What Does Alexa Ranking Mean for a Website?

Alexa rank, a subsidiary of Amazon, is a global website ranking system that uses website traffic data to list the most popular websites. It ranks literally millions of websites in order of popularity. The better the Alexa rank, the more popular a website is. In short, the Global Alexa Rank calculates the ranking by combining a website’s estimated traffic and also the visitor engagement over the previous three months. Traffic and engagement are an estimation from the data provided by the Alexa toolbar. It monitors a visitor’s browsing behavior which acts as a sample of all Internet users. The Alexa ranking algorithm audits a website and calculates the frequency of visits. For example, if the same visitor visits a website more than once on the same day, it will only count as one visit.

Should a website rely on Alexa ranking?

If a website makes money through advertising, a high Alexa rank may allow the website to charge more for advertising space. It’s seen as third-party proof. Also, a website can get a quick traffic estimate of its competitors’ websites which can be useful for comparison. Furthermore, insights into the performance of a website could be useful for improving SEO or other marketing activities.

On the other hand, the data is limited to only visitors who have added the toolbar extension. So there will be many websites that get a low rank despite having high traffic. It might thus be useful to look at other metrics and rankings as well to put the Alexa metric in perspective. Another limitation of Alexa is that a website can manipulate the data by creating a JavaScript function which makes the rankings unreliable. Finally, subdomains and subpages are not ranked separately. Only the main domain, which can cause some inaccuracies.

Of course, there are plenty of other ranking websites that you can use. For example, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SimilarWeb. As Alexa and SimilarWeb are the biggest players in online raking they offer the most metrics. They have a different approach, and can thus compensate for the other’s limitations. In the case of Alexa, it provides Alexa Traffic Rank, Monthly, Unique Visitors, Audience Geography, Engagement Metrics, Backlinks, Related Sites, Page Load Time.

How to Improve Your Alexa Rank?

To improve your Alexa Rank a couple of steps will help to improve the rank. Firstly, optimize the metadata of the website, like page title and meta descriptions. It is useful to apply a technical SEO tool. Secondly, write content that attracts people. Improved SEO will generate more visits to a website and therefore increase the chance that people who installed the Alexa toolbar that visit the website. Thirdly, keep the website regularly updated with fresh content. Furthermore, share your content on Social Media. Finally, increase the traffic to the website by making it a central element of all your campaigns.

To conclude, Alexa is not a completely valid or reliable ranking website method. However, Alexa rank can be a useful piece of data for website comparison in combination with SimilarWeb, and other tools. Alexa does not have the high coverage and accuracy as, for example, Google Analytics. But as a complementary tool to track your SEO strategy, it is useful. The better the Alexa rank, the more popular the website is.

Wouter Maatman

Digital Marketing Manager at Icecat N.V.