How To Get Competitor Web Traffic Estimates For Free

Tracking your site's traffic has become so much easier with applications like Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica and Oribi, to name a few. These page view tools allow you to track your website traffic, which channels visitors use to find you and what they do on your website. Many site owners and digital marketers tend to look inward and focus only on the trends they see on their site, which can be used to craft false narratives and drive poor decisions making.

To get a bigger picture of what is going on your niche, you need to look at what websites competing for the same traffic are doing. Tracking your competitors not only allows you to put into play strategies to compete with their efforts. But it also gives you a macro view of where traffic is going, what users are doing and looking for and what preferences they have when searching in your niche.

Getting competitor information and tracking new competitors is essential for any business looking to expand their reach and grab more of the addressable market. Still, sourcing this information isn't a simple task and also requires assumptions to be used based on these sampled figures.

If you're looking for ways to source traffic stats from your competitors, then here are a few tools you may want to consider using.

1. Alexa

Alexa site info is an application powered by Amazon and their cloud service of data analytics tools. Alexa site info provides you with free stats on your competitors such as a 90-day chart of traffic trends. Alexa also provides you with engagement metrics such as average page views, time on site and bounce rate. It will also show you the geolocation of visitors and an overall global ranking.

The tool does not provide you with any traffic stats but rather a measurement of your site's engagement and comparing that with others and then assigning it—the global ranking as well as a localised ranking.

Check out Alexa

2. SEMrush

SEM Rush is also an SEO and PPC analysis tool and provides you with rather deep diving reports for free regarding organic search traffic. As with SE Ranking, if your competitor is strong in other channels such as an app, email, CRM or social media, you'll miss out on that part of the picture but will get a fair reflection of their search engine presence.

SEM Rush will provide you with organic and paid search traffic going back as far as two years and while you may not get absolute numbers, but groupings, you can get a sense of the overall trend of your competitor's site.

Check out SEM Rush

3. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is mainly a PPC and SEO tool, but it does provide pretty handy data for free. All you have to do is visit the site and pop in your competitor's domain, and you'll receive a break down of the traffic stats of the current month. The tool will provide you with a total traffic estimate, for paid search and organic search so if your competitor is strong on social media or email; you will not be able to get that kind of data.

SE ranking also breaks down the traffic estimates, by the various regions so you can view which countries bring in the most traffic based on an organic and paid search split.

Check out SE Ranking

4. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb provides by far, the most complete traffic estimates of any free tool available today and this includes traffic distributions. Its estimates are not only closer than most tools, but it provides you with a break down of traffic sources such as direct, referral, organic search, paid search, social, email and display.

It not only provides you with traffic numbers but average page views, bounce rate and average time on site which can all be used to benchmark against your site. You'll also get a global, local and category ranking of how popular your site is that can also help gauge where you stand versus your competitors.

Check out SimiliarWeb

Keeping track of the pack

Remember, these tools don't provide absolute traffic stats but use various methods of sampling traffic from sites. If you want to get a more accurate measure, what you can do is test your site and compare the figures these tools provide for your site. Then compare these tools to your actual traffic stats and work out the standard deviation between the numbers.

Then you can plugin int hat standard deviation to your competitor's data and get a reading on where their traffic is in comparison to your data.

Now that you have a way to secure traffic stats of your competitors and benchmark them against your site, you can use this to figure out where you lack against your competitors and where you should focus if you want to make up ground on them.

Tell us your traffic story

Have you been frustrated with your competitors? How have you been keeping track of them? Let us know in the comments section down below.

Contact us

If you would like us to improve the analytics or want us to create a marketing strategy for your site or want to know more about digital marketing for your business, then don’t be shy we’re happy to assist. Simply contact us

Are you looking to promote your business?

South African Business owners can create your free business listing on nichemarket. The more information you provide about your business, the easier it will be for your customers to find you online. Registering with nichemarket is easy; all you will need to do is head over to our sign up form and follow the instructions.

If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile 
• How to create a nichemarket business listing 

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on traffic stats.

• Why Your Clicks & Traffic Will Continue To Decline in 2019
• What Does Your Direct Traffic Actually Consist of
• How To Fix googleads-doubleclick.net Referral Traffic
• Reasons Why You Would Track Your Initial Traffic Source

Tags: Marketing, websites