may be less clear-cut in this regard. In fact, as explained by John Muller of Google, the act of rapidly opening and closing search results – or so-called pogo sticking – is something that has very limited impact overall.

As Mueller explained, there are countless different metrics impacting a site’s SEO rank, and Google’s search engine algorithms are highly advanced, considering millions of different factors and results to rank content in the most relevant order for users. However, since pogo sticking can be caused by so many different factors – and may be something as simple as the user finding the information they need immediately – it’s not a metric that will drastically alter a website’s SEO performance overall.

As such, if you have been concerned that pogo sticking might be impacting your website’s SEO capabilities, don’t panic; the impact of it is minimal at best. In fact, many other metrics will play a far more prominent role in the overall SEO value of your website.

Pogo Sticking Vs. Bounce Rate

Pogo sticking and bounce rate can seem incredibly common; however, they are actually distinct – though similar – metrics that will impact your website’s SEO very differently.

Indeed, in many cases, pogo sticking will have a very minimal, if not negligible, impact on your website’s SEO. Since search engines recognize that many users only open a tab momentarily, there would be little value in creating algorithms based on this.

However, the bounce rate is calculated outside the original 5-second window often applied to pogo sticking. After five seconds, it’s hence perceived that the reader isn’t going to “pogo” from the website; as such, visitors leaving the site after this point may indicate that the content isn’t as valuable, in turn damaging the website’s SEO metrics as a result.

To improve your website’s bounce rate, you need to prevent users from “bouncing” away from your site. With this in mind, encouraging users to read more content on your site – for example, by linking relevant or similar posts – can be a simple but effective way to retain users, enhancing your website’s performance in turn. However, as pointed out by Make Me Bait, bounce rate may be less important than dwell time on the page – all metrics to consider.

Final Thoughts

With more and more search engine users engaging in pogo sticking behaviors, it’s reassuring for website owners that pogo sticking won’t directly negatively impact the site’s SEO performance alone.

Indeed, there are countless different metrics that can boost or hold back your site’s SEO capabilities. Fortunately, search engines such as Google are working to ensure that metrics outside of your control don’t necessarily harm your website’s SEO too greatly.

Nevertheless, it’s always worth looking for potential ways that your website could enhance its SEO efforts – and, if you’d like to find out more in this regard, please don’t hesitate to contact our team here at Outreach Bee to learn more.