5 Ways to Measure the Popularity of Your Website

Ever wonder how you stack up and compare to the billions of websites in cyberspace? Measuring your site’s popularity is not just a pursuit in vanity but is an excellent way to understand what measures you need to take to improve your site. Everyone in your web team benefits from knowing your site’s popularity metrics from your site’s webmasters to designers to marketers to the site’s owner/stakeholders.

• Business owners of-course have the most to lose if their site is not popular in terms of sales, profits, dollars and reaching future prospects. If you are involved in selling anything online, the popularity of your site will determine your earnings. Researching your site’s popularity will give you a better feel on where you can focus your budget to obtain better future metrics.
• If you are a webmaster, your site’s popularity metrics will tell you what you need to do to improve speed, metadata, make changes in code and site optimization.
• The site’s content team needs to know how popular the site is so that they can adjust their content, make it more appealing to certain types of visitors and apply strategies to increase and further engage their audience.

#1. Alexa.com

Your Alexa ranking is a pretty good indicator of the popularity of your site. I always like to look at the global Alexa rank of a site, especially before I do business with them. Advertisers tend to look at these stats. If you are into any type of affiliate marketing you already know the importance of Alexa ranking as many affiliate marketers will do business with your blog based on your Alexa rank. Alexa will also give you other important statistics such as your rank in a particular country, traffic stats and back links info.

Formerly, it was essential to have an Alexa toolbar installed so that Alexa could track the number of visitors but in 2008, Alexa went through a major update and they claim that they no longer need to see an Alexa toolbar installed to calculate your global rank.

Alexa provides traffic data, global rankings and other information on thousands of websites, and claims that 6 million people visit its website monthly.

Alexa is good as a research tool as it also compares competitor sites and shows you:

• How popular the site is compared to yours, including Reach, Pageviews and more.
• Search Analytics that indicate which terms your competition is using to get traffic.
• Audience data such as what kind of visitors your competition is attracting.
• Clickstream data that indicate where your competition is getting traffic from affiliate programs and partners.

Alexa ranking for WordPress.com, the popular blogging platform

#2. Seo mozRank

mozRank is measured on a scale of 1 to 10 and is SEOmoz’s 10-point measure of link authority and popularity. It’s similar to the old Google Page Rank and is logarithmic. That means it’s ten times as hard to move from a 3 to a 4 as it is to move from a 2 to a 3. Google Page Rank is no longer an accurate measure. It’s updated very infrequently and new sites are not given an API Soap key that is used by Google to effectively determine Page Rank.

Each link back counts as a vote for your site and search engines often rank pages with higher global link authority ahead of pages with lower authority. Measures like mozRank are global and static, hence, this ranking power applies to a broad range of search queries, rather than pages optimized specifically for a particular keyword.

It’s a good idea to have the MozBar installed as you will see your rank and also immediately know the rank of any site you visit. OpenSiteExplorer, another popular tool by Seomoz also gives you your mozRank(mR) along with other factors such as page authority(PA) and domain authority(DA).

#3. Marketing Grader tool by Hubspot

Are you doing enough to bring visitors to your website and fill the top of your sales and marketing funnel? How do you do when it comes to converting traffic into leads and leads into customers? Do you know what marketing activities are working?

I like Hubspot’s Marketing Grader tool because it points out exactly my areas of improvement based on reviewing over 30 factors and then providing me with an overall marketing grade on a 0-100 scale.

The Marketing Grader tool studies over 30 different parameters including popularity metrics such as:

• Are your marketing efforts generating sales and leads?
• Is your blog driving results that justify the time investment or are you wasting time doing the wrong things?
• Your mozRank and your Klout score
• Your analytics and monthly web traffic
• How effectively are you using social media to drive traffic to your website?
• What are the strong points and suggestions for improvement in your marketing strategy?

Maketing Grader report for Web Content Blog showing me different areas for improvement

#4. Analytics

Analytics software such as Google Analytics, Omniture analyse different metrics such as:

• Number of page views, visitors, pages per visit, new visitors vs. returning visitors
• Most popular posts based on number of page views
• Most shares on social media
• Other metrics such as demographics – visitors by geographic location, language spoken etc.
• Metrics that measure engagement such as time on site and bounce rate.

#5. Social Media

In the current climate, your website’s popularity is also gauged by the number of times your site’s content is shared on social media. Your site is naturally more popular the more times it is shared on social media. Each share, like, tweet, reddit is counted by search engines as a vote for your site’s content and social shares are an important way for search engines to determine the popularity of your website.

Sites such as Topsy do a good job of showing which post/page of your website content got the most shares. I also like url shorteners such as bit.ly that tell you how many times a piece of content was shared and by whom. I also like tweetmeme which shows you the hottest links on Twitter. Social Overview and Social Sources section of your Google Analytics are also pretty strong indicators of your site and content’s popularity. Of-course you can also get various paid solutions such as Radian6 to monitor social media analytics.

If your website has a blog, there are certain other indicators such as your site’s RSS feed subscriptions and number of email subscribers that that give you an idea on your blog’s popularity. Even though fewer people subscribe to RSS feeds and RSS feeds are mainly subscribed to by readers who are already technically savvy, you could get some idea by checking your Feedburner stats or by checking your RSS feed stats through Google Reader. The number of email subscribers and also the type (profession etc.) of email subscribers could give you an indication of which niche market your blog is best aimed at.

How about you? Which tools do you use to measure the popularity of your website and also why do you measure popularity? to gain more business? write better content? Please share in the comments below. Thanks.

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