Posted by randfish

SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclick and Google Trends for Websites. These sites report massively lower and wrongly trending data - and SEOmoz isn't alone in experiencing this frustration. We're among dozens of sites I've talked to who've gotten emails and comments lamenting our poor growth or crummy year thanks to these horrifically inaccurate services.

Here's a screenshot of our actual traffic from Google Analytics:

Now let's look at the comparison to each of those services:

Above is Alexa's estimate of SEOmoz's web traffic for the past few months. It's hard to tell how accurate they are, because they're not showing any exact numbers, only "percent" of "reach." They do correctly note that traffic was down in December (the last two weeks of the year were very slow for us due to the holidays, which is a good thing - even SEOs deserve a break)