Businesses can learn a lot by watching their competition, no matter how successful they are. When you are building brand awareness, driving referral traffic, and turning prospects into customers, your competition can always teach you something about referral sources you’ve overlooked, linking opportunities you’ve missed, or even the types of social content that drives the best traffic for your site.
To discover these insights, you need to know how to find your competitors’ website traffic. Fortunately, much of this data is available online, and your business can access and analyze it by using a number of different website traffic tools. Here are five proven tools that can help you discover this data and use it to generate strategy improvements of your own.
1. Google Keyword Planner
Part of the Google Ads platform, Google Keyword Planner is primarily designed to offer traffic data for your own website, but you can also use it to find competitor data. You can find keyword data across both paid and organic campaigns, and it lets you analyze your website performance alongside the performance of your competitors, making it easy to identify trends and insights that might benefit your website strategy.
The tool may have some limitations in generating deeper insights on your competitors, but since it’s available for free, it’s hard to ignore — especially for organizations working with a tight budget.
2. Alexa
Alexa has a longstanding reputation for its website rankings, and it provides some deeper insights into traffic demographics that can tell you a lot about the audience your competitors are serving. In addition to standardized Alexa rankings, the tool also offers basic data such as bounce rates, page views, time on site, and even demographics such as gender makeup and the location of website traffic. The basic insights package starts at $79/month.
3. SEMRush
Unlike the first two tools mentioned, SEMRush is designed specifically for evaluating your competition. The free version of this tool lets you analyze competitor sites to get information on keywords, traffic, page rank, social referrals, brand mentions, backlinks and a range of other data points. The pro version of this tool starts at $99/month.
4. Quantcast
This tool uses a suite of artificial-intelligence solutions to generate data including visitor traffic, demographics, and other data points to shine a light on your competitors’ marketing success. The platform also integrates with digital advertising solutions to help you translate this data into better-performing campaigns. Quantcast offers a version of its services for free, but if you’re targeting global competition, check with the company before buying: Some of its data may be restricted to U.S. traffic.
5. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb offers a wide range of data on your competitors’ website traffic, including referrals from different online sources, global- and country-specific ranks, and trendlines illustrating website traffic over time. It also offers a neat tool if you’re still identifying competitors: The platform will suggest other relevant brands. The tool offers a basic plan for free — otherwise, plans and pricing are custom-built for every client.
Borrow ways to boost your own traffic
Once you know how to find your competitors’ website traffic, you can use this information to improve your own website strategy. As you seek new ideas on how to reach an audience, take note of what your competitors are doing right, and consider whether a similar approach would benefit your company. Whether it’s tapping new traffic referral sources or targeting overlooked search terms, competitor analysis is essential to optimizing your strategy and increasing engagement with your target audience.
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