How to Increase Alexa Rank Quickly – A Case Study with the Best Tips & Tricks
The Alexa Traffic Rank is important for a number of reasons. It allows you to see how your content is performing relative to other sites. If your Alexa Traffic Rank is improving, it can be an indicator that the content you are creating is performing well and attracting an audience. Additionally, websites with an Alexa Rank of less than one million qualify to submit queries on HARO as a journalist. This can be helpful because injecting expert opinions into your articles is one way to improve your content and make it more authoritative.
In this post, I will detail what I did to improve my Alexa Rank by a whopping 7,870,249 points over the course of three months.
What is Alexa Rank? How is Alex Rank Calculated?
First, it’s important to understand what Alexa Rank is and how it’s calculated. In order to understand this, I went straight to the horse’s mouth.
Alexa.com states, “Alexa’s Traffic Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by users in Alexa’s global data panel over a rolling 3 month period…The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked #1” and in a blog post they state, “Alexa’s data panel is the sample of global internet traffic that is used to calculate Alexa Ranks and estimate non-Certified metrics. The panel is comprised of millions of internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions.”
It’s reasonable to assume that the browser extension they are speaking of is the Alexa Traffic Rank browser extension. Therefore, the Alexa Rank is determined by the traffic hits to your website from visitors who have the Alexa Traffic Rank extension enabled in their browser.
Why Should You Improve Your Alex Rank? Does it Really Matter?
One excellent reason to improve your Alexa rank is that after you have passed the one million mark in Alexa rank, you can submit queries on HARO as a journalist. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a FREE online service that connects journalists to the general public. It is designed to allow journalists to acquire quotes from people with expertise in a particular field. Once you join HARO, you can sign up as a ‘source’ to receive emails 3 times a day that contain a list of approved journalist queries. By joining as a ‘journalist,’ you can submit a query that will be sent out to the email list of 800,000+ people who have signed up as sources.
HARO is great for creating content fast. By gathering a number of quotes from experts through HARO, you can whip up an Expert Roundup post in no time. These posts tend to get lots of social shares and acquire lots of backlinks because the people quoted in the piece have an incentive to share it and link to it. The social shares increase your site’s online visibility. The links help build your site’s domain authority which allows your site to rank higher for your target keywords. It’s a digital marketing double whammy.
How I Improved My Alexa Rank, Step-by-Step (A Case Study)
I had started with an Alexa Rank of 8,863,372. My goal was clear: to hit an Alex rank of less than one million as quickly as possible. With this in mind, I began to research how to improve my Alexa Rank. I achieved my goal over the course of three months. Here is how I did it.
1. Install the Alexa Rank Browser Extension
I headed over to the download page for the Alexa Traffic Rank browser extension and installed it in Google Chrome. As stated on the extension download page, “as you browse with the Alexa extension, you’re helping to make the Web a better place for everybody by contributing to the traffic information that Alexa provides.” With the extension installed, Alexa recorded whenever I visited my site. After the installation of the extension, I saw a major improvement in my Alexa rank.
After installing the extension, my site saw a huge jump in Alexa rank on October 7th from 8,863,372 to 5,514,921.
To ensure that the Alexa rank continued to head in the right direction, I made sure to visit my site from multiple IPs everyday (home computer and work computer) so that the extension would record those visits.
2. Publish High-Quality Content on a Regular Basis
One thing that you should always be doing is creating high-quality content that is useful and valuable to people. I published a guest post on my site on November 4th and shortly thereafter on November 6th, my Alexa rank again shot up, this time to a ranking of 2,522,130.
In December, I published a 7,000+ word guide to WordPress SEO. I wanted to be sure that I was publishing lengthy posts crammed with useful tips that I knew would be valuable to my audience, people interested in digital marketing and SEO.
3. Build Links from Authoritative Sites
As I was visting my site every day with the Alexa extension installed, I also made sure to continue to build links from authoritative sites that were within my niche. On November 20th, I published a guest post on MuffinMarketing.com which included two links back to my site. I was also featured in a number of expert roundup posts (here, here, and here) throughout October, November, and December which further boosted my site’s domain authority and allowed me to attract more referral and organic traffic.
Anything that gets your content in front of more people increases the chances that you will be acquiring traffic from users who have the Alexa browser extension enabled so sharing your content on social media is an absolute must.
Every time I create content I make sure to share it on my Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook properties and I have a social plugin installed on my site which makes it easy for anyone to share my content on those social media platforms.
Alexa Traffic Rank is useful for monitoring your content’s performance and joining HARO as a journalist. Follow the steps outlined in this guide and you will be well on your way to achieving a much improved Alexa Rank. Good luck!
