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Small Business Anxiety Over Alexa

Over the years, Alexa has been a punchline for Internet professionals and businesses owners who are “in-the-know.” In their opinion the data has always been flawed (primarily coming from the Alexa Toolbar users), their rankings would fluctuate wildly, especially once you were above the 50,000 mark, and in the end was derailed by many as not being a good indicator of how a business is really doing on the web.

Regardless, today a lot of small businesses use Alexa as their primary indicator of how they’re doing on the web and today they’re freaking out as Alexa announced some dramatic changes to the way their rankings work. A significant number of businesses found that their rankings dropped like a rock once the new changes were in place and they started going crazy.

It’s very important for small business owners to take a step back and remember:

Your website is the same.
Your traffic is the same.
Your pageviews are the same.
The past has not changed.

Regardless of what happened to your Alexa Ranking in their update, it’s important to as a small business owner that data from sites like Alexa shouldn’t be the only indicator of the success of your website.

In our business we find these tools to be exceptionally helpful when tracking trends especially in relation to our competitors, but in the end your internal goals that lead to revenue such as leads, conversions, and actual traffic should dictate how successful your feel your business is. You can tell the world your business is #42,000 on Alexa, but if you have no paying customers is your business really that successful?

If you aren’t using a statistics or analytics package such as Google Analytics or Mint, you should be. These tools really allow you to get a solid idea how much traffic you really have, and if you’re growing it. These programs track in great detail your websites traffic, including visitors, pageviews and how people are getting to your site. By tracking actual people visiting your website you’ll start to get a very good snapshot of your website’s progress. If you have website logs available, some of these packages will built reports from the past for you giving you a head start.

In my opinion, the new changes that Alexa have made are definitely for the better and make Alexa’s product much more useful to the business owner. Their service is now on par with Compete.com and Quantcast.  In the end though successful businesses aren’t built off of rankings, they’re built on customers and revenue.