Under normal circumstances, bounciness is a good thing. I mean, obviously no one wants a basketball that doesn’t bounce, and a non-bouncy inflatable jumping castle is just lame. One place you don’t want bouncing, though, is your website. A site’s bounce rate—that is, the percentage of visitors who pop over to your site and right back out again without exploring past the landing page– directly impacts your search engine rankings. Luckily, there are a few tricks you can use to reduce your bounce rate… and one of them is high-quality writing.

Increased Content Consumption

Although some websites are designed specifically for visitors to get in, gather data and get right back out again (looking at you, Wikipedia), most sites want you to hunker down. Linger. After all, your audience is a lot more likely to connect with your brand, product or business if they consume a greater amount of your content; that deeper connection means you’re more likely to see those visitors become repeat customers rather than one-stop shoppers.

This is the main reason why bounce rates count against your search engine ranking. A high bounce rate indicates to search engines that users didn’t find what they needed on your site, or weren’t interested enough in your offerings to stick around. Either way, both are indicators that there might be a more relevant site out there that maybe should rank higher than yours the next time around.

The Connection between Bounce Rate and Content Quality

All this is not to say that writing is the only aspect of your site that can overcome a high bounce rate; it makes sense that design and ease of navigation count for something too, not to mention the time your site takes to load overall. But professionally written and edited content is a major determining factor in not alienating your site’s audience, which is sorta kinda a huge priority for any business.

The better the writing, the less likely your audience is to bounce away elsewhere. Engaging content should entice visitors to stay longer, check out a few more pages, maybe even sign up for your newsletter. You’re not a drive-thru lane; you’re fine dining at its best, and your writing should reflect that.

Maarit Miller is a writing junkie who will always love the Oxford comma.