Don’t Sweat the Page Views

By Michelle Rebecca

Yes, today’s online business leaders have it hard. There’s a ton of competition and a lot of complexity involved in dealing with certain kinds of market realities. It’s hard to monetize a web project the way that businesses monetize other kinds of investments and campaigns.

However, some of those who are promoting a business and its products or services online can get too wrapped up in various kinds of technical fixes for these issues, and may tend to disregard the bigger picture. Meanwhile, big companies like Google are trying to promote big-picture thinking that adds to the general quality of the Internet.

Effective Online Management and User Interest

Even though online business owners know that Google has made a raft of changes to its algorithms, punishing content mills and other generic SEO sites, many of those managing web projects are still obsessed with the idea that they can manipulate page rankings through metrics like keyword placement metadata and back linking.

Busy managers who want results without coordination simply plug page view analytics into automated job managers that they think will force outsourced marketing or content people to spit out the magic formula for growth. What these businesses are neglecting is the idea that natural interest is derived naturally from creating actual benefits for Web viewers.

Preserving Traditional Practices… and Branching Out

It’s not that businesses need to disregard all of their analytics or drop all of the market research. Targeted content and user analysis has its place. But beyond just micro-managing technical results, web project managers who free up content producers to explore new avenues connected to “the meat space” (the off-line world) can see a lot of improvement in their return on investment.

Time and time again, online entrepreneurs who take risks have seen their sites blossom as the consumer audience for a particular industry starts to read more, link more, and share more of what they have to offer. This generates web results in a system with longevity, where yesterday’s linking and page optimizing created quick floods of web traffic that taper off when Web viewers understand they have simply been directed by a search term.

Web project managers who understand all of these new dynamics often source projects differently. Instead of getting a low dollar bid for a few landing pages or some generic high-volume domain SERP optimization, they hire industry professionals and qualified freelance journalists to create actual content that explores the flesh and blood realities of an industry and offers readers material from the real world rather than rehashed phrasing from a Google analytics result.

That can drive a lot more vitality and power into a web campaign than anything dreamed up in an SEO laboratory.