Many people ask us: How can I improve my Alexa Rank? We understand how important this metric is for you and your business. As a public metric, potential advertisers, investors, and partners will look up your Alexa Rank and use it as a way to evaluate the value of your business. For this reason, improvements in your rank can make a real dollars and cents impact on your bottom line.
For those of you who are new to Alexa or unfamiliar with the Alexa Rank – it is a single metric that provides a quick summary of a site’s performance (yours or your competitor’s) relative to all other sites on the web. If you aren’t focused on it, you may not be doing everything you can to maximize the value and visibility of your business. In all, the authority of your site on the web is translated as your Alexa Rank.
But before we dive into how you can improve your site’s Alexa Rank, we should take a step back. It’s important to understand the makeup of the Alexa Rank so you understand how you can make it better.
Let’s get started.
What is the Alexa Rank?
Your Alexa Rank is an estimate of how popular your site is relative to all other sites. The Alexa Rank answers the question: Compared to all other sites, how is my site doing? Note that since rank is a relative measure, your site’s rank is not only dependent on that site’s traffic, but also on changes to traffic on other sites.
How does Alexa get its data?
Alexa has a large traffic data panel consisting of millions of people all over the world. Based on the data from this sample, Alexa estimates the number of visitors to all sites on the Internet. It’s a complicated calculation that involves correcting for biases as well as identifying and discarding fake or spam traffic. Our data scientists are the best in the business and they make sure the data we present is free of noise and non-human data, so you can make the best decisions for your business.
How is the Alexa Rank calculated?
Every day, Alexa estimates the average daily visitors and pageviews to every site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews over the past 3 months is ranked #1. The site with the least is ranked somewhere around 30 million. If no one in our measurement panel visited a site over the past 3 months there is no rank at all for that site.
Getting a more accurate Alexa rank
To get a more accurate Alexa Rank you can certify your site’s metrics on Alexa. Sites with certified metrics have their metrics directly measured by Alexa instead of being estimated based on information from our data panel. Certifying your site’s metrics provides a more accurate rank, but not necessarily a better rank! There are several other benefits of Certified Site Metrics, but a more accurate Alexa Rank is just one of them.
So, how do you get a better Alexa rank?
There are several tactics that will help improve your Alexa Rank:
Produce engaging, original content, updated frequently that provides real value to your audience. Content that strays from this motivation fails to build loyal audiences. When readers find resources valuable and informative, they engage with future content and share among their networks (link building), introducing new visitors that potentially turn into customers. Quality content is also being rewarded by search engines like Google, which is taking steps to get better answers faster for the end user.