What is Alexa Rank all about, and what does it mean for your website’s SEO?
Alexa rank is a global ranking system for websites. Alexa uses website traffic data to measure a website’s popularity relative to other websites. Alexa is just one of many SEO measuring tools in the world of Search Engine Optimization.
When you first launch a new website, your Alexa ranking is going to be weak, somewhere in the top 10 million or so. Don’t let that discourage you. As soon as you start publishing content, and start getting even just a tiny little traffic (improved SEO), you’ll quickly rise in the ranks, and this is motivating!
It doesn’t take much work to get into the top 2 million on Alexa Rank, assuming that the content you publish is sought after. If you publish a couple of times per week for a month or so, you should get there.
The reason it’s relatively easy to get into the top 2 million, is that at the end of the day, out of billions of websites, only a small percentage of them are any good — just like most other avenues in life.
Once you break into the top 1 million, you’re going to start feeling the competition increase rapidly, and your rise in Alexa Rank will slow down significantly.
Getting into the top 1 million takes a bit more work, both in terms of:
- Publishing high quality content (Content SEO) frequently.
- Improving the technical qualities of your website (Technical SEO).
Getting diminishing returns as you get closer to the top of Alexa Rank is just the name of the game — don’t let it discourage you, keep working hard!
To test your website’s current Alexa Rank go to their website’s site scanner section and type in the URL to your website and click the Run Analysis button:
Within 20 seconds you’ll have an overview of your current Alexa Rank, including various metrics, from engagement numbers to referrals, and competition stats.
To get access to more in-depth website analysis, you can sign up for one of Alexa’s subscription plans. I don’t suggest that you do that prematurely. Once your trial is up, you’ll have to pay $149/month to keep the service.
Focus on building a great website with excellent On-Page SEO first, then get the free trial. After the trial is up then you can think about whether or not it makes sense for you to pay for it moving forward. Alexa is just one of many SEO tools.
My experience rising in the Alexa Rank
This website you’re on right now gets up to 1000 visitors per day, but averages around 450 right now. 99% of this traffic is organic, mostly from direct Google searches, and around 20% from other websites like Reddit.
I’ve done little to no work to promote the website outside of my domain within the past 12 months. This is part of my strategy, as I want to focus on doing as much On-Page SEO optimization as possible for the rest of 2019 before I start focusing on Off-Page SEO. And I still got plenty of On-Page SEO work to do.
Off-Page SEO is when you promote your website outside of yourdomain.com.
Publishing often is good for your ranking
Around a month ago I decided that I’m going to publish one article every day. My long-term vision is to have one of the most popular tech websites in the world and that is going to require some serious effort, and more than anything, consistency.
It turns out that deciding to publish every day is a lot easier than publishing every now and then. Getting into the habit of writing every day is one of the best decisions of my tech career as it keeps me sharp and motivated.
Almost up 300.000 positions on Alexa in 30 days
So far my experience of publishing every day has paid off on Alexa. Around a month ago I was in the top 900.000 (globally) — now Techstacker is closing in on top 600.000 (at 610,870 at the time of this writing).
Every 10k positions are going to be harder and harder from now on, so it might take me the rest of 2019 to crack into top 500k — but I’m confident I’ll get there.
In fact, I’ll write another Alexa Rank article once I reach the 500k milestone.
See you later, this year =)
Edit: I didn’t quite reach my goal of top 500k in 2019, but as of June, 2020, I’ve gone far past it, which you can read about here.
