Alexa is an online ranking system (purchased by Amazon) that provides insight on all websites on the Internet, and the most popular metric tracked by Alexa is the Alexa ranking.
Your Alexa Rank is an online ranking metric that indicates how popular your site is and how engaged your audience is compared to all other websites on the Internet.
How Is Alexa Rank Calculated?
The Alexa rank is calculated by estimating a website’s average traffic and how many pages are viewed across the site over a 3 month period.
While all elements taken into account are not known, Alexa’s website says that it uses the number of unique daily visitors and the number of pages viewed on the site to determine the popularity of a site compared to millions of other websites.
- Unique Daily Visitors: The number of individual devices that visit a specific domain within 24 hours.
- Average Pageviews: A site’s average number of pages viewed highlights how many times a particular page is loaded in a browser.
Alexa’s understanding of website traffic and user behavior are estimates based on data from the company’s global dataset created by sampling information gathered from users various browser extensions installed on their computer that’s added to Alexa’s dataset.
Of all the sources that gather information for Alexa ranking, most SEOs agree that the Alexa browser extension seems to have the data collected by users with the Alexa rank toolbar installed has the most influence over a site’s Alexa rank.
Since the Alexa toolbar carries the most weight for data collection with the Alexa ranking, it should be noted that you will need to attract readers who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their site.
We will go into this strategy a bit more later on, but in general, you will need to engage with technologists, webmasters, and coders are the most likely to have this toolbar installed on their browser.
Does My Alexa Rank Matter?
Your site’s Alexa rank is another metric that you can use to understand how your site compares to your competitors and how your visitors interact with your content. Similar to other third-party metrics like Domain Authority (DA), you can use your Alexa rank when pitching to outlets like HARO and other services to promote your site with marketers, influencers, and PR companies.
Many companies consider your Alexa rank to determine how much they will pay you to place ads and content on your site. In the same way, many outreach partners will look at your Alexa rank when factoring in costs and if they want to work with you in a business deal.
These factors mean that you should make every effort to improve your Alexa rank now if you plan on reaching out to companies for partnership opportunities. Even if you are not concerned with your Alexa ranking for SEO purposes, you should find ways to improve your Alexa ranking to ensure future business ventures and partnerships!
How To Increase Alexa Rankings On Your Site For Free
While your site’s Alexa ranking does not directly influence search engines, we discussed above how this metric can be an essential factor when prospecting and building partnerships.
If you are struggling to improve your Alexa ranking, you should focus on ways to generate more traffic to your site and keep people on your site for more extended periods.
Combining proven SEO practices with a focused promotional strategy can help you achieve a lower Alexa rank and help you position your site for more success in the future. Here are five easy ways to improve your Alexa ranking today!
1. Install The Alexa Rank Browser Extension
One of the best ways to improve your Alexa rank is to install the Alexa extension on your browser. Installing this extension will feed the Alexa dataset with information each time you visit your site.
Once the extension is installed on your browser, be sure to visit your website every day and click around for a few minutes. If you are serious about improving your Alexa ranking then you could consider visiting your site on multiple devices and even use a VPN to ensure you generate lots of unique daily visits and page views.
2. Update Old Pages Around Valuable Search Terms
Many people only think about producing new content for their blog and website, but they forget to optimize existing content based on seasonality, market trends, or other factors.
It takes a lot of time and resources to create great content, and if you are not updating existing content you could be wasting the hours you spent to produce the article.
You can start by reviewing the top-performing content in Google Search Console over the past 90 days and adding target keywords from Google Search Console into the pages. Once you find pages that are performing well but could benefit from a boost, you can use Google Search Console to insert more keywords into your content headers and body sections to rank higher in search engines and drive more traffic to your site.
Refreshing old content is a minimal investment compared to researching, writing, and optimizing new content. Optimized content will help your web pages get found more often and help you improve your Alexa rank!
3. Create Content For Search Engines & People
A search engine’s primary goal is to deliver the best content on the Internet-based on what a user types into the search bar. Whenever you publish a piece of content, you should think about what your audience is searching for, the terms they use to ask a question, and the type of information they will engage with.
Image Source: https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/seo/why-search-engine-optimization/
The ultimate goal to improve your Alexa ranking is to improve the number of unique visits to your site and direct visitors to multiple pages on your site (both important factors to improve Alexa rankings). Here are a few quick ways to create new content that will help you increase your Alexa rankings:
- Research & choose specific keywords to get found in search engines.
- Write content based on the needs of your audience to ensure your content is useful.
- Use common questions in your headers to improve your online visibility.
- Aim for 1,000-word blog posts to ensure you have enough space to write optimized content.
- Interlink pages and posts to increase pages visited.
As you can see, there is nothing secret about making content to improve your Alexa ranking. As long as you focus on your audience’s needs and optimize content around how they engage with that content, you will be able to drive more traffic and pageviews, which will all contribute to your ranking!
4. Implement A Content Promotion Strategy
Search engines are not the only outlets that you can use to drive more unique daily visitors to your site. You can use social media to reach a wider audience than ever before, and using social sharing options can help improve your website’s Alexa ranking quickly.
Image Source: https://foundationinc.co/lab/reddit-statistics/
As discussed above, you should focus on reaching people with the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. This type of audience is likely not on Facebook, so you should focus your content distribution strategy around how to use Reddit and specific technology forums to reach developers, coders, and marketers with the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser.
5. Make Your Site Fast & User Friendly
It is a good idea to make your website fast and user friendly for search engines, and doing this will also help improve your Alexa ranking. This is because your audience will consume more content on your site the faster that your website loads, and your target audience will not have the patience to click around your site if it loads slowly.
Image Source: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/
These people will be viewing content on their phones and tablets instead of traditional desktop computers. If you want to attract and retain their viewership, you will need to design your website to consume content on a mobile device.
Improve Your Alexa Rank!
As you can see, there are several quick and easy ways to improve your Alexa rank. While your ranking doesn’t directly influence your Google ranking, you should include Alexa in the overall SEO strategy to have a new view into your content performance.
Jump into the comments below if you have tried the above Alexa rank optimization ideas. Be sure to also let me know if you have other optimization ideas that you would like to recommend!
