How do you measure how successful your site is?
… or Arbu designs the most visited websites in Argyll!
So you’re about to commission a website, you’ve got a competitive tender going and you need some sort of objective criteria to measure the expertise of the companies and individuals quoting. Difficult for SMEs who are focussed on business and products, near impossible for associations and organisations without in-house web expertise. There is an answer though.
Alexa.com ranks websites worldwide on how much traffic they get and how long they retain visitors for. The stats look like gobbledegook at first, but once you see the rankings it becomes much easier. I now have the Alexa Firefox plugin which allows me to see the rank of sites as I visit them. The ongoing battle for number one spot is fascinating, but what’s more useful is seeing how successful Arbu’s site designs are in terms of the traffic they pull in.
As you’ll have gathered from this blog, we work on ForArgyll.com, the region’s premier news service, and top website, and it is this site which has really made us pay attention to Alexa’s very useful stats. Here’s how things looked the week beginning March 2009 with a random selection of other websites from across Cowal and Argyll (Arbu’s websites are marked in bold):
- forargyll.com’s rank this week is 346,703
- Lochfyne.com has a traffic rank of: 357,874
- Argyll-bute.gov.uk has a traffic rank of: 546,984
- Arbu.biz’s rank this week is 596,532
- Dunans.org’s rank this week is 1,101,285
- Colglen.org’s rank this week is 2,204,430
- Watermill-glendaruel.com has a traffic rank of: 3,545,293
- TheWalkingTheatreCompany.com’s rank is 4,469,314
- Cowal-dunoon.com has a traffic rank of: 5,008,692
- Bumbleargyll.com has a traffic rank of: 5,571,596
- Philippaelliott.com has a traffic rank of: 5,694,181
- Katesbigchair.com has a traffic rank of: 6,149,160
- Dunoon-observer.co.uk has a traffic rank of: 7,737,864
- Argyllpublishing.com has a traffic rank of: 10,479,940
- Cowalopenstudios.co.uk has a traffic rank of: 17,706,517
- Aboutargyll.co.uk has a traffic rank of: 18,078,371
- Glendaruelcaravanpark.com has a traffic rank of: 22,858,198
- Cowalfest.org does not register
This is NOT a definitive list of websites across Argyll, but it does show how the hierarchy of business turnover or local visibility is completely undermined by the traffic visiting these webpages. For example, there is no way in a sensible world that the ColGlen website should be over three million ranks higher than the main site for the Dunoon and Cowal Marketing Group, but it is. Similarly, and probably more incredibly, a small (but luxurious) B&B run by Michael and Sandra Webster is 15 million places higher than their local friendly-neighbourhood Caravan park.
How do these things happen? Well, aside from saying that Arbu knows what it is doing in terms of attracting traffic, it is probably sufficient to say that a lovely design isn’t as important as knowing how the web works.
So, if you are thinking of commissioning a website in the near future and you want a directly comparable way of measuring how your tenderers’ previous commissions stack up, or if you would like to check these ranking out for yourself, click here
A final thought: if you have a web designer, and you’re wanting a quick thumbnail of how they’re doing in terms of traffic, put their website into Alexa.com – you may be surprised!
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March 11th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
from Ron Simon, Argyll & Bute Councillor: “You are doing a great service to the area, you should be aware that this is valued greatly my end.”
March 13th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
[...] How do you measure how successful your site is? [...]