Alexa.com is a great tool to analyze traffic of your competitors. I use Alexa and Similar Web to get a good overview of a competitors traffic stats. It gives you a good idea of total web traffic, keywords used, demographics of visitors etc.

Your ranking may have tanked, or is not climbing, due to the page size and loading time of your homepage.

One thing I noticed with Mantality’s own Alexa ranking is that the rank plummeted (ie 800 points out of the top 1000 for South Africa) after a bit of tweaking, and a few more elements were added to the homepage which made the page load time increase. Alexa then labeled the site as “Very slow” and the rankings tanked. Google also notes the load time and page size of your website and it will affect SEO efforts and SERP rankings, so it’s worth tweaking it to get a good balance of valuable elements on your homepage versus quick loading times. The elements I added do add value to conversions overall so are worth keeping, even if it means a poor Alexa ranking.

Traffic has remained at the same steady growth on Mantality, so the rank dive is definitely as a result of the increased page load time. I’m quite sure that their pricey site audit would screech at me for this too.

So homepage and your website’s loading time is something to consider if a higher Alexa rank is important to you. Try reducing your homepage load time to < 4 secs. You can test this out via Pingdom