In today’s internet, it’s more competitive than ever to get the attention of potential customers. Whether you operate an e-commerce store, a service-based business, or a blog your website traffic is vital to your success. Competitor analysis is one of the best ways to increase your site traffic and beat competitors. Knowing where your competitors get their traffic from, what strategies they are using and how well they are performing allows you to get the edge you need to beat them in search rankings and customer acquisition.
The SimilarWeb’s website traffic checker is one of the most effective tools that facilitate this process. A competitor traffic checker gives insights into a competitor’s traffic sources and audience demographics, as well as the competition’s best-performing content, so you can see what is working for them and do the same or better. You can utilize SimilarWeb to dig deep into your competitor’s traffic data, analyze trends, and leverage that information to your advantage.
In this article, we will explore what to look for when using website traffic checkers for competitor analysis and how that can put you ahead of your competitors.
Why is Competitor Analysis Important?
Knowing who your competitors are is more than just competitor analysis but it’s also about knowing what makes them successful and where they are weak. By leveraging competitor insights, you can:
Identify Traffic Sources: You can find out where your competitors are getting their traffic from — whether it’s organic search, paid advertising, social media or referral links (See the example of SimilarWeb’s Traffic Source section). That way you can refine your marketing strategy based on traffic sources.
Spot Content Opportunities: You can discover gaps in your own content strategy by analyzing what content of your competitors’ is driving the most traffic, then create high quality content that fills those gaps.
Benchmark Performance: Benchmarking your website’s performance against your competitors via competitor analysis. You can see how much traffic their site is getting and set realistic goals for your site to close the gap (or exceed them).
Uncover Backlink Strategies: With it, you can keep tabs on where your competitors are getting backlinks from and try to bag links from same sources as to increase your domain authority and rankings.
What is the use of a Website Traffic Checker for Competitor Analysis?
If you want to find some data to support your competitor analysis efforts, you can use a website traffic checker, like SimilarWeb. Here’s how you can use it to gain insights and create a winning strategy:
1. Analyze Traffic Sources
There is no more important bit of information that you can get about a competitor from a website traffic checker than the breakdown of where their traffic is sourced from. Traffic sources typically include:
Direct Traffic: Users who don’t remember to use the domain to access the website. Strong brand awareness is in high direct traffic.
Referral Traffic: From links on other websites, visitors. Now analyze the quality of backlinks that are leading to your competitor’s site and then find out if there are any referral opportunities for your own site.
Organic Search: Those who find this site through search engines. If your competitor is good at organic search, you can find the keywords they are ranking for and you can work on an SEO strategy to rank for those keywords.
Social Media: Social media traffic. Also knowing which social platforms generate the most traffic for your competitors can help you know which social media platforms to use.
Paid Search: Traffic driven from paid ads with Google or Bing. This helps you to monitor this and adjust your paid advertising campaigns.
If you figure out where the bulk of your competitor’s traffic is coming from, you are able to give your attention to channels that are providing the most amount of success.
2. Find out Which Content is Top Performing
Content is among the most crucial factors to make organic traffic. For instance, website traffic checkers usually give you a glance at what pages or blog posts are getting the most traffic for your competitors. For example, you might realize that a competitor is getting tons of traffic for a blog post that answers a common question that people in your industry ask.
It also opens the door for you to create more comprehensive or engaging, or more up to date content about the same topic. It is a tactic called the skyscraper technique, where you take existing content to change it into something much more valuable for users. As a result, you have a much better chance of outranking the competition.
3. Compare Audience Demographics
A website traffic checker can tell you about the demographics of your competitors’ audiences, like where they live, what age they are, and what they are interested in. By knowing your competitors’ audiences, you can refine your audience or find new segments in the market.
For instance, if a big part of your competitor’s traffic is coming from a particular country or region you haven’t focused on yet, you can divert your marketing efforts to land this audience. Also, if their audience is younger or older than yours, you may want to alter your target audience’s content or product offering to target different age brackets.
4. Track Keyword Rankings
Organic traffic is a powerful SEO driver. Using website traffic checkers you can find out the top keywords on which your competitors rank. Once you know what’s driving the most traffic to your pages, you can decide to target those same keywords or to explore long tail keyword variations they may not have optimized for.
In addition to targeting the high-traffic keywords, make sure your website has all the necessary on-page SEO factors, for example, the meta descriptions, title tags and optimized images to compete.
5. Monitor Paid Search Campaigns
Another thing many website traffic checkers will give you about your competitor’s paid search campaigns is what keywords they are bidding on and how much traffic they get from paid search. This data is useful if you’re running Google Ads or Bing Ads, because it can help you to optimize your bidding strategy, avoid overspending on highly competitive keywords or find niche keywords that your competitors haven’t targeted yet.