Share this story, choose your platform!
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Since this myth is so persistent in some circles, let’s look at the reasons why Alexa Rank doesn’t affect or measure your search engine optimization (SEO) success.
The first sign that you shouldn’t be using Alexa Rank as an SEO yardstick is Alexa Frequently Asked Questions.
“How are Alexa’s traffic ranks determined? By default, traffic estimates and ranks are based on people’s surfing behavior in our global data field. Rank is calculated using a proprietary method that combines the average of daily unique visitors to a website and the number of page views over the past 3 months. The website with the highest combination of unique visitors and page views takes first place. ”
– Alexa.com
Alexa Rank is based on traffic from all digital channels – direct, email, search, social, etc. Using it to assess SEO performance (or that of any other digital channel) is therefore inherently flawed.
For example, two websites could have nearly identical Alexa ranks: a website you are tracking can get 900 visits from organic search and 100 visits from direct traffic. Another could get 100 from organic search and 900 from direct traffic. The two websites look like their SEO programs are equally successful with 1,000 visits each, although the data in that website’s analytics software would show that their organic search performance was radically different.
The Alexa rank is based on a group of users. This means that the behavior of a fraction of the world’s users determines the Alexa rank for each site. When you rely on it in your search marketing performance, you rely on 1% of your sales data to determine your company’s profitability.
Since Google controls the world of search engine marketing, only data from Google can tell you exactly how you compare to other domains on Google.
The metrics of tools like SEMrush or seoClarity are a more valid measure of SEO performance in many domains because they get their data from two parts of the Google Ads API:
- Google Ads Keyword Planner data that shows how many people searched for each keyword topic and how much advertisers paid for ads with those keywords in a given month
- Google search results, also through the Google Ads API
In addition, these and similar tools allow you to enter your analytics data and data from your Google Search Console account to make them even more informative and accurate.
If you want to assess your organic search performance, the best data source is always your own Google Analytics in conjunction with the data of the platform on which you advertise. All other tools are estimates of performance. Only Google Analytics and Google Search Console can accurately represent your website’s organic search performance.
To any question about how Alexa Rank affects or measures SEO performance, the answer is that it doesn’t.