One problem with doing business online is that it’s easy to treat it as something other than a business. Many business owners treat it as if the ordinary rules of business don’t apply.
In reality, though, business online is the same as business offline: if it isn’t making money, it isn’t working.
You’d think the business world would have learned from the dot-com to dot-bomb crash that attracted investors simply on the basis of, “Hey, we’re a WEBSITE, and websites are bound to make a fortune.”
Yet, here, eight years later, many business owners still find themselves seduced by the aura of the Web, focusing on metrics that are nothing more than a means to an end.
Metrics like backlinks, search engine rankings, and even traffic are valid metrics. But they must be viewed in the context of what effect they are having on generating revenue.
What role do they each of them play?
Backlinks is a term that refers to links from other sites that point to your site. Their value is twofold. First, they are a potential source of visitors. Second, they represent a vote for the page to which it points.
This vote is important when it comes to search engine rankings. With thousands of websites that seem equally relevant as far as what is on their page, the search engines use incoming links, especially ones from high-regarded authority sites, to determine which sites other sites consider most valuable.
Backlinks can affect your revenues indirectly by bringing you visitors and by helping to increase your search engine rankings. In no way, though, do they measure your revenues.
Search engine rankings, similarly, affect your revenues indirectly. High rankings for highly searched terms bring you more visitors, but they do not directly increase or decrease your revenues.
Website traffic comes closest to affecting your revenue. It represents the living, breathing people who visit your site. Yet it still is not the key metric you ultimately want to track.
In the end, the metric that matters is revenue. You can track any of these other metrics to assess general elements of your website’s potential for generating revenue. But never let them distract your attention from revenues.
Even when you plan expenditures that affect these other metrics primarily, your ultimate concern should not be, “What will this do for my backlinks, or rankings, or traffic?” but “What will this do for my bottom line?”
Always make sure that any discussion of website work focuses squarely on what really matters to your business.
