Every day you delete messages received from faceless SEO companies who have “noticed you could have a lot more hits to your website”. We are often mistakenly led to believe that our biggest challenge is getting more people to pay attention to our products, services or work.

Of course, we can game our way to increasing a meaningless number, while fooling ourselves into thinking we are making progress. The truth is it doesn’t matter if people landed or came, what matters is that they got exactly what they were hoping for, left surprised and delighted and wanted to come back.

The most 100 most popular websites in the world don’t get there by focusing on gaming numbers, they do it by obsessing about how to be useful to the audience they serve.

The challenge for most businesses isn’t to work out how to get more people to notice them. It’s to be clear about which people they want to matter to, to know what those people care about and to understand how they can make a difference in their lives.

Image by Duncan Hull.