What to Ignore Entirely

A list rather than a principle

Advice about focus is usually a principle, which is easy to agree with and impossible to apply.

What follows is a specific list of things that can be ignored permanently, with what each costs to attend to.

Ignoring is not the same as never looking; it means not monitoring, not reacting, and not letting it into a report.

The purpose is to leave room for the small number of things worth watching.

Daily ranking positions

Which vary by location, device, history, and the day.

A position checked daily produces movement that means nothing and prompts changes that make the next reading unreadable.

The only useful version is average position over a month, in your search console, compared against the month before.

Cancel any tool sending you daily rank alerts, which is a subscription and an interruption at once.

Follower counts

Which measure an audience rather than a business.

A thousand followers who are not in your area and do not need your trade produce nothing, and the number rises whether or not anything useful is happening.

What matters is enquiries from that platform, which is a different and much smaller number, and frequently zero.

Count that instead and the follower figure becomes irrelevant rather than encouraging.

What competitors are doing

• Their new website.
• Their posting frequency.
• Their advertising.
• Their announcements.

Worth one deliberate look a year, as an audit, and not worth watching. Continuous attention to a competitor produces reactive decisions based on what they appear to be doing, which is not what they are actually doing and tells you nothing about whether it works.

Most announcements

Which was the subject of a fortnight ago and belongs on any such list.

Anything not available in your country, not measurable in your figures, and not changing a decision you are making is information rather than a trigger.

That covers the overwhelming majority of what gets written about.

Read it if you enjoy it and act on almost none of it.

Bounce rate on its own

Which is among the most misread figures available.

A visitor who arrives, reads the answer, gets your telephone number, and leaves is recorded identically to one who arrived and left in disgust.

On a page whose job is to answer a question, a high figure can be the page working.

Look at enquiries from the page instead, and use the figure only as one input when something else has already raised a question.

A worked example

A business listed everything they looked at in a month and what they had done about each.

Rankings checked most days, a social dashboard weekly, competitor sites occasionally, three industry newsletters, and a monthly analytics report.

Of those, one thing had produced an action all quarter: an enquiry figure that had fallen and turned out to be a broken form.

They stopped four of the five, kept a monthly check on four numbers, and set an alert for the site being down.

The recovered time went into asking for reviews, which produced more than everything they had stopped watching.

Nothing was missed in the following year.

Anything you would not act on

Which is the general test underneath all of this.

Before watching any number, ask what you would do if it moved by a fifth in either direction.

Where the honest answer is nothing, watching it is a habit rather than management.

That question eliminates most dashboards, most reports, and most of what suppliers send monthly.

It also improves the reports you keep, since asking for the two numbers you would act on produces something readable.

Tell whoever else is watching

Since stopping alone is only half of it in a business with more than one person.

If a colleague or a partner is still checking rankings daily, the reactive decisions arrive through them instead and the discipline never takes hold.

Agree the five things once, in a short conversation, and agree that nothing outside them goes on a meeting agenda.

That is easier to hold to than an individual resolution, because it becomes the shared standard rather than one person's preference.

It also gives everybody permission to stop, which is frequently what they were waiting for.

What is left

Since the point is what remains rather than what goes.

Enquiries, counted monthly. Arrivals from search, split branded and unbranded. Your top landing pages. Whether the site is up and the form works. And explicit notices about your site.

That is five things, checkable in fifteen minutes a month, and it covers everything a small business can actually act on.

Everything on the ignore list above is a candidate for the time that frees.

Stop the reports you did not ask for

Since a good share of this arrives without being requested.

Automated summaries from platforms, weekly digests from tools, and monthly reports from suppliers all arrive whether or not anybody reads them.

Each is an interruption that suggests something needs attention, and most of them contain nothing that would change a decision.

Turn them off at the source rather than filing them, and where a supplier sends one, ask for the two numbers you would act on instead of the twelve you would not.

That request also tells the supplier what you actually care about, which usually improves what they work on.

The counter-case

Some of this is context-dependent.

A business selling on social genuinely should watch its audience there, and a shop in its peak should watch daily rather than monthly.

Competitor attention is also warranted when entering a new area or when something has visibly changed.

And ignoring everything eventually means missing something that mattered, which is a real cost.

Ask what you would do if each number moved by a fifth, stop watching everything where the answer is nothing, and keep the five.

The list

1. Stop daily rank checking.
2. Stop counting followers.
3. Look at competitors once a year.
4. Read announcements, act on few.
5. Stop reading bounce rate alone.
6. Drop anything you would not act on.
7. Keep five things, monthly.

Step six is the test that generalises, since anything you would not act on at a fifth's movement is being watched out of habit rather than for a reason.

Why small movements mislead is covered in numbers that move without meaning anything.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.