[Build Backlinks Online] Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem - Whiteboard Friday

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem -
Whiteboard Friday'


Posted by randfish

Getting your site to display at the top of a SERP is quite an accomplishment,
but it also takes quite a bit of effort to keep it there. If people click
through to your site only to click their back buttons and look for another
result, the search engines are going to catch on, and you could fall in the
rankings.


In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us broaden our thinking to satisfy
the searchers and keep them from pogo-sticking back to the SERP.







Whiteboard Friday - Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem








Pro tip: Learn more about on-page optimization for content and UX at Moz
Academy.


For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:



Video Transcription



Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I want to talk to you about the pogo-sticking problem.


So here's the story. Basically search engines, Google included, use a lot of
different kinds of data for their ranking algorithms, but one of the pieces
that's in there, we don't know exactly how big it might be, but it's certainly
possible that it's sizeable, is what's called pogo sticking. They measure this
feature or this occurrence where someone performs a search. I performed a search
here for IT consultants, and there are a few listings that come up. I click on
"IT Boston." It takes me to IT Boston's website, and then I decide, maybe in the
first five or ten seconds, "You know what? This site is not solving my problem.
This isn't really what I wanted," and I go right back to the same search result.


Either I click back or I search for it again or I search for something
different, and then I go and click on other results. Maybe I click on this "Is
IT Consulting Dead?" It's sort of a link bait article from some news source,
BuzzFeed maybe, click on that, go to that page, and I stay on it and I don't
come back to the search result.


Google measures these kinds of things. So does Bing. They measure this
pogo-sticking, and they come up with essentially, this is a very simplistic
representation of what actually happens, but X% of people pogo stick away from
IT Boston in their first 5 seconds of visiting the site, Y% do it for this
BuzzFeed page, and Z% do it for IT 101. We're going to calculate some average,
the average pogo-sticking as sorted and weighted by the ranking position for
this particular search result.


Here's the problem. For every search result, there's some different
pogo-sticking rate. But great pages and sites tend to have the trait that
they've got really low pogo-sticking rates. If IT Boston is a great result,
people click it and they stay. Their search query has been satisfied. Google
likes that. That means that a searcher is made happy, and they're not coming
back and doing other searches and clicking other results. Sometimes this might
be okay. Maybe there are some sorts of searches where Google says, "Oh, lots of
people do click multiple times, and lots of people do bounce back and forth and
it's fine." But for the vast majority of searches this is really important to
get right. So I have some tactical tips for you.


If you've got a pogo-sticking problem, a high bounce rate, people are going
back to the search results, clicking on your competitors' links, that kind of
thing, the number one thing you can do is get in the searcher's head. This is
different, might be different from getting in your customer's head. You might
say, "Hey, we've designed this excellent landing page. It's really focused. If
the 10% of people who search, who are our kind of customers, come to this page,
they're going to convert."


The challenge there is you've got to think bigger. You have to think about
all the searchers, the 90% of the searchers who may not be your customer and how
do you answer their query, because otherwise you're probably going to be falling
in those search results. What questions do those people have? What makes them
engage versus leave? What is it, when this person performs a search, that they
want to know? And if you don't know, you can ask.


One of my top recommendations for people who have just kind of a crummy page
is, "I want you to go out and survey people in your office, people who work with
you, people who are long-time customers, people who are in your network. I want
you to survey them, and I want you to ask them, 'Imagine you have performed a
search for X. Tell me the first, most important thing you're looking for. Now
tell me the second thing that you'd probably be interested in, and now tell me
the third thing.' " People will just free-form leave a couple phrases or
sentences in those boxes, send it back to you. Boom. Now you know what people
want. If you don't have that sort of searcher empathy built into your head
already, you can do it this way, through the surveying system, and then you can
make a page that people are going to love. You can answer those questions.


Number two, I see a lot of search results out there that are missing design
and UX elements that are critical to success. If you've got this crappy, crummy
1990s design aesthetic going on or even a more updated thing, but it's just not
a very usable website, the navigation's poor, the images are poor, the content
quality is poor, you've got to work on that. If you can't say with conviction
that you have the highest quality, most usable, beautiful, high visual-quality
page in the results, get to work man. Get to work. This stuff is really
important.


If you're looking, by the way, one of my top suggestions is to check out
Dribbble.com. That's D-r-i-b-b-b-l-e.com. Wonderful designers are available on
there. Some of them are very expensive. Some of them are less expensive. Great
resource to check out.


Number three, the last thing I'll mention on tactical tips for this is load
speed and device support. A lot of times I do see this problem where someone
goes to a page and then after two or three seconds if something hasn't loaded,
they go back. You can work on this. Even if you have a relatively robust page,
you can get elements to load in those critical first second, second and a half
time frames. Check out developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed. They've got an
analysis tool and a system you can walk through to make sure that that works.


You should also be multi-device compliant. Make sure that if you don't have
responsive design, you at least have a mobile-friendly site, an iPad-friendly
site. I do love responsive design. I recommend it. But this becomes a challenge
too, because remember, if lots of people are searching on mobile and they're
bouncing back because your page is slow or it doesn't work with a mobile device,
you're in trouble. Those stats are going to hurt you in the results.


All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.




Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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