Sonja
No matter what kind of content your website publishes, you will find that there are other sites out there that do similar things. Making your site stand out from the crowd is one of the challenges of marketing anything on the internet. There are many tools you can use to assess your site’s performance, one of which is your site’s Alexa rank.
What Is An “Alexa Rank”?
Internet popularity is represented by a site’s Alexa rank. This is a number that represents how a website is doing in comparison to all other sites, which makes it a useful key performance indicator. Your Alexa rank is calculated by looking at the estimated average daily unique visitors and number of page views for a given site over the past 3 months.
What Should Your Alexa Rank Be?
As a small business owner, you should be concerned with your Alexa rank, but also be realistic. Expecting a single-digit Alexa rank means that you’d be competing with Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, and other web giants. Alexa ranks start at 1 (Google holds that rank) and go to about 3 million; sites further down after that simply don’t have enough data to be compared to other sites.
So, your first question isn’t “What’s my Alexa rank?”; rather, it should be “Do I have an Alexa rank?” You should also be looking at the Alexa ranks of your competitors and similar websites. Your goal should be to have the lowest Alexa rank amongst your competitors, meaning that you’re the most popular in your niche. From there, you can then work on expanding your reach and growing the size of your audience. As that happens, your Alexa rank will drop!
How Is Alexa Rank Determined?
Alexa rank is determined using two major factors: site page views and unique site visitors. Alexa pulls from its data panel, which comprises millions of internet users who have opted in via browser extensions. Through this data, Alexa calculates the rank based on the number of unique visitors and the number of site visits. Unique visitors are tallied by IP address, and site page views are recorded whenever a full page of your website is viewed or refreshed.
In addition to data gathered from internet users, Alexa can also use data taken directly from your site, if you opt to share it. Alexa has an opt-in certification code that you can embed into your site that allows Alexa to measure your site’s traffic directly.
Factors that Impact Alexa Rank
While a site’s Alexa rank is calculated using two major metrics, there are several other factors that go into determining where your site compares to others.
Content
To improve your Alexa ranking, you need to attract search engines to your content by considering your content’s SEO. Each page of your site should be optimized for one specific target keyword in a process called on-page SEO. Alexa has a built-in On-Page SEO Checker, which you can use as part of your SEO strategy.
Crawlability
Crawlability allows search engines to scan a website and review its content, so they can determine what the page is about and how it should rank. Your site can’t be indexed if search engines can’t find it, so you need to make sure that your site can be read by web crawlers!
Crawlers are bots that are used by search engines to index website content. It’s just like how the index or table of contents of a book can help readers find the information they need from a book without any hassle. These bots collect data from a website and help people find what they are looking for with ease when they search keywords online.
To improve your site’s crawlability, you can take the following steps:
- Submit a sitemap to the top search engines
- Use relevant keywords
- Check your index status in Google Search Console to review the number of pages Google has crawled on your site
- Maintain working links
- Use robots.txt to tell which search engines which pages they should access and which pages they should ignore
- Optimize your site for mobile users
- Improve your site’s
Domain Age
This is one element of the Alexa ranking you can’t do anything about, but it is good to know. It isn’t clearly stated anywhere by Google, but research has found that older domains tend to rank better. What this means for you is that when you launch a new site with a new domain, it will take some time for your SEO efforts to work.
Mobile-Friendliness
More than half of all online traffic is conducted on mobile devices, so your website must be mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendliness refers to how a website looks and performs when someone views it on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly sites provide a good user experience by using a responsive design that adjusts the content so that it looks good on every screen size, including the smallest smartphone screens. This may also mean configuring your images differently so that they look good on screens with smaller resolutions.
Security
In recent years, site security has risen in importance as one of Google’s ranking factors. It’s one of their top concerns, and it should be one of yours as well. In this case, site security refers to the use of HTTPS encryption. Sites with HTTPS encryption have SSL certificates that create a secure connection between a website and its users. It adds an extra layer of security that protects information exchanged between users and the site. Simply put, search engines want to drive users to the most trustworthy sites, and using HTTPS encryption shows them that a site is secure.
Speed
If your site doesn’t load quickly, you may find yourself facing ranking problems. People will click away from a site that doesn’t load instantly, often preferring to find an entirely new website to check than wait for a slow one. For mobile users, this is even more important. Google is well aware of this and has made load speed a ranking factor for mobile searches. A site speed checker, like Google’s Page Speed Insights tool, can show you how fast your site loads.
If your site is loading slowly, there are several things you can do to improve its load speed. These include:
- Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution
- Compress and optimize your images
- Reduce your redirects
- Enable browser caching
Visitor Engagement
The way visitors engage with your site helps search engines determine which pages they should promote in search rankings. Pages with better engagement flags are better and more useful to searchers. Google uses an AI tool called RankBrain to do this, and looks at numerous factors, like the click-through rate and the time visitors spend on the site. If you want to improve visitor engagement, you can use techniques such as the following:
- Use high-quality website design and graphics to make your website look good
- Use a good data structure that’s easy for your users to understand
- Use internal links to help users easily navigate through your site
- Use good SEO and make sure that your content has titles and descriptions that can rank for keyword use
- Optimize your content for featured snippets
How To Improve Your Alexa Rank
So now that you know what the Alexa rank is and how it’s determined, you may want to know what can cause the rank to rise, and how you can bring it back down.
If you want to improve your Alexa rank, you need to think about the scale of your site and the scope of your content. Websites don’t exist in a vacuum; you need to consider what other sites your audience may visit, and how to attract them to your site instead. To do this, you need to spend some time thinking about both what visitors do on your site and how they find your site in the first place.
Optimize Your Content
Your content needs to be credible and valuable to your audience. There are lots of ways to do this. One is by making sure that your site’s keywords are well-planned and easily determined. Remember that sites are indexed by bots, and bots are looking for keywords to help them determine how to categorize a site.
Refresh old content by repurposing it. This is a great way to get your message across even more thoroughly; once you’ve created a piece of content, you can extend its life by reformatting it, restructuring it, or even reinventing it. By putting your content out in different formats, like turning an audio post into an infographic or an article into a chart, you make your content more accessible and more visible.
You also need a steady stream of new content, and you need to be strategic about what that content is. Blog posts are highly rewarded by web crawlers and users alike. Web crawlers like them because there’s plenty of content for them to work with, and users like them because they provide information and help answer search queries. While there’s no one right answer for the best average blog post length, research shows that blogs shorter than 300 words typically don’t have enough content for good SEO.
Blog writing and refreshing can take a lot of time, so you might want to consider a blog writing service like Content Cucumber. This will save you time so you can focus on growing your business. A content writing service can help you keep your updates consistent and optimized for your audience! Users like well-researched, well-written content. They don’t like ads, but promotional content that provides information in return, like blog posts, can drive traffic to your site and improve your overall ranking. Even the most advanced SEO tactics can’t make up for a lack of content.
Share, Share, Share
Because Alexa ranks are calculated using unique site visits, the wider your audience, the better your rank will be. This means that in addition to good content, you need shareable content! This can mean maintaining a social media presence, but it also ties back into creating good content. When readers find resources valuable and informative, they engage with future content and share among their networks. Word of mouth engagement on social media is a kind of advertising you can’t buy. Make that content interesting, provide quick links and social media share buttons, and don’t lean into cheap tactics like clickbait or spam. It’s always better to provide quality content that people feel confident about sharing.
Build Backlinks
There are two ways that visitors can find your site. First, they can find it in a search engine’s results. But backlinks are also important. Backlinks, or inbound links, are links to your website from a site outside of your domain. Visitors who find your site through a backlink get to your site from somebody else’s site. This means that other site owners need to find your content interesting and good enough to link to! You can build backlinks organically, with no effort on your part, but to build good backlinks you need to do some off-page SEO. This means strategies like guest writers, social media marketing, local listings like Google My Business, and offline advertising.
Beef Up Security
Don’t forget how important site security is for your business’s Alexa rankings! Building site security is different from ensuring personal safety while browsing, and there are lots of tools you can use to enhance your users’ safety. These include keeping your software up-to-date, using SSL certificates, using a secure web host, keeping your administration passwords secure, and other simple steps that put the user’s security first.
Ultimately, your site’s Alexa ranking is a valuable tool that you can use to see how your site compares to others. The best way to improve this rank is through good business practices and great content. The data Alexa provides transforms data into meaningful insights that can help your business grow; it’s worth it to do what you can to keep that rank nice and low!
Note: Amazon will be retiring Alexa.com on May 1, 2022.
