Sure, by now you all know that high ranking on Google is the best way to determine if the website is successful or not. To a great extent it is true. However, a metric that most people often ignore is – Alexa Rank.
What is Alexa Rank?
Alexa ranking system ranks millions of websites based on its popularity. The lower your Alexa rank, the more popular your website is.
Alexa Rank is a great KPI for competitive analysis and benchmarking. The rank is calculated based on a proprietary method that combines the number of page views and average daily visitors over the past three months.
Traffic and engagement are estimated from the browsing behavior from Alexa’s global panel which includes samples of all internet users.
Why is Alexa Rank important?
1. It serves as a valuable metric that helps you know your website’s popularity. It also allows you to compare your website with your competitors and understand how well you are doing in terms of traffic and popularity. For best results, you should aim to have your website among the top 50,000 ranked websites.
2. Alexa rank helps advertisers determine the marketing potential of your site. Websites with a higher Alexa rank attract more advertisers as they are more profitable. It also helps asses your website’s monetary value.
3. It serves as one of the factors that determine your Google page rank. Google bots index higher-ranked websites regularly making SEO a lot easier.
4. Many webmasters, as well as users, consider Alexa rankings as a relevant and important metric, especially for commercial websites. Most users check your Alexa ranking and rating before deciding if your website is safe and trustworthy to make a purchase from.
You can download the Alexa toolbar from their website and customize it. You can reward your user base by offering it as a free download from your website.
Interestingly, more the downloads from your users, the better will be your rankings. Alexa counts the visit from users to with Alexa toolbar to determine your rankings.
How is Alexa rank calculated?
As mentioned above, the rank is calculated using a combination of page views on the site and average daily visitors to the site over the past 3 months. The data for the rankings are based on the traffic provided by their global data panel.
The data is collected from internet users who use browser extensions available for Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. The Alexa ranking algorithm visits a website and checks the frequency of the visits. If a user visits a website more than once on the same day, it is counted as a single visit.
The ranking is obtained on two parameters;
Unique visitors: This includes the number of Alexa users visiting the site in a day.
Average page views: This includes the number of times a particular URL or page is viewed by Alexa users.
Using both these parameters, the website has the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked as number 1.
The Alexa algorithm also looks for any potential differences and changes its rankings to accommodate users who are not included in Alexa’s measurement panel. Interestingly, it is believed that Alexa uses third-party data to get a broader view of internet users.
How to view your website’s Alexa rank?
This is really easy. All you need to do is, visit their official website, type your full domain name and hit return!
You will receive a report known as the ‘Website Traffic Analysis’. It displays metrics such as daily pageviews by every visitor, bounce rate, daily time on site and the percentage of visits from search. Additionally, the report also includes a list of sites that link, various demographics and page speed/load times.
You can also check the Alexa rank of a website by installing the Alexa Toolbar in your browser.
Advantages of Alexa ranking
A high Alexa rank may help you charge more for the advertising space. It is great for sites that make money through advertising.
Provides you with insights into your website performance that may help you with SEO or marketing strategies
You can estimate the traffic of your competitors’ website and use it to analyze your own
It can help get high-quality guest writers to contribute articles to higher-ranked websites
Disadvantages of Alexa ranking
The data is limited to users having the toolbar installed. Therefore, many sites may get a low rank despite having high traffic
Rankings can be manipulated making is slightly unreliable
Only the top-level domain is ranked whiled the subdomains and subpages are not ranked separately which may cause some inaccuracies
Despite having a few disadvantages and advantages, Alexa ranking is still worth trying.
How to improve your Alexa rank?
Here are some tips that will help improve your Alexa ranking without manipulating it.
1. Install Alexa toolbar: Installing Alexa Toolbar is the first thing you need to do. It sends your hits to the Alexa server which will help you get the required Alexa rank.
To install the Alexa toolbar, follow the steps;
Visit the Alexa Toolbar Installation Page from your favorite browser.
Click on Install Alexa extension.
That’s it! It will install the Alexa toolbar extension in your browser and you are good to go!
2. Install Alexa Widget: There’s no denying that the Alexa toolbar helps to increase your website ranking. However, all visitors may not have Alexa toolbar installed and most of the users may visit your site through their phones.Also, all the clicks or hits on your website may not be generated by you.
To help Alexa not just track visitors to your website but also the hits on your website, you need t use Alexa widget on your website. It works like the Alexa toolbar and with every hit on your website will help improve your ranking.
3. Optimize metadata: Include page titles and meta descriptions to your website so that Alexa and Google know what your site is all about.
4. Relevant and high-quality content: You must write high-quality content for your website as 70% of users learn about products through great content. It will not only attract users to your website but also boost your SEO efforts. It will help you rank for revenue-driving keywords. Additionally, it will increase the chances of people with Alexa toolbar visiting your website which will result in improving your ranking.
5. Update your site with fresh content: It is important to keep your website updated with fresh content regularly if you want people to read it. So, if you are a developer, small business owner or a blogger, you must include useful content on your website regularly.
6. Leverage social media: In addition to writing content for your website, you must make it a point to promote it on social media channels. You may target 2-3 social media platforms where you can find your target audience.
Social media has been really useful for most business owners and you must leverage it for optimal results.
7. Increase traffic: This is probably the most difficult task as traffic cannot be increased overnight. It takes consistent efforts to maintain the quality of your website and get high-quality backlinks. Also, you must have a reliable web host in place if you want to increase the traffic to your website.
Conclusion
Now that you have a clear idea about the importance of Alexa ranking and why your website needs it, you can go ahead and download the toolbar. You can find out your website’s Alexa rank and update it on your home page!