Alexa Ranking and Site Info review

Amazon Site Info is a collection of various SEO reports. It was launched a few years back as an alternative to other competitor research, keyword research, backlink checker tools available on the internet.

The term Alexa ranking is popular among bloggers and website owners. Wikipedia displays it when you open the page of a popular website.

Is the Alexa rank important or relevant to the SEO industry? Are the Alexa SEO tools a good alternative to SEMRush, Ahrefs, SerpStat, Long Tail Pro, Kwfinder, etc? Let’s find it out!

Alexa Site Info features

The Site Info tool displays the following reports:

Backlinks

According to Alexa, the website’s backlinks database is updated weekly. They’ve used the word “Recalculated” instead of updated. Alexa claims that one of my competitor’s site has 36 backlinks. When I checked the backlink report of the site with SEMRush, I learned that the site has 998 backlinks. Amazon Alexa’s backlink database is not worth exploring.

Bounce Rate, daily time, and pageviews

The bounce rate, page views, and daily time estimated by Alexa is somewhat similar to the same details calculated/provided by Google Analytics.

Keyword Trend

Alexa ranking might be calculated on the basis of the number of keywords the site is ranking for. I know a website that was affected by the Google November algorithm update. Before the update, it was ranked 12xxxxx. After the algorithm update, the site’s ranking dropped to 8xxxxxx.

Site the user had visited before accessing your site

Alexa makes you aware of the website the user was on before visiting your site. It also allows you to see the site user had visited immediately after closing your website. This feature allows you to see the major source of traffic for the site. For example, if you see Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo at the top three positions in the “visited just before” section, this indicates that search engines drive most of the traffic to the site. However, if you see these three search engines in the “visited right after” section, you should be worried. Why the visitor left your website and opened the search engine? Well, as the user didn’t get an answer to his query on your website’s page, he/she visited the search engine.

Similar sites

This section displays a list of sites of the same niche. For example, if you’re seeing the details of a technology news site, you’ll see a list of tech portals in this section.

Audience Geography

Here, you’ll find a map. Some countries on the map will be highlighted by shades of green color. The colored countries are the locations from which the sites get traffic. Below the map, Alexa displays the names of the highlighted countries and the estimated amount of traffic a website gets from it.

List of other tools provided by Alexa

• Competitor keyword matrix.
• On-Page SEO Checker.
• Keyword difficulty tool.
• Workspace, etc.

Alexa Rankings

As mentioned earlier, Alexa ranks websites on the basis of its traffic. The rankings may also depend on the factors which I didn’t know. Google.com leads the ranking tables. YouTube is at the 2nd position. Facebook ranks at number 4.

Is Alexa ranking important?

Might be. According to the product experts in Google Webmaster Forums, Alexa ranking is not important. However, as Alexa collects important data of websites and makes it available for all, people looking for advertisement opportunities on a website might be using the information to learn whether a site is suitable for their ads or not. You should also note that the advertisers will contact you only if your site is popular and gets a huge number of visitors. If you have a small or a new site, you should ignore the Alexa rankings.

Pricing

The free edition of Alexa tools gives you access to several reports but the reports show only 4 to 6 rows of data. To see full data, you must either buy the Advanced or the Agency plan of Alexa. The 1st plan supports 1 site and a single user only. It costs $149 per month. The other plan costs $329/month. It supports 20 users, 35 projects, and 35 sites. Both plans allow you to audit the site two times a month. The company also offers a free trial of 14 or 30 days to the users who want to try the tools before buying their subscription plans.

See the plans comparison table here on Alexa.com

How to improve Alexa ranking?

The best way to improve Alexa ranking is to install and activate the plugin called “Alexa Toolbar” in your browser. You can also ask your website’s loyal readers or newsletter subscribers to install the plugin on their browsers.

Alexa Site Info and Ranking alternatives

In my perspective, the best alternative to Alexa is SEMRush. SR has a huge database of websites.

Pros

• Google interface.

Cons

• Expensive.
• The backlink and keyword database are not up to date.

Final thoughts: Although Alexa offers a good collection of SEO tools and gives users access to several reports, its backlink database is incomplete. The Alexa Site Info will become a powerful tool of its backlink database is improved.