What happens when someone lands on your page from a Search Engine? Well, it can pretty much go one of two ways:
Scenario #1: The user leaves your page right away.
Scenario #2: They stick around and spend time on your site.
Those two scenarios trigger very different reactions from Google.
When people stick on a page for longer, Google starts to think, “Hey, people think this page is pretty great. Let’s bump it up a notch on the ranking ladder.”
But when they bail out faster than a cat in a bath?
Google sees it as a signal that your page should probably be featured lower in search results.
This is why we advise you to aim for an average ‘time-on-page’ of at least 2 minutes for your Focus Pages. You can monitor this in the ‘Traffic Health’ section.
If You Want Higher Rankings, You Need to Keep People on Your Site
So, how do you keep people from bouncing?
One way to do it is by using Bucket Brigades.
What’s that?
Bucket Brigades are an old-school copywriting tactic that was originally designed for sales letters.
Their mission? To keep readers’ interest piqued and to encourage them to keep reading.
And they still work today.
Because the truth is: most people DON’T read every single word on a page.
They skim.
And when you break up your text with these “special phrases” known as bucket brigades, it’s like flipping a switch – the whole game shifts.
Your content instantly becomes more compelling, your readers more engaged.
This is a Bucket Brigade in Action:
The best SEO copywriters in the world consistently use this tactic when creating content.
Here’s an example from Brian Dean (SEO expert and founder of Backlinko):
Of course, there are other factors that contribute to people sticking around.
Having useful, relevant articles that satisfy the search intent behind the keywords they’re targeting is high up on that list.
However, sprinkling bucket brigades in your articles can help you captivate your audience and get them to spend more time on your pages.
You can use them in your introduction, in the middle of your article, or in any other section where a reader may get bored and leave.
📝 21 Examples of Classic Bucket Brigades that You Can Steal:
– Let me explain.
– For example:
– What does this mean to you?
– You may be wondering…
– Yep, it’s true.
– Think about it…
– In my own experience…
– And that’s just one side of the story.
– Here’s why this works:
– The best part is…
– It gets worse.
– Are you surprised?
– If only it were that easy…
– But wait, there’s more!
– Don’t you hate it when…?
– Guess what happened next.
– Here’s the big secret:
– Ready for the twist?
– The most surprising thing is:
– You’re about to find out.
– Let’s dig a little deeper…
Keep these examples in your recipe book – they’ll come in handy the next time you’re cooking up a new blog post.
🔭🌌 A little something extra for curious minds:
Before hand-pumped fire engines were a thing, people would form a human chain to pass along buckets of water from one person to the next.
That’s how they kept the flow of water going enough to put out fires. Hence the name bucket brigade.
