Virginia Internet Marketing Training - Ask Kelly & Ted

Here's a question that's come up - "why is my Alexa ranking so low"?

Here's our answer:

Alexa is just one indicator out of many of your site's traffic and trends, and isn't ever as accurate as metrics collected with your own website statistics package. Alexa gets its rankings via installations of its toolbar - which is a bit skewed towards the Internet-literate and somewhat technical crowd (who actually decide to install the toolbar). That's why sites that don't have anything to do with technology will be ranked artificially lower.

Also, the Alexa toolbar doesn't install at this time for IE on Microsoft Vista machines - so basically you're getting evidence of traffic from just a few segments of Internet users, not all. Additionally, any ranking by Alexa is usually quite delayed, and tends really not to be statistically relevant or useful for sites that aren't in the top few 100,000. We don't view Alexa rankings as useful past a possible general indicator of trends; your Google Analytics are the very best source of traffic trends.

Alexa rankings can be manipulated to some extent, thereby not being very objective measures. For example, in your next newsletter, tell everyone to go ahead and install the Alexa toolbar and set yoursite.com as the default homepage. You'll get a boost, for sure, in Alexa's rankings - but it's a false indicator of actual, useful traffic.

So for now (if you're a smaller site, just getting started, etc.), just ignore Alexa - focus on the Google Analytics (or whatever your site metrics package is). Your overall "ranking" in Alexa doesn't really have any relevance in terms of SEO. What's important is that all the keywords/keyphrases you're focusing on are coming up high in the search results, AND more and more people are actually clicking on them, AND you're getting more "coversions" (i.e. email signups, advertising signups, etc.) from your site. Instead of "ranking" against all other general sites, focus on "ranking" against your competition for advertising dollars and subscribers.