Should educators care about the ranking that Alexa, an Amazon company, assigns them?
I feel like you already know the answer to this, yes. Yes, you should care.
Especially educators who want to promote the materials or services they sell on their websites.

Who is this Alexa?

Available since mid-2015, Alexa is the virtual (think voice) assistant created by Amazon. Perhaps you know her friends/frienemies Siri and Cortana? Don’t even get us started on how Google’s assistant doesn’t even have a name, but sadly always responds when someone says, “Hey.”

You voice search via the Alexa browser and it uses its own proprietary search algorithm to find items on the Internet and read them, or show in the case of the latest device “Echo Show.” To be “found” by Alexa will be increasingly important as these devices spread through homes and schools:


Smart Speaker Market

Currently, these are direct competitors to both Google Home and Apple HomePod. Google Home has a more open stance which includes many third-party devices – think Android and how they are open to a wider variety of apps. As far as the browser? Google has been pretty well dissected for SEO growth. Apple HomePod is a little more proprietarily, as Apple often is, and limits those activities to things within the Apple environment. As far as searching, we already know about the Safari browser, which is what HomePod uses to search.
Here’s a nice side-by-side of these big three smart speakers.

How to Be Found by Alexa

Alexa can start to find your webpage, and you can start to track where in the Alexa pecking order you fall, by adding the Alexa toolbar to your current browser.

Step One: Install the Alexa toolbar.

Step Two: Inspect your site rankings (both internationally and nationally) and basic analytics. You can pay for deeper analytics.
Step 2.5: Consider ways to improve your ranking. (Hint: There are facebook groups for this)

Step Three: Use Alexa to search for keywords you expect to bring up your products/services. If your results are not returned, check out your competition and study them for ways to improve!

Educators Alexa Ranking

What do you Think?

Some are even asking Should Alexa be in Schools? I’d welcome your thoughts on that.

Best of luck! If you are selling educational resources you need to be present on Alexa to win.
Please share your success stories, we would all love to learn from you!