One of the questions that any business with an online presence needs to answer is – How much traffic do you have? The amount of traffic you get is the key indicator that helps set a value to the worth of your website, and by extension to your business. This is where Alexa comes into the picture, as the world’s foremost authority on traffic ranking for websites. If you would like to see how your website ranks for Alexa use the Lucep Website Grader tool and find out how your website scores.
If you are not sure what Alexa is or why its important to know your reach you can read this article on What is your Alexa Website reach and how to widen it
It’s a public ranking and analysis of the amount and kind of website visitors that you get, and anyone can see it. So when the owner of xyz.com tells you that the website gets a huge amount of visitors, you go to Alexa to verify it. And this is what you see.
So now you know that xyz.com’s traffic tanked hard near the start of the year, and it’s Global Rank is now over 2 million, which means there are more than 2 million websites across the world that have more traffic than xyz. Alexa assigns this Global Rank to a website based on the average daily visitors as well as the pageviews for the past 3 months. So a low Global Rank indicates that you get more website traffic. That’s why Google has a Global Rank of 1, and xyz.com’s rank is 2,089,592.
If you have a Global Rank above 1 million, it’s nothing to be proud about. But you can rectify this situation by quickly improving your Alexa ranking. So how to improve Alexa ranking? This question can be answered in two parts. There are some quick-fix tips and services you can use to temporarily increase your Alexa traffic and bring down the ranking immediately to something that looks better than 2,089,592. We’ll address this down below, but the only permanent solution is to increase your website traffic over the long term, which will automatically push your Alexa ranking down.
How to Increase Website Traffic
If you are starting or growing a business, you need website traffic to generate leads and online sales. It’s a huge pie, with U.S. e-Commerce sales now adding up to $92.8 billion, and growing annually at about 19.27 percent.
The competition is, however, fierce and getting increasingly worse. There are now more than 1.04 billion websites, and counting.
The good news is that traffic acquisition is by now pretty much an established science, so you have simply have to follow the tips below on how to increase website traffic.
Traffic Analysis – Before you do anything, you have to know how much traffic you have, who your visitors are, where they are coming from, and what they are doing on your website. You need to know the number of unique visitors you get in a day or month, the number of page views, the bounce rate, and other such key traffic metrics. All of this and more you can get from your webhost’s traffic logs and traffic analysis tools such as Google Analytics.
As per Lucep’s data, Google sends around 57 percent of the traffic to our clients. This is obviously going to be a huge part of the analysis – finding out which pages are getting the most search traffic for what queries. Discover as much as you can about your customers from the traffic data, including their location, device used, peak traffic times and other such information that can help focus your efforts to increase web traffic, online conversions and the conversion rate.
On-site SEO – SEO is a much maligned word these days, but it’s really very simple in theory. You want to create a website that is functional, easy to use, and provides visitors with the information they come looking for.
A: Keyword Research – A good place to start is by doing keyword research. Your traffic analysis has already told you what keywords your website is getting traffic for. Pick the top keywords, and use tools like SEO Profiler and the Google Adwords Keyword Planning tool to come up with a list of related keywords with high query volumes. Also find out what keywords your competitors are using. SEO Profiler allows you to look at the top keywords a specific competitor is targeting.
B: Content Creation – Start creating content that is focused on the list of keywords you have come up with. Set up a blog to publish all this content. This also has the added value of keeping your main website apart, maintaining its focus on your company and its products/services. Most importantly, creating engaging content will increase pageviews by your existing traffic, and that will increase your conversion rates.
C: Design – You don’t really have to figure out the most search-engine friendly design options. Just make use of the default settings in a standard content management system (CMS) like WordPress that publishes content in user friendly templates. If necessary, you can add SEO plugins like Yoast.
Make sure to use responsive templates so that mobile and Tablet users are able to visit, view and use your website, irrespective of size and the type of device. Mobile commerce now accounts for nearly 30 percent of all e-Commerce sales in the U.S., and counting. You simply cannot afford to ignore mobile users.
Off-site SEO – While you are optimizing your website pages, you also need to start with the offsite part of search engine optimization. The content creation strategy has to be coordinated with social media outreach and promotion, partnerships with other websites, and so on. The idea is to get incoming links from external websites, blogs and social media, all pointing to your new content as and when it is published. If you are not familiar with concepts like deep links, anchor text, landing pages and so on, and you aren’t aware of the fine line between white hat and black hat SEO practices, then it’s best to leave this coordinated content and link acquisition strategy to the experts.
SEM – Just SEO by itself is not a viable strategy for increasing website traffic in the short term. Along with optimization, you need to get direct links from high-traffic sites, increase your social media traffic, and also launch a PPC campaign. If you’re not sure of how to start with Google Adwords and how much to set aside as a budget for search marketing, then make sure that the SEO consultant you hire can also manage PPC campaigns.
Doing all this over a period of 6-8 months will slowly and surely bring your Alexa ranking down below 1 million and then even more slowly to below 500,000. It gets a lot harder as you get closer to the really big sites who get a lot of traffic, but we don’t have to think about that right now. For now, here’s a few quick fixes that will help you get more Alexa traffic and improve your ranking instantly.
1. Install the Alexa Toolbar – Alexa shows how many visitors your website is getting based on data about websites visited by Alexa Toolbar users. So you can easily improve your own website ranking by installing the toolbar in your own browser, and encouraging all your visitors to do the same.
2. Install the Alexa Widget on Your Website – The same reasoning applies here too, since it accurately calculates all your website visitors and faithfully reports it back to the Alexa mothership, instead of just the ones who are toolbar users.
3. Buy Alexa Traffic – It’s a simple transaction. You need website visitors who are users of the Alexa toolbar, and there are services such as Rankstore.com that will provide such visitors for a price. You can even hire people on sites like Fiverr and AlexaBoostup for a few dollars, who can immediately bring your Alexa ranking down below a million.
4. Verify Your Alexa Listing – This may not do much in terms of improving the ranking, but a verified website with positive reviews looks much better than an unverified one with just the numbers to look at.
Do all this, and then get to work on actually increasing your website traffic through content creation and marketing and other forms of traffic acquisition.
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