Finding out how popular your website is and how it compares to your competitors is useful for many businesses hoping to fully develop an online presence. The Alexa.com website provides a number of in-depth tools that help you make sense of your local and global reach whilst providing clear recommendations that allow you to develop areas like your SEO more intelligently, boosting your site’s value and allowing potential customers to find you.

The problem most businesses have with all the data collected about visitors is they often don’t know how to leverage that information to their best advantage. At its heart, Alexa uses a simple algorithm to record the behaviour of users which is then used to monitor online behaviour and provide rankings for individual sites.

Measuring Your Website Rankings with Alexa

The information it supplies for businesses that have subscribed to their analytics platform gives a comprehensive breakdown of performance, which includes.

• Alexa ranking compared to other sites both locally and globally.
• How engaged visitors are with your site with bounce rates, average time on site and the average number of pages viewed in one visit.
• Demographics of visitors including gender, age, ethnicity and income level.
• Which country your visitors come from and how your pages rank in that location.
• The places visitors come from such as search engines or social media.
• Where they visited before they came to you and where they go next.
• Which pages people on your site are visiting most.
• Which other sites link to your website.

Gathering all this information begins to create a clear vision of what is happening with your business website. But you can also use Alexa’s tools to take a look at your competitors and see how well they are performing too. Having a clear idea where your nearest rival is upstaging you can bring valuable insights that help you to develop a clearer online plan. One of the most useful tools is the site comparison, allowing you to compare not just 1 site but multiples, most useful for seeing how effective your SEO is compared to others.

But that’s not all that Alexa does. It provides a comprehensive range of development tools that help you to make sure your site is performing at its optimum level. This not only includes top of the range metrics but SEO audits that track everything from faulty tags to duplicate content and meta descriptions that can inhibit your search engine ranking.

One of the issues that the site’s detractors often raise is that you have to have the Alexa toolbar on your browser for the information to be collected. On Alexa you are getting a sample of millions of internet users and your ranking is a comparison to other sites on the internet. The popularity of Alexa means that you gain a comprehensive insight into how your online presence is performing along with the tools that inform your future development.

Measuring Your Website Rankings with Alexa: The difference between Alexa and many other analytics platforms is that you get actionable data that is easy to understand. Their mantra is that they bring all that data into sharp focus and that it consequently helps you make ‘smarter decisions’. That means you can develop a more profound and robust online strategy, whether you are a content strategist, a marketing specialist or a business looking to maximise your online presence.