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October 26, 2007

5 Website Metrics That Are Vastly More Important Than PageRank

Google's recent massive PageRank p0wnage of link sellers and blog networks has got webmasters freaking out all over the Internet.

Here's 5 good reasons worrying about your little green pixie dust is a waste of time :)

  1. Rankings - PageRank does not equal rankings. Not even close. Especially when you're talking about toolbar PageRank, which typically months out of date and bears little relation to the actual PageRank Google uses. Of course, rankings are meaningless if they don't bring you traffic, in the form of...

  2. Unique Visitors - It may be fun to tell your friends you rank number one in Google for custom fit drill bits in Bumford, Indiana, but if no one's searching for that term it's going to bring you zero traffic. But even if you get 10,000 visitors a day, if they take one look at your site and turn around and leave all you're really doing is wasting bandwidth. That's why a much better metric of site health is...

  3. Page Views - When your site connects with people, they're going to spend some time browsing around, reading your content, and hopefully being channeled into your sales funnel. Of course, lots of page views could really just be a product of poor site design forcing people to click too much to find what they're looking for. Time on site or return visitors may be a much better metric, but what you should really be concerned with is...

  4. Conversions - PageRank is meaningless if it doesn't bring you rankings. Rankings are meaningless if they don't bring you traffic. And traffic is meaningless if it doesn't bring you sales. And, of course, sales are rather meaningless if you're not achieving a positive ROI.

  5. RSS Subscribers - Depending solely on Google traffic for your business model is a dangerous game. Subscribers are one of the best forms of defensible traffic. John Chow may have had his Google rankings stripped and his PageRank knocked down, but his 13,000+ subscribers means he doesn't need Google to make money with his site.

So if you got slapped in Google's latest paid links offensive, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and remind yourself that (unless you're selling text links) toolbar PageRank doesn't mean squat. Then get back in the game and focus on what really matters.

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