by Table of Contents
When I was first starting out on my blogging journey, I didn’t have a clear cut idea on how to actually get traffic for my website. As a beginner, my sole focus was to write just to get content out there, hoping for readers to magically land on my website.
I didn’t know that driving traffic is a different beast in itself. Much more than that, I didn’t know that there are different strategies required to actually drive traffic to my blog.
I progressed from that amateur thinking, and eventually, I focused on SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.
Getting my website to be indexed on Google search is everything and so I thought.
What I didn’t know was that there is another ranking metric that is just as important as getting your website to rank in Google search Engine- Alexa rankings.
What is Alexa Ranking?
ALEXA RANK is a public ranking metric of your website’s popularity in comparison to other websites. It measures your website traffic and engagement within the three month period and ranks your numbers relative to other websites.
Alexa rankings give advertisers and potential investors an insight on the traffic, performance, and overall value of your website. If your site is popular, you’ll have the upper hand on negotiating on a higher advertising revenue for your website.
The lower the ranking in Alexa, the more valuable your site is. If you want to monetise your blog or website, you have to improve on your Alexa ranking.
To give you an example, here are the top 15 most popular websites in the world:
It’s not that surprising to see Google, Youtube and Facebook among the top most popular sites. They are behemoths in the world wide web, with billions of users all over the world. Chinese sites like Tmall, Qq, Baidu, Sohu and Taobao also made it into the top 10 because these websites have dominated the Chinese market and the Chinese population is one of the biggest in terms of online usage and it’s poised for more growth in the near future.
As of today, Google has a net worth of a trillion dollars. Can you imagine! A trillion dollars! But it’s the quintessential example that a website’s valuation is highly correlated to its popularity. It’s not rocket science to expect that, after all, users and the network effect are the primary determinants of a site’s value.
Of course, it’s delusional to expect your site to rank in the top 10 of Alexa rankings unless you’ve come up with a unique and highly innovative Social Networking Site or a search engine with billions of venture capital backing you up.
A lot of beginners make the mistake of thinking BIG without actually coming up with a strategic plan on how to really rank better.
What is considered a good ranking in Alexa?
Bloggers and entrepreneurs would consider a ranking of below 1 Million to be a major feat. It is indeed true since there are about 1.47 Billion websites that exist and ranking below 1 million just means that you belong in the top .1%.
But to take things in perspective, even a ranking below 1 million could be incredibly hard especially for those who are building their site from scratch and for those with limited experience and capital.
A better definition of a “good ranking” is when your website is ranking better in a particular subset or a niche, whether it be for a certain demographic or location in comparison to your DIRECT COMPETITORS.
A direct competitor is a website that talks about the same topics and targets similar keywords and audiences as you do.
It makes the most sense to compare your ranking with your direct competitors in a particular niche because you’d be able to gauge on how well you’re doing in that specific industry only. The rest is just noise (like how you can’t compare apples to oranges) and you’d want to weed out irrelevant data when measuring your overall website value.
You have to establish Authority in a specific niche to rank well in Alexa.
Why is my website not getting any Alexa ranking? No results?
If you’re just starting out, you might have found yourself scratching your head and wondering why you’re not faring well vs your direct competition. It indeed takes time.
But what’s even more confidence eroding is checking your site for rankings only to see this:
Alexa couldn’t rank my website. It didn’t come up with any results. It wasn’t showing any data.
There can be a plethora of reasons why your site isn’t ranking, but one of the major culprits perhaps is that you aren’t getting enough traffic for your website. Alexa measures popularity according to your website traffic for the last three months so for it to not show any results, your traffic just might not be sufficient.
It could also be because your website is fairly new. In my case, Alexa couldn’t retrieve my data and rank my website because my website is less than 3 months old.
Another probable reason for results to not show up is that you haven’t tracked your website with Google Analytics. While there are counterarguments that Google analytics is merely a tracking script that is in no way related to Alexa’s ranking algorithms, it still doesn’t hurt to install Google Analytics to properly track your site’s traffic.
Why is my website ranking so poorly in Alexa?
If your site is older than 3 months, there are several factors that can affect your website’s Alexa ranking:
- Low traffic
Low traffic could definitely hurt your chances of ranking better in Alexa. As we’ve mentioned, traffic is one of the primary factors that Alexa takes into account when ranking your site in comparison with your direct competitors. Traffic could include page views and unique visitors to your website. Having low traffic could mean that you have a low visitor retention rate (or the number of readers that go back to read more of your content), or your unique visitor acquisition strategies are not working.
- High bounce rate
Bounce rate, to simply put it, is the rate at which viewers visit your website or blog then leave without engaging further with your content. A high bounce rate means that people don’t stay too long, or they don’t click on other pages in your website. It might be because your site is not compelling for the reader or it might be because your content is inundated with boring texts or eyesore images.
For stunning copyright-free images and videos that you can use for your website, check out 10 Best Sites for Royalty Free And No Attribution Stock Photos and Videos
- No social media presence or low social media engagement
Social media shares and engagement have a high correlation with traffic. And traffic is also highly correlated to rankings. By not having a social media presence, you’re hurting your chance of driving a massive amount of traffic to your website.
Social media engagement doesn’t only pertain to the number of visits, but most importantly, engagement includes the number of likes, shares and comments. If your posts aren’t compelling enough, or don’t resonate with your target demographic, the lower the chance that they’ll engage with it, let alone visit your site. With users’ shortened attention span while browsing through social media, your biggest challenge is to be able to capture their attention as fast as possible.
- Slow site speed
Having an annoyingly slow site speed does not only affect your Alexa Rankings, but it can also have a detrimental effect to your SEO and traffic. It could kill your website.
Regardless of your well-researched long tail keywords and articulately written 2000 long comprehensive blog post, if your site is not loading properly or if it takes too much time to load, you’ll be losing out on your viewers.
- Poor website UI/IX
UI refers to User Interface while UX refers to User Experience. UI is your visitor’s point of interaction or touch points with your website and this includes your overall site aesthetic, visuals, colors, fonts, buttons, menu, scrollbars, forms, displays, etc. UX on the other hand, refers to to overall experience (as the name would suggest it) and usability. Both work hand in hand to increase traffic and conversions.
Having a poor UI/UX optimisation would give you a higher bounce rate and it can definitely affect your brand as a whole.
First impressions last, as they say. And giving your unique visitors a bad impression about your website could hamper your ability to properly communicate what your overall website is about.
- Poor SEO Strategy
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation ensures that your website or blog would get organic traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
By not having a proper SEO strategy, your website could potentially be lost in the sea of authority websites out there. Authority websites get the most traffic, and you’re losing out your potential visitors to them. We all know that traffic is everything with Alexa rankings.
How to improve your website’s Alexa rankings
- Write quality content that consits of 1500 to 2500 words to lower down bounce rate
Gone were the days where people could get away with just posting a 500 word content and they can be rest assured that search engine algorithms and Alexa would still be in their favor. The blogging space is more competitive than ever, and for you to stand out amongst your direct competitors and to rank better in Alexa, you need to write a comprehensive blog post that is VALUABLE and HELPFUL for your readers.
When asked about the A 1500- 2500 word content would massively help you rank better in Alexa. More often than not, beginners think that brevity is wit. While it is true, brevity could work only as far as capturing your visitor’s attention. To keep them hooked with your content and to lower down your bounce rate, you need to be able to provide exhaustive information.
- Post consistently
Another great strategy for improving your Alexa ranking is by posting consistently. I always made it sure to post at least twice a week to keep the flow going. Posting consistently would send a signal to the search engines, bots and crawlers that your website is always updated and maintained and it would keep your readers anticipating for what’s next.
- Install Alexa toolbar for Chrome, Safari or Firefox
The Alexa extension for Chrome, Safari or Firefox is a one-stop toolbar that allows you to check analytics about a website’s traffic and rank, see websites that are similar to yours and view older versions of a website. Installing this toolbar will improve your Alexa ranking as your website analytics is updated to their server.
- Share content on social media
As mentioned above, traffic is highly correlated with social media engagement so it’s imperative to increase exposure on Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter or instagram. If you’re just starting out, you could opt to choose at least two from the said social networking sites and grow from there.
Do not buy artificial likes and shares as you’d risk being banned from those social networking sites. If you have an extra budget, you could buy ads to target your demographic.
- Build backlinks
Backlinks, also known as inbound or incoming links, are links from other websites that point back to your website.
Backlinks are incredibly important in SEO as they suggest that people value your website as it provides high quality content. The higher the number of backlinks, the higher your website relevance. Backlinks also help you establish niche authority while improving your Alexa rankings.
The easiest way to build backlinks is by promoting your content via free publishing platforms like Medium, Quora and Reddit, or you could guest post in other blogs in the same niche as yours. By doing this, you’ll be spreading brand awareness while improving your Alexa ranking.
- Improve site speed
Improving your website’s speed would help decrease bounce rate. You can check on your mobile site speed via Google’s Test my Site, or Google’s PageSpeed Insight.
My website scored an 85 on Google’s PageSpeed Insight. Not bad, but there’s still room for improvement. What I loved the most about PageSpeed Insight was that it listed down points of improvement and diagnostics that could cause my site to load slower than usual.
Always update your plug-ins and themes and always check their compatibilities.
- Optimise SEO
While there is no direct correlation with SEO and Alexa rankings, SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) SEO can drive traffic to your website. Always remember, traffic is key to getting better rankings in Alexa.
The secret to Search Engine Optimisation is keyword research.
By researching keywords, you strategically targeting high demand but low competition keywords to amp up your chances of making it to the top of SERPS. This is one of the most cost-effective ways of driving organic traffic to your website.
- Add meta-tags in your posts
Meta-tags are basically a brief, summarised form of what your post is about. These are additional information that help crawlers identify which keywords you’re targeting. Meta-tags helps your post gain more relevance and these will help you rank higher in SERPS and at the same time help improve your Alexa ranking.
I personally use this easy-to-use plugin called Yoast SEO to add meta-tags and meta-descriptions per my blog posts.
