Alexa Ranking: Is Alexa Ranking Really Worth Considering?
Many advertisers use Alexa Ranking as a scorecard to determine whether or not to advertise on a particular website. This article will help you decide whether to consider Alexa Rank to estimate a website’s quality score.
How does Alexa rate a website?
According to Wikipedia, Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary of Amazon that is known for its toolbar and website. Once installed, the toolbar collects data about browsing behavior that is transmitted to the website where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company’s web traffic reports.
Watch what happens here:
I have an entertainment blog that had an Alexa rank of 1,05,268 with an average of 2000 daily unique visitors. I have a friend who has a site with an AlexaRank of 45,025, which is a very high rank compared to my site.
We have analyzed the state of traffic for the last 30 days. You only get 800 unique visitors per day (in the same niche).
The report stated that my site outperformed his blog by twice the total number of visitors, but the Alexa rank for him is higher than mine. So do you think Alexa Rank should not be used to determine the overall traffic rank of websites or should it be weighed more?
Let me explain!
According to Google Analytics, there are 3 types of traffic indicators.
direct traffic: This is traffic where visitors come directly to our website, either by bookmarking our site or by remembering its URL if they find the content interesting. This type of web traffic will convert very well.
referral traffic: This is traffic from other sources (other websites, may also be ours), such as social bookmarking sites, social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. In my experience, most people will receive the highest percentage of traffic through these referral sites if they are active on social media.
search engine traffic: This is the free traffic that we get from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista, etc… This is the traffic that every webmaster, SEO Professional and Professional Blogger always dreams of.
Therefore, we must rely only on real statistics than estimated traffic (Alexa) to determine the authority of a website. There are many free tools like Google Analytics, Sitemeter and many more… that give you real data. If someone wants to advertise on your website, they should request this data before making an investment.
So don’t worry about Alexa rankings if you get a good number of unique visitors per day and your bounce rate is less than 40%.
What are you doing now? Start analyzing your analytics data against Alexa traffic status.