What is Alexa Rank and how does it impact your SEO?
“Alexa, what do I need to know about ranking for my SEO strategy?”
Ok, so we don’t really mean that kind of Alexa, but we are going to give you some helpful tips to improve your ranking score through SEO.
While Alexa Rank is, like the well-known speaker, a subsidiary company of Amazon.com, unlike the device that lives respondent and rent-free in your home, it is a global ranking system that uses web traffic data in order to list the most popular websites.
Alexa Rank can be a huge factor in your SEO strategy as it indicates your website’s popularity against literally millions of other websites, making it a useful benchmarking KPI for competitive analysis.
Even though Amazon retired Alexa.com in May 2022, the backend application programme (API) and associated tools still work. You can still run the system in order to generate a score to see your URL’s Alexa Rank.
How does Alexa Rank work?
Alexa Rank calculates rankings by estimation. It combines a site’s estimated number of average daily unique visitors with the site’s estimated number of page views across a 3 month period.
Data is collected from the downloadable Alexa toolbar which monitors a users’s browsing behaviour. This then serves as a sample of all internet users.
The Alexa toolbar is displays the Alexa Rank of your website, as well as the traffic rank based on your location, and how many sites are linking in to yours. It gathers this information by recording your IP address and the visited URL.
How is Alexa Rank calculated?
In basic terms, Alexa Rank is an auditing tool that calculates visitor frequency. Data for Alexa Rank is based on traffic provided by the global data panel. Like an online index or folder, this panel gathers its data from internet users who use one of the browser extensions available for either Google Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer.
From here, the number one spot in rankings goes to the highest combination of unique visitors and page views.
If a user visits a website more than once in a 24 hour period, this still counts as only one visit in order that Alexa Rank can provide a more accurate depiction of user engagement.
How accurate is Alexa Rank?
Part of the reason why Alexa may have been retired might be down to its inaccuracy, as well as the lack of digital marketer engagement.
Compared to Google Analytics, you might want to keep in mind that Alexa Rank’s results provide more of a relative measurement rather than a complete and accurate picture of a site’s traffic and engagement. By contrast, Google Analytics uses a complex algorithm with over 200 ranking factors in order to determine the order of search results.
How can you manipulate Alexa Rank?
As with most statistics and ranking tools, you can manipulate Alexa Rank by artificially increasing your rank score. You can do this by creating a JavaScript function to open an array of page addresses from your website. If every address opens in a new window, this would automatically increase pageviews for your website as a whole.
However, if you’re looking to enhance user experience this is not the way to do it. These days, users are more likely to click off and find a different source if they have to click through tonnes of different pages just to get to the specific article they were looking for.
A better way to increase your rankings is just to write better content that includes backlinks in an enticing and accessible format in order to make your site easier for Google spiders to crawl. This will lead to increased rankings and ensure that your website is a strong representative of your brand, rather than just a bunch of open windows that lots of people have clicked off of in frustration.
- How to check your website’s Alexa Rank
To make matters easy, Alexa Rank have a built in official rank checker so you can see where your website stands in the Alexa list. All you need to do is head to Alexa’s official rank checker, input your URL into the search box and click “Find”.
You can even search for multiple (up to 5) URLs at a time with the bulk rank checker by following the same instructions.
5 ways to improve your Alexa Rank (without manipulating the results)
- 1. Optimise your metadata
Metadata encompasses the page titles and meta descriptions on your site. By optimising this information to ensure it’s relevant to common search queries, you have a much higher chance of improving your Alexa Rank.
- 2. Write content that appeals
Another surefire way to improve your ranking is by producing content that people will be interested in reading. In order to do this you not only need to make sure that your content is of a high quality in terms of word choice and sentence structure, but also that you’re covering topics that have proven relevance and popularity amongst your target audience.
- 3. Keep your content updated
Especially in the digital marketing industry, things tend to change quickly. One minute you’re tweeting about your business and the next you’re de-verified on a platform calling itself ‘X’. That’s why its important for you to frequently update your content and website content in to ensure that you remain relevant – and that you continue to climb the rankings. This will make sure that you don’t miss trends when they occur and can make the most of the internet as a resource to drive more organic traffic to your website.
- 4. Spread the word: share your content on social media
Your website may be full of fantastic content, but wouldn’t it be even more fantastic if more people could read and engage with it. Social media is a great way of generating more organic traffic to you site because it allows you to promote existing content and engage with users in order to gain insight into what people are looking for.
- 5. Increase your organic traffic
If you haven’t worked out already, all of this optimisation and quality enhancement is basically to generate more organic traffic to your website.
The more visitors your site has, the more likely they will convert into paying customers. But you need to devise a comprehensive SEO strategy that will lead them there in the first place.
One way of doing this is to try and get featured in snippets (a short summary of your web content that appears in the SERP) and getting backlinks which lead users directly to your website. This won’t be an instant process but should be core to the implementation of any successful SEO strategy if you want to improve your site’s rankings.
So, is Alexa Rank useful?
Alexa Rank may not be the most accurate tool, but if you’re looking for a useful benchmarking KPI to see how your well your website is doing compared to your competitors then it could be a good one to keep in mind. The best way to think of Alexa Rank is as a complementary tool alongside other analytical software that can help you optimise your website quality in order to boost your visitor quantity.
If you still have questions about Alexa Rank, or want to talk about any part of SEO, contact us today!
