Find out how to examine the web site visitors for every web site
Since website traffic is the number of people visiting your website, it forms the foundation of your website. Without traffic, nobody reads, clicks, reports or buys.
Sure, you can check your traffic on a daily basis, but do you know what to look for? Or how can you check your competitors' website traffic?
Let's examine why and how to monitor and improve your traffic, as well as how to review website traffic from some of the websites that you are competing with in search results.
Why should you monitor website traffic?
You can't improve what you don't measure.
Whether you're looking to generate more sales, get more email signups, or increase your advertising revenue, the first thing you need to know is where you are.
That means diving into your website stats to find out where your traffic is coming from and how it is in touch with your website (as well as with competitors).
How do you check website traffic for your website?
How to analyze your website traffic
There is only one standard tool to consider when analyzing your website traffic: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is directly connected to your website and shows you exactly how many visitors your website is receiving, where they are coming from and how they are interacting with your content.
But what data should you pay attention to?
Website traffic statistics to consider
- Unique visitors: People who have visited your website at least once within the selected date range
- Pageviews: The number of pages that will appear on your website within a selected date range
- Organic search traffic: A number of people who visited your website using a search on Google or another search engine
- Other traffic channels: How many visitors your website receives from other channels like Facebook and Youtube as well as from referral traffic (visitors who click on a link to your website from another website)
While there are many more statistics that Google Analytics collects, these are the most important ones to consider when analyzing your website's traffic.
However, things are not that simple when you want to check your competitors' website traffic.
Analysis of the website traffic of the competitors
Typically, when you're reviewing website traffic from websites that don't belong to you, you want to know more than the number of visitors they are receiving. Some great reasons to analyze your competitors' traffic are:
Unfortunately, you can't just log into Google Analytics to get this data. So where can you get it instead?
Top tools for checking website traffic
You can check website traffic with a variety of paid and free tools. The ones listed below have a solid reputation and are well worth checking out.
Ubersuggest
Our Ubersuggest tool offers competitive pricing and a unique combination of SEO courses, coaching and research tools, as well as traffic estimates and keyword information.
Curious? Open a free account with your Google login to check it out.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular and comprehensive SEO audit tools out there. The organic search overview report gives a good look at the type of organic traffic a website is receiving and what keywords are driving the traffic. You can use this data to search for the keywords that are bringing in your competitive traffic.
Ahrefs only gives you an estimate of a site's organic traffic. It won't tell you anything about the traffic from sources like social media.
A test conducted by Ahrefs found that the tool underestimated unique organic visitors for 74.14% of the websites they examined.
Ahrefs has a seven-day trial. After that, you need to choose one of the paid plans.
SEMrush
Like Ahrefs, SEMrush is a complete SEO audit tool with a wide variety of features. One of them is the traffic analysis report, which shares data like an estimated number of unique visitors, traffic sources, top pages and more.
SEMrush also shows you which keywords your competitors are ranking for. Based on this and the search volume of the keyword, you can estimate how much traffic each keyword will bring to your competitors.
SEMrush has a free version that includes all of a website's organic traffic and top five top performing keywords. If you want more information, you need a premium subscription.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides an overview of the total traffic of a website, the main traffic sources and the countries of origin of the country. It is important to note, however, that SimilarWeb has a limited pool of data and often does not return results for small or recently launched websites.
In a test by ScreamingFrog, SimilarWeb turned out to be the most accurate website traffic checker compared to Ahrefs and SEMrush and overestimated organic traffic by only 1%. However, Ahrefs provided more accurate results for high traffic websites.
SimilarWeb has a free version that allows you to estimate the monthly visits to a website and five keywords it is ranked for. If you also want to get information on unique visitors and other keywords, you have to pay for the premium version.
Serpstat
The free version of Serpstat gives you an estimate of a website's total traffic, its top ten keywords, and its top ten top performing pages. It also gives you an idea of a website's traffic development over time. For more detailed data, you'll need a paid plan.
SE ranking
The SE ranking is a great way to check a website's organic traffic and the keywords it is ranked for. There are different pricing plans depending on how many features you need, how often you want your rankings to be updated, and how long you are ready to sign up. There is also a 14-day free trial if you want to take a test run.
Quantcast
Quantcast doesn't look like a website traffic checker at first as it focuses on data for publishers and marketers looking to grow their audience. However, when a company signs up for Quantcast, some of their data becomes publicly available.
The downside is that you can only look up websites that use Quantcast. While over 100 million websites do, chances are your competitors don't.
Quantcast has a limited free version that is mainly aimed at getting data about your website. For further statistics you need a paid edition.
Alexa
Alexa has both a free and a paid version. The free version is a bit limited and only gives you a website's Alexa rank based on Alexa rank, but not actual traffic. To get an estimate of this, you'll need to sign up for the premium plan (or the 30-day trial).
It is also good to know that Alexa only has data on websites that have been visited by millions of users in its data field, as well as some direct sources. You may not find your competitors there.
While using any of these tools is the easiest way to check website traffic for your competitors, there are other methods you can use. They require a little more work, but can give more accurate results.
Check website traffic without tools
Here are some ways to check website traffic without using free or paid tools like the ones above.
Find a Advertise With Us page
If your competitors are offering advertising or other collaboration opportunities, they likely have an advertising page on their websites. In that case, they might even list their traffic right there for you to see.
Enter this search term into Google to quickly find out if a website has an advertising page:
site: domain advertise with us
Do not use "" to indicate that you want an exact match for Advertise with Us, as they may be using a different name. With this search, however, the advertising page should appear at the top of the search results – if available.
When checking website traffic this way, it is a good idea to pay attention to when the advertising page was last updated. If an advertising page has not been updated for six months or more, you can assume that the information there is incorrect.
Look for a media kit
A media kit or press kit usually contains not only traffic statistics, but also information about who the website is targeting and where the website was featured.
While some companies have their media kit on their websites, they often link to a PDF. Still, you should find out if your competitor has one by looking for:
Site: Domain Media Kit
Other terms you can use are "press kit", "press kit" and "media pack".
As with getting website stats from advertising pages, it is important to check when a media kit was last updated so that you don't run into outdated numbers.
Conclusion
There are several methods of checking competitor website traffic. You can use a tool, dig something, or ask them directly. While using tools will often produce the most efficient results, it is important to know that all traffic statistics are estimated.
If you want to check website traffic for your website, you need to install and use Google Analytics. It tells you exactly how much traffic you are getting from which sources, making it easier for you to analyze what to work on next.
What's your favorite way to check your competitor's traffic? Go ahead and tell us in the comments.