Search Analytics with Alexa

When we search for something on the internet, either through a search engine like Google or a site's dedicated search, we're showing our intent. Our exact intent isn't always obvious, a search for "Italian coffee maker" could indicate we want to purchase an stove top espresso maker, or that we're looking for instructions on how to brew Italian style coffee, or even trying to find an Italian coffee shop. Most modern search engines, however, do a fairly good job of guessing what we might be interested in and showing us results we're interested in. It is this intent that makes search engines so important.

If you own a website, you of course want your site to be considered among the most relevant for searches that apply to your site. But what are the best searches to optimize for? It's easy to generate a short list of terms that seem important, but are people really searching for those terms? Your site analytics will tell you which terms are sending traffic your way via various search engines, but which terms are you missing? Also, wouldn't it be great to know which terms are sending traffic to your competitors, and how important they are?

This is where Alexa Search Analytics comes in.


There are three pieces of data we present: Search Traffic, Top Keywords from Search Traffic, and Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic.

Search Traffic is an estimate of the percentage of visits to the site that come from search engines. The goal of most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) initiatives is to increase the percentage of quality traffic to a site coming from search engines, and Search Traffic indicates how well this is working. In the example to the right, the numbers are steady at slightly under 1 in 3 visits coming from search engines. What does this graph say about your competitors? Are the numbers climbing, indicating that they recently launched a successful SEO initiative? How do their SEO efforts compare to yours?


Next are the Top Keywords from Search Traffic. These are the keywords and keyword phrases driving traffic the most traffic to the site. In the example, the top 10 keyword phrases account for less than 3.5% of the total search engine traffic, meaning that this site is optimized for a wide range of phrases. This is good, because the more phases search engines consider you relevant to, the more potential traffic you can drive to your site. What does your site analytics say about your keywords? What do we say about your competitors? Do they have a wider variety of terms leading to their site? If so, you might start thinking about ways to improve your SEO.


Lastly are the Search Terms with a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic. These are the important terms, because they're there keyword terms and phrases that are driving significant amounts of traffic to the site you are analyzing. The relative importance of the phrases to the site is indicated by the green bar. In the example to the right, which has been truncated for space, we again see a wide variety of terms. These are often different from the Top Keywords, because again this list takes into account how popular the term itself is. You can, however, and should ask similar questions. What does this list say about your competitor's SEO? Is it dominated by a few words, or is there a broad range? How do you compare? Can you identify phrases that offer you the best opportunities?

Thoughts? Then please leave a comment below! Note, however, that all comments are moderated, and comments containing URLs will be deleted. You can also reach us through twitter, either @AlexaInternet or me personally @wcoburn. And, as always, you can leave us a message in the Alexa Forums. I am very interested to hear what you have to say about this.

Get a Reviews Widget for your site!

Since we reintroduced website reviews on Alexa, we have received a number of requests from webmasters for help getting their site reviewed. Well, one of the easiest ways to get visitors to review your site is to politely ask them to. If a visitor loves your site and wants to help promote it, it should be easy. But we wanted to make it even easier, so you can now download one of our new Alexa Reviews Widget and place it on your site.



If you are familiar with the Alexa Site Widgets, the Review Widget is similar. All you need to do is go to the For Site Owners area on Alexa.com, where you will see the full selection of widgets we have to offer, and select Get Reviews Widgets. We offer two styles of Reviews Widget, each in three sizes. Choose the one you want, enter in the domain of your website, and we'll generate a short snippet of HTML code that is ready to cut and paste into place. It's simple and easy, so what are you waiting for? Install an Alexa Reviews Widget on your site today.

2009 Year in Review

For those of you using the Gregorian calendar, Happy New Year! It has been an amazing year for us here at Alexa, one that has brought with it a large number of improvements. I thought I would take some time to cover some of the more exciting ones, in no particular order.

A New Website

Probably the biggest and most visible change was the new Alexa website. Our old website was fine, of course, but the time had come for an updated look. The new website has also allowed us a lot more flexibility, too, and has made it easier to add new things. Among the additions are metrics about who's visiting a site, how they got there, where they go next, and what they're doing on the web right now. With our new site we also embraced the social web, making it easier for you to share information with your friends through buttons that allow you to post a page to your Facebook wall or Tweet about it.

A Toolbar for Firefox

In late November, we unveiled the new Alexa Toolbar for Firefox. We've had Sparky, a lightweight Alexa add-on for Firefox for some time now, but not a true toolbar like the one we offer for Internet Explorer. That's changed. Also, in addition to our standard toolbar features, we added two new, optional social networking buttons for Firefox users. Now you can use the Toolbar to post updates to Facebook and Tweet without ever leaving the page you are on. You can also easily keep track of what your friends or people you follow are saying, and be part of the conversation while you browse. And these are just the start, we have some big plans for 2010.

TIP: In the toolbar options menu you can choose to have the Alexa Toolbar appear as either a toolbar or sit in the status bar like Sparky does.

Reviews

While not completely new, 2009 saw the return of Alexa's website reviews. Now you can quickly and easily see what others are saying about the sites you're interested in, and you can write a review of your own. We also now rank reviewers based on how useful others think their reviews are, and you can view reviews by reviewer.

Find Sites About

We released a new type of search engine, one designed to help you find websites about a topic, as opposed to countless webpages about it. Often what you want is a webpage on a topic, and there are other search engines that are fantastic for that. What they're not so good at is recommending a websites about topics of interest to you, which is what the Alexa search is about.

New Traffic Stats

In 2009 we added three new metrics to our Traffic Stats: Bounce %, Time on Site, and Search %. These were intended to supplement our existing traffic numbers, the Alexa Traffic Rank, Reach, and Pageviews, and lead to a better understanding of a site's traffic. The Bounce % is an estimate of the percentage of visits to the site that result in a single pageview. The Time on Site is an estimate of the average amount of time for each visit to the site. The Search % is an estimate of the percentage of visits that came from search engines. The first two metrics, Bounce % and Time on Site, provide incites into how engaged the visitors to a given site are, while the Search % can tell you about the site's SEO.

Keywords

There's no denying the importance of search engines on the web, and if you are a business on the web then understanding how they drive traffic to your competitors can potentially give you an edge. So Alexa now provides you with estimates of the top 10 keywords driving traffic to a site, along with the top 30 high volume keywords.

Clickstream

Another competitive tool is the Clickstream, or Upstream/Downstream sites. These are lists of where visitors were directly before the came to a site, and then where they went when they left. If you are a business, it's a quick and easy way to see how well you are serving your customers. Are they leaving your website happy? Or are they moving on to a competitors site?

Demographics

Knowing how many people are visiting a site, how they're getting there, and where they're going next is important, but so is having an idea of who they are. So in 2009 we started making our Demographics data available. We break a site's audience up by age, gender, education location, and whether or not there are children in the household, and display the popularity of the site relative to the internet population as a whole.

Hot Pages/Hot Topics

Last, but not least, we added Hot Pages and Hot Topics. Now you can see what people have been searching for and what pages they've been visiting over the past hour, updated every five minutes. Personally I find it incredibly addictive, especially since they're also available directly from the Alexa Toolbar.

Whew, that's a lot of new stuff! Rest assured, though, we're not going to stop improving our site any time soon. I'm really excited about what we have planned for 2010, and I'm sure you will be too. Expect great things.