The popular website traffic monitoring tool, Alexa offers valuable input to support your internet marketing efforts. It allows you to compare your website traffic to that of your closest competitors so that you can adjust your internet marketing strategy accordingly. Using Alexa is a good option to assess visitor metrics and to optimize your website. Here are some of the pros and cons of Alexa, as discussed on a blog, that you should know about.
Alexa is a good tool that can be used to compare your website with up to 5 competitor websites in one shot. They have a huge index and you can get data for almost any site that you would like to benchmark vs your website. You can compare websites within a specific industry or even those from completely different industries. Most importantly, it is a free tool and the data is visible to everyone.
The data presented by Alexa, such as information about site visitors by demographics, especially country, is usually accurate for websites with good traffic. However, one of the shortcomings of Alexa is that it is not very useful as far as smaller websites are concerned. If your site is ranked outside the top 100,000 in terms of traffic, you cannot rely on Alexa’s traffic stats.
The bottom-line is that while Alexa is a good tool to get a general idea of where you stand against your competitors, you should not be using that data to draw definitive conclusions, especially if your site does not yet get a lot of traffic.
Alexa lost favor with the SEO industry for a while due to the inaccuracy of its information. Like most free tools on the web, take everything with a grain of salt and view the information as a comparable estimate for your specific industry.