Alexa Tools and Services for webmasters and bloggers
Are you a webmaster looking for premium opportunities to promote your websites? Learn how to use various subscription plans from Alexa to promote your website and better track the ranking and statistics. In this post, I will compare and review the plans from Alexa.
Alexa is the industry standard to measure the ranking and popularity of websites. If you are a webmaster or blogger, it is hard to stay away from the Alexa services. Being a webmaster for last several years, I look at our Alexa statistics almost everyday to see how we perform compared to our competitor sites and when the graph changes in our favor, it gives us some satisfaction! The Alexa statistics, keyword queries play a significant role in SEO. A lot of webmasters and bloggers use Alexa to find out the high impact queries of their competitors and try to grab some traffic from them by providing content on similar topics.
The basic services from Alexa are absolutely free. The free services from Alexa that help on SEO include:
1. See statistics summary of your website which include the Alexa Rank, Page Views and Reach relative to other websites tracked by Alexa
2. Compare your site with up to 5 other sites at a time and see how they perform.
3. Monitor the traffic growth of your website over a period of time.
4. Compare the load time of your website with other websites.
5. View traffic ranks of your site in various countries and find out from which country you have most visitors.
6. See the queries used by people to find your site.
All of the above service can be used to find information about your own site as well as any other website in the internet. This means, you can track the basic traffic information of any site including your competitor sites.
Alexa services help a lot in SEO and promoting your websites by identifying the right audience and keywords for your website.Review of Premium Services from Alexa
In addition to the free basic services, Alexa offers some premium services which are paid services. The premium Alexa services can help you a bit in Search Engine Optimization on your websites.
Plans & Prices of services from Alexa
Alexa offers 3 different plans for the webmasters to track their websites SEO progress and traffic statistics:
This premium subscription offers the following additional benefits:
- Premium listing in Alexa search results
- Link back to your website
- Add company logo to Alexa listing page
- Certify your site
The advanced subscription appears to be bit expensive and I doubt if it is worth for small sites. The benefits offered by Alexa with this plan include all benefits of basic subscription plan and additionally, it offers two audits per month that cover SEO, broken links, security, performance and more.
Both of the above premium services can be canceled anytime and you can get a refund.
In case of the advanced subscription, you can optionally buy a single site audit report and get an extra free report. The single site audit by Alexa costs $199. It appears to be cheaper to go for a monthly subscription and later cancel it after using it for a month.Is Premium Listing on Alexa useful and worth the money?
The premium listing allows your site to be listed in the Alexa search results with a highlighted, premium listing status. This can fetch some additional traffic and also could get you a better quality incoming link.
The Basic subscription is relatively cheaper and costs $9.99 and it could be worth the money if you are looking for some quality incoming links and show your logo in the Alexa stats page. However, the advanced subscription seem to be bit expensive to me. The only extra feature offered by this plan is the site audit which covers SEO suggestions, broken links, meta tag issues, landing page data, various server errors, too many link problems, crawler errors and so on. Most of these stats can be obtained from Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Alexa free listing and various other free SEO and Analytics tools. So, in my opinion, paying $149 per month may not be worth for small bloggers. If you represent a corporate and run a big website that has serious impact on your business, I would say go for it. $149 per month may not be a significant amount for your business and it would definitely help you improve your business by analyzing your website with additional data and reports.
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Tony,
I did not know the varied ways of using Alexa, though I did look at the stats once in a while. The sixth point "See the queries used by people to find your site." gives me an idea and I am so excited.
I can use this to spy on my competitors keywords for free. I am heading over to check mine.
What exactly are you looking for when you are monitoring the Alexa for your website(s)? What is a good sign and which is considered bad? Would like to know...