Alexa Rankings - Are they worth tracking?

Alexa Rankings - Are they worth tracking?

There were so many people boasting that their website broke the 100k or 10k barriers in Alexa.com for traffic rankings, but what's the point? Well, people tend to brag a lot about how much traffic they're getting and Alexa.com is one way to show people what you're doing without giving them access to your analytics.

Alexa rankings help some websites but don't matter for others. You can have an Alexa rating of 500, and no one on your website would know or even care lol. Below you'll see me cover the upsides and downsides of Alexa and why people are using it.


The Upside of Alexa.com
Alexa is fun to use if you're a newbie marketer because it shows your new website going from 18,000,000 to 800,000 in a few weeks and you get the push to keep working. You'll want to hit 700k, then 600k, maybe you'll even break 100k and feel like a beast of marketing!

Alexa is useful if you're trying to sell a website and don't want to give people access to your analytics until they're dedicated and ready to purchase. You can say "Hey, here's my Alexa ranking and here are some screenshots of the traffic I'm getting from month to month," and that will usually convince them you're legitimate. Remember, I said "usually" convince them lol.

The Downside of Alexa.com
Alexa is a great morale booster if you don't know the rankings can be fluffed and faked. You can hire a company to boost your Alexa rankings, and you never gain an additional visitor to your website. If you do get more traffic to your website, it's likely bot traffic that is faking the Alexa system to think everything is legitimate.

Alexa rankings are a metric that isn't taken very seriously in most niches since most people don't even know what it's for. If you're in any sort of online business like SEO, online marketing, web design, etc. then you can likely sell your website to someone who knows of Alexa, but even then they will probably know you can fake the numbers and they won't get serious about purchasing until they get access to your analytics as a guest.

One website can get 500 visitors a day and have an Alexa of 300k, and another site can get 10,000 people a day and have an Alexa ranking of 10,000,000. You'll only get a better ranking if the people visiting your pages have the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. This means that only the people who have the toolbar installed can help your rankings, making your overall rankings inaccurate, because that 100k website is less successful than the 10mil site.


Why people still use Alexa.com
People still use Alexa because of the morale boost, and it's some validation to people visiting their pages. You can add a little widget to your footer that makes you look more professional, and people will see you as more of an authority if they don't know what Alexa is. You'll still see website flippers publishing their Alexa rankings as a sort of "Look at my amazing rankings!" but it usually blows back at them because the metric isn't too accurate.


In the end, Alexa rankings are fun to watch and play with, but they're not a reliable metric to follow. You can't do anything with them except show people what your rank is and how much you increased it. You can't get more money from a sale due to your rankings, because they can be faked, and this is why a lot of people stopped using the system altogether. You need visitors to have the Alexa toolbar installed to make your rankings better, and that's not something the majority of people want to do.


Thanks for reading

Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey