Less Content Gets More

By: Sorab Ghaswalla

If I were to tell you that traffic to your site was just another vanity metric similar to a ‘like’ on a social media network, you would perhaps recoil in horror. Let me add a rider then - you need to focus on getting the right type of traffic.

What do I mean by “right”? Here’s an illustration - your Google Analytics tracker shows you are getting 1000 visitors to your site every day. You bask in the glory of the knowledge that in a month, you are getting about 30K visitors. But here’s the thing - if yours is an e-commerce site, you need to focus on increasing the “buys”, not only on the traffic.

If you run a “How-to” site with a focus on say, Microsoft products, you need to figure out the profile of the 1000 visitors to understand whether most of them came to your site to learn how to operate Microsoft products or not? If only 10 of the 1000 were of that ilk while the rest either landed on your site mistakenly, out of curiosity, or were bots, you have a problem on your hands. Instead of 1000, your “real” traffic is only 10! Your content is not being consumed by your intended target audience. That’s how traffic can become a vanity metric.

More is not always right. Even in a democracy. If 90% of the population demands something, it still does not mean they are right in asking for what they want. Same with content.

You can keep banging out 7 blog posts a week but find that the incremental traffic is just not coming. Or the right traffic. Quantity never wins over quality where content is concerned. This was true decades ago when there was no World Wide Web, it is true even today.

This is not an unproven hypothesis. Time and again, publishers, writers, vloggers and bloggers have tested it.

Write right to get it right to the right people.

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