Let’s suppose you run a website for pet supplies or one on investments. You may have very good, regularly updated blog content to keep the search engines busy indexing your content. That’s all fine, but you still might not see a huge change in your Alexa ranking and, unfortunately, people often make decisions about the credibility of your business based on your Alexa ranking. And this reputational ranking can, therefore, ultimately affect your sales.
So, here’s how to significantly boost your rank (ie., reduce your Alexa number) without having to change your current marketing workload at all. You see, Alexa analyzes site visits only by those Web surfers who have agreed to download their toolbar. Their hope is that this system will yield a statistically representative sample of broader Website visitation patterns. The problem is that the data pool is inherently biased towards the more technology oriented people among us. For super popular websites like Google or Yahoo, Alexa’s ratings will be quite accurate, but at the lower end of the popularity scale, where your business website likely falls, the Alexa numbers your site shows can be very incorrect (yet, since outsiders are not privy to your server logs, the only sense they can get of your web traffic comes from Alexa).
This means that a little website that appeals to the types of people more likely to download the Alexa toolbar may have a better public rank even if, in actuality, it has far viewers visitors. For example, a site whose content appeals to Web designers, all other things being equal, will pull a better Alexa rank than a blog on investment advice.
The answer for the investment adviser and the pet products retailer then is to add some content that will draw in more Alexa toolbar users. How about adding a blog on the former site that features some articles with titles like “how a new Website tool can help Investment advisers attract new clients”. Or, for the pet store site, add a bunch of articles with headlines like “How a small online retailer grew its Web traffic by 35% almost overnight”.
Raising one’s website ranking on Alexa is really about adding a tech savvy target market that you may not have thought about before.