What Is Website Traffic Ranking and Why Should You Care?
When we talk about traffic ranking services, the most popular one is Alexa. It is a free provider of global web metrics and actually the leader in providing such services. Alexa can be used in the process of market research, competitive analysis and, ultimately, business development. It can show the most popular websites by selected country, category or keyword and also offers tools to optimize web presence for a business.
When you start working on your online identity as a business, your start from choosing a domain name, go through the process of web design and code building (at least someone does that for you) and, in the end, get a page that you can, hopefully, be proud of. But if this page does not have enough traffic, meaning that few visitors have passed by “to say hello”, then the effort was in vain. Optimizing the website for search engines, promoting it on social media and through paid-for advertising is something that must constantly be done for getting website traffic.
This continuous effort must be monitored, and tools that can offer website statistics, such as Alexa, come in handy. Site analytics are offered by other providers also, such as Compete, Quantcast, Ranking and Technorati, however Alexa is the leader in traffic tracking and we will focus on this service in this article.
Introduction to website traffic ranking – What is traffic rank? What is page rank?
Website traffic rank is evaluated based on three months of traffic data that is incoming from users of Alexa Toolbar users, which are not few at all, and from other traffic data sources. It is basically a combined measure of page views (the number of pages visited by individuals on a website) and reach (reach is a measure for the number of users).
Alexa monitors and computes the number of users and the number of page views for all sites and it does that every single day. An average of these values is made considering a period of three months and Alexa traffic rank is obtained. All in all, the traffic rank of a website is a reflection of how many users have visited that website and how many pages on that respective site they have viewed. As you can see, the higher your traffic rank, the more visitors have seen your site and the more pages they have browsed through. This means that you are doing okay where your online identity is concerned. Lower traffic rank means that you should work harder to increase traffic on your site.
What should be very clear is that Alexa Traffic Rank (ATR) and GPR (Google Page Rank) are two different things. While ATR is a measure of a website’s traffic, GPR results from the number of links to the website, in other words from monitoring backlinks.
What are trend graphs?
A Trend graph shows the daily traffic rank of a website, in its evolution over a period of time. The daily traffic rank shows, of course, the traffic rank calculated for a single day, while the main traffic rank returned by Alexa is reflective of a period of three months. Observing daily website traffic ranking can show you how traffic fluctuates on the short term and eventually you can associate these fluctuations with certain changes you have performed where your website is concerned. On the long term, you should aim for consistent traffic performance, meaning a constant good number of visitors, rather than aiming for temporary “booms” in visitors.
How can keeping an eye on the evolution of Alexa ranking help your business?
A good marketer should keep an eye on Alexa website traffic ranking and know how to interpret it. This ranking shows your website value and can also help to understand the evolution of your competition. With Alexa, you can check the ranking of any site listed with it. Climbing in Alexa website traffic ranking helps to draw further traffic from search engine query searches.
An interesting aspect is that a monetary value is associated to a website considering its rank. A site with a healthy traffic, 250,000 to 500,000 in ranking, is very likely making money. With figures of 20,000 to 100,000, your website is a super website and it is somewhat of an online real estate: you can sell space for advertisement placement and live well off of that. Eventually, you can sell the site for good money, especially if your ranking figures are from 1,000 to 20,000.
You may aim to earn money through your website, or simply aim to have more traffic just because visitors of your website might become clients of your products and services. Either way, you must be aware of what traffic you have so that you find means of increasing it and keeping it stable: this is how it will, in the end, bring you profit.
