Northfield’s largest online audience: ranking the traffic to Locally Grown, Northfield.org, and the Northfield News web sites

The Northfield News has been running this ad in the want-ad pages of their B Section recently.  The ad headline reads: “Click here for Northfield’s largest online audience.”  The ad copy sates that they get “…over 400,000 monthly page views.”

Here on Locally Grown, we get about 60,000 pageviews/month. I don’t put too much emphasis on pageviews for a blog — any blog — because so much of the content appears on the home page and doesn’t require much mousing around the site… especially one like LG because we don’t generally break up long blog posts. Visitors to our blogsite generally check the home page for the latest and then depart.  So I pay most attention to our monthly unique visitors (6,000+) as measured by Google Analytics.

But a nudge from one of my sons made me curious about how Locally Grown and the web sites for Northfield.org and Northfield News are ranked by 1) Google Page Rank and 2) Alexa. (I’ve linked to the Wikipedia entries for those two for a more unbiased view of their strengths and weaknesses.)

Here’s the current info for all three sites:

There are probably many factors to take into consideration when trying to assess the traffic to these three sites.

For example, both Northfield.org and Locally Grown host their photos with commercial photo services (Flickr and Picasaweb, respectively) so traffic to the photo galleries isn’t counted, unlike Northfield News which hosts their own photos.

Also, both Northfield.org and Locally Grown provide RSS feeds to readers who want to aggregate blog content and/or discussion. People who get content via their RSS newsreaders don’t generate pageviews. The Northfield News doesn’t provide RSS feeds.

I’m not a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert or consultant, nor have I read much about the pros and cons of the two popular ranking systems.

But it seems misleading for the Northfield News to use the headline in their ad, “Click here for Northfield’s largest online audience.” And I think they should reveal their unique visitors per month if they’re going to use the phrase ‘largest online audience’ in their advertising.

Truth be told: Carleton is the true champ for Northfield area web site traffic. And among the sites selling banner ads, Northfield.org appears to beat the Northfield News handily.