What is Alexa Rank? How To Improve Your Alexa Rank in 2021
Every business owner knows that ranking well in search engines is essential. If you can’t be found in a search engine, then it isn’t very easy for customers to find you.
However, there is another type of ranking that a lot of companies focus on today. It is more mysterious, and most people are unsure of what it means. For a website owner, it is essential to understand the Alexa ranking system.
Alexa rank, in simple terms, measures how popular a website is. But what exactly does popular mean?
While we’ll never quite know precisely due to their proprietary methodology, the team at Alexa explains that their ranking approach “uses a site’s estimated traffic and visitor engagement over the past three months.”
While this is still a bit on the vague side, we have a general idea of what influences the ranking.
Alexa rank is important in the sense that it provides you high-level data with how traffic and engagement fare. This data allows you to get a better understanding of your site and a general idea of what to work on to improve your ‘popularity.’
Knowing your Alexa traffic ranking is a good start. But how do you improve your website’s Alexa rank? Do you even need to worry about it?
In this article, we will look at Alexa Rankings in more detail, and how you can grow your Alexa traffic rank.
What is a Good Alexa Ranking?
Alexa ranks websites from #1 to seemingly infinity. In 2020, there are about 1.5 billion websites that can be ranked by the Alexa algorithm.
Google is the #1 website in the world according to Alexa rankings. The top 500 sites on Alexa are listed here for those interested in trying to crack the list.
While there is no exact range for what defines a good Alexa rank, generally, the lower the number, the better. It seems that any Alexa ranking under 30,000 is considered very high.
How is this Alexa ranking decided? The Alexa team explains that “traffic and engagement are estimated from the browsing behavior of people in our global panel… which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of many different browser extensions. We also gather much of our traffic data from direct sources, including sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script and certify their metrics.”
Compare with Your Competitors
When it comes to your website, you can compare your Alexa rankings with some of your closest competitors for a better reference. Your Alexa score is essentially your way of knowing the value of your site compared to competitors based on the Alexa ranking system.
Once you know what your competitor’s ranks are, you can start using basic SEO research to figure out what they are doing well that you might not be.
Again, the Alexa ranking boils down to estimated traffic and visitor engagement.
Browsing your competitor’s top pages and seeing how much traffic is being generated can steer you in the right direction for improving your
own pages.
How Do You Check Your Alexa Ranking?
Interested to know what your Alexa rank is? It’s pretty simple. Visit the Alexa Rank Analysis tool and enter your company information. If you are a Chrome user, you can also add the Alexa toolbar browser extension to your browser for easier access.
Within a few seconds the Alexa toolbar will bring back some interesting information about your company. This Alexa Rank Analysis data includes:
- The top keywords you rank for
- Similar sites by audience overlap
- Keyword opportunities
- Comparison metrics for competitive analysis
- Daily time on site
While striving for a lower Alexa number is a good goal, you don’t need to lose sleep over trying to improve too quickly. Alexa rankings will increase with better SEO tactics and more engaging content on your site.
Do Alexa Rank Impact SERP Rankings?
The impact that Alexa rank has on SEO is that you’re able to understand valuable insights about your website and use that data to improve your SEO rankings. You can get a clearer sense of your traffic ranking
You can access even more metrics and competitor research if you upgrade to the Alexa paid plans. The paid plans give you access to complete reports for your site, as well as SEO audit tools. The plans for Alexa start at $79 month for basic website traffic analysis and go up to $299 month for the full marketing stack.
What Alexa offers in its premium plans is pretty standard when it comes to SEO tools available on the market.
Choosing the right tool depends on your specific website needs.
How To Improve My Alexa Rank in 2021?
Here are some things to focus on to improve your Alexa Rank this year:
1)Publishing Quality Content
Content is one of the most significant determining factors for better rankings. When you post topical, useful content and are consistent with doing so, users are more willing to want to read it. Each additional page view sends good signals to the search algorithm, and can boost your site’s Alexa rank.
This improves your trust, visitor count, and users staying on your site longer.
Also, the more informative and valuable it is to your audience, the more willing they are to engage with it and share it with other people online. This grows the volume of unique visitors and helps boost your page rank.
2) Acquiring Backlinks
The more inbound links that a website acquires, this tells search engines that this site is more credible and authoritative.
One thing to keep in mind is that not all inbound links are treated the same. You want to have quality sites linking to you. The ideal type of backlink is one from a site with higher domain authority than yours, that has topical relevance.
The higher the number of links that point to your site improves your overall visibility and can also drive in more traffic.
3) Get A Certified Alexa Rank
If you are serious about improving your Alexa Ranking, then you can purchase a Certified Alexa Rank membership for $19 a month. This membership helps Alexa to directly measuring your site’s traffic (including AMP pages). You begin by installing Alexa code onto your website, then allowing the Alexa software to scan your entire site. This gives your direct attention and accurate data that is then certified by Alexa.
Work on Both Alexa Rank and SERP Rankings
Having the mindset of wanting to improve your Alexa rank is great, but also consider that Alexa rank is dynamic because it has a more narrow focus on looking at traffic and engagement.
At one period in time, the score might be in your favor. However, the next time you check, it might have changed.
If your business is seasonal, the peak times of the year might also show a better Alexa Rank than others.
This rankings drop doesn’t necessarily mean that your site is performing worse. It’s just that using traffic and engagement are only two pieces of a much bigger puzzle.
It also appears that Alexa rank also has no impact on Google Search. When John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, was asked whether Alexa rankings affected Google results, his answer was clear.
From an SEO standpoint, knowing where your traffic ranking and engagement stand is important. From that point, you can make a plan to improve your site and, ultimately, your Alexa Rank.
However, Alexa rank is only one type of metric. You also need to track your results on tools like Google analytics, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
A good place to start is to look at your site from a holistic point of view and then drill down to the areas that need the most attention.
The priority is focusing on consistently providing your audience with amazing value and keeping up with SEO best practices. Over time, this approach will lead to a lower Alexa rank, and grow the popularity of your site.
