Alexa Toolbar

I kind of hate doing these kinds of reviews. When the tool I’m checking out is so self-explanatory and famous that there’s really no need for the damn review in the first place. Well, I guess the bottom line here is trying to figure out which toolbars are better than others and that kind of opens up the question of metrics. Which metrics really matter? Do you want to be on the lookout for your Alexa rating or should you instead consider your Google Analytics? Well, there’s no clear answer. At this point, I can easily link you to a ton of different reviews, by a ton of reputable companies that are all claiming contradicting results.

On the one hand, you’ve got the people who swear by the validity and importance of Alexa rankings. On the other, you’ll find tons of proof that there’s literally no connection between your Alexa ranking and your actual Google metrics. On paper, Google shouldn’t really care about your Alexa ranking as they’re not affiliated. There should be some natural overlap since everyone wants you to follow the same rules, more or less, but SEO has always been such a convoluted mess. At this point, I kind of feel like we’re throwing darts at a board and drawing baseless conclusions depending on what sticks.

I do have one conclusion at least and you can pretty much take this for gospel: Caring about your rankings and using that information to improve your site can only help you – it can’t hurt you. The question isn’t whether Alexa’s information is helpful, rather, how helpful it actually is. This, I cannot help you answer. But, I can tell you about the Alexa toolbar. That’s what this review is about after all. It’s one of many essential tools that works well both on its own and in combination with other similar tools.

Simple to Integrate and Use

You head on over to the official Alexa toolbar posting under the Google Web Store and click a button. That’s about it. Once you do that, you’ll see a neat little button appear to the right of your address bar. You can press this bad boy at any time to get detailed information on the site you’re currently browsing. There’s a little window that pops up under the button showing you Alexa rankings as well as the site’s most important geographic success. Like, if the site is a smash hit in Japan, you’ll know. It’s just randomly thrown in to give you a better picture of who the site is appealing to.

You can use competitive metrics on your site and your competitors’ to try and drive your business to the edge. There’s a search analytics button, which doesn’t show anything unless you click it, but we’ll get to that in a bit. There’s also a wayback machine button that lets you see previous versions of the site through the official web archive. This site is not affiliated with Amazon’s Alexa; it’s just a neat feature they threw in so that you can reach it faster. It would be dumb if you had to copy and paste the URL for every site. This way, you get a dedicated button.

There’s also a breakdown of the three most popular competitor sites and this is arguably the most useful part of the toolbar that doesn’t necessarily send you away to another destination – you get this information within the toolbar itself. It’s great for long browsing sessions when you’re doing some casual market research.

Part of a Bigger Picture

You’ve probably seen this business model before as all the other big players in the industry are doing it. It’s an extension of the trial versus premium model that’s supposed to entice you into eventually breaking down and getting the full package. The Alexa toolbar is free, for life. You can use it as much as you want with no limitations. I already mentioned that there’s some useful data that appears within the little box in your browser to give you a taste of the expansive SEO database that Amazon have been hard at work scraping.

But, you’ll have to admit that this information is far from sufficient for you to actually build an empire around. At best, it’s just a taste of something greater to come. Well, that’s where the premium model comes in. Alexa might be known for the global website rankings list and more recently as being an annoying little AI companion that lives in your Kindle, but there’s much more to the business model. Alexa is actually an extensive SEO platform that comes with all the bells and whistles we’ve grown accustomed to over the years.

The site runs competitive analysis and wide-scale web scraping to get you all the information you’ll need to push past your competitors. Whether you’re trying to rise to the top of a search engine results page or you’re just trying to increase your traffic, the metrics will be found on Alexa. You just have to enter your website information. Alternatively, you can run similar analyses on your competitors to figure out how they’re so successful.

Used in Tandem

Well, unlike the plugin, the Alexa platform isn’t free. It’s a premium solution similar to that of SEMRush and Ahrefs, to name a couple. I’m not going to get into the details of which is better, because this is primarily a review of the Alexa toolbar. But, I will say that all of these platforms are very similar because they are drawing from the same pool of information – the publically available world wide web. No-one’s got any inside scoop here.

And yes, different SEO analyzing platforms will give you slightly different opinions on certain metrics, but their methodology is the same. They have some subjective touch that alters the weight of certain numbers when they do calculations in the background, but none of that matters to you. You should be looking at the more qualitative data that comes out of these bad boys.

The toolbar is a great way for Amazon to market the Alexa platform, but it’s also an essential tool in and of itself. If you do get an Alexa subscription, you’ll still be using the toolbar because it’s optimized for speed and ease of access. Whenever you land on a competitor’s website, it’s always there hovering over, reminding you to instantly get your hands on the information behind the curtain. How highly are they rated and why? Who are they competing against? What’s their ranking and so on.

It’s Free and Essential

If your browser isn’t covered in ridiculous seemingly pointless plugins, then you’re probably not a good webmaster. Trust me, I should know. When I say that 17 different plugins are all essential, you can be damn sure I mean it. Until someone makes a tool that pulls all of these plugins into one package under one button, you’ll get every single one and you are going to like it. This toolbar, along with the information from Alexa’s database, are all being provided to you for free. Plus, it’s compatible with all proper modern browsers – in other words, it works great in Chrome and I didn’t test any other browsers because you literally don’t need any other browser. Jokes aside, they have the toolbar for Firefox as well. I don’t think there’s an Edge version.

I can’t think of much else to say beyond that it’s free, which I already mentioned. It’s also pretty light and it loads the information on every site instantly, which is impressive when you consider it’s drawing from a gigantic database that contains information on every website across the world wide web. That’s impressive stuff, but I guess being owned by the richest man in the world will do that to your quality of service.

Alexa Vs Alternatives

I kind of touched upon this earlier and I guess I’ll put it this way – it doesn’t matter which toolbar or platform you’re listening to until their advice actually clashes. You’ll find they don’t clash by a lot and it doesn’t happen often. One service might say that you have three main competitors, but another will perhaps swap one out for another for whatever reason. Their subjective design decisions impact the kinds of breakdowns you get on the statistical data.

Don’t sweat it too hard. At the end of the day, SEO is as much an art as it is a science. As long as you’re moving in the right direction and your rankings are going up, you’re doing a good job. So grab yourself this handy dandy free toolbar and move forward on the path to becoming a true porn webmaster legend.