There are many different ways to analyze a website's traffic. We’ll look at each one in this step-by-step guide.
We all know it’s easy to see how much traffic your own website gets with Google Analytics:
But, what about your competition?
You won’t have access to their Google Analytics account. So how do you know how much traffic they get? And, more importantly, where they get it from?
- Which channels drive the most web traffic?
- Which subdomains or subfolders get the most visits?
- Which pages/posts pull in the most organic traffic?
- Which individual keywords generate the most organic search traffic?
- How does this traffic engage with a website?
There are many layers to the “traffic onion”. And the deeper you go, the more valuable the insights become.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to check the traffic data of any website.
And then, we’ll go deeper, layer by layer, as we peel back the onion to find out exactly which geographies, channels, directories, pages, and individual keywords - organic and paid - are driving the most valuable traffic to the website.
We'll even look at device break down – mobile vs desktop – and get a look at how this traffic interacts with a website's content by checking estimated bounce rates, average visit duration and other engagement metrics.
You’ll have an all-access backstage pass to your competitor’s traffic strategy, and emerge with a proven traffic road map for your own business and/or clients.
Editor's note: You’ll need the following tools to perform this website traffic analysis:
- SEMrush + Traffic Analytics (free 14-day trial) for traffic and engagement insights across all channels.
- Free traffic analysis template (below).
Ready to go? Sweet. Let’s get started!
Disclaimer: This article does contain affiliate links. If you purchase a tool through one of my links I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for the support.
You can jump to specific sections using the links below:
Overview: How to Check ANY Website's Traffic (Top-Down Analysis)
Step #1: Global Traffic Analysis
Step #2: Organic Traffic Analysis
Step #3: Paid Traffic Analysis
Four Traffic Analysis Alternatives
How to Check ANY Website's Traffic
(Top-Down Analysis)
How much traffic does a website get?
To answer this question, we’re taking a top-down approach.
And by that, I mean we’ll start with a top-level look at the estimated total traffic of a website.
And then we’ll peel back one layer at a time to reveal each piece of data in more detail.
Here is a quick overview:
- All website traffic - We’ll start by looking at the total amount of traffic a website gets each month, check estimated engagement metrics, and break down the numbers by device type.
- By channel - Next layer down, we’re looking at how much traffic is coming from different sources. For example, we can check traffic numbers and trends across different channels like organic, paid, social, email and referral. Then, drill down into each channel to see the exact strategies competitors are using to drive that traffic.
- By subdomain/ directory - Next layer down is really handy for larger websites, especially ecommerce sites, where you can see which product categories drive the most organic traffic.
- By page/post - The fourth layer looks at the individual posts/pages that drive the most traffic to a site so we can start to prioritize the content strategy. For example, does the website focus on blog content, review pages or product pages to attract visitors.
- By keyword - Finally, for organic and paid channels, you can drill down and find out which keywords (and modifiers) drive the most traffic across different stages of the funnel - top, middle and bottom.
Note: we'll look closer at the intent break down later in the post.
The key thing to remember is that you can analyze traffic stats at varying levels of granularity, especially for organic and paid search channels.
IMPORTANT: Your site monetization model will dictate how you analyze website traffic.
For instance, analyzing category subfolders is way more valuable to an ecommerce store than an affiliate site looking for mid-funnel keyword modifiers.
For example:
- If you monetize mainly through Adsense/ ad revenue, then you’d want to look at all the top traffic pages because your primary goal is to drive ad impressions.
- If you run an Ecommerce store, then you’d want to drill down into the product category subfolders to see how competitors are driving website traffic with a high level of commercial intent.
- If you run an affiliate site, then you’d want to dissect traffic by keyword modifiers like “best”, “alternative”, “top”, “vs” etc.
- If you work in an emerging niche with little search volume, then maybe you’d want to analyze the top referral traffic sources of competitors; i.e. where they’re getting coverage from press releases and guest posts.
We’ll dive deeper into this traffic analysis below.
Step #1: Check Global Traffic (and Engagement) Data to Quickly Pinpoint New Opportunities
We’ll be using the SEMrush Traffic Analytics Report, as well as the SEO and Advertising Toolkits for the majority of this analysis. Grab a free 14-day trial of SEMrush Pro + Traffic Analytics here ($299 value).
The SEMrush Traffic Analytics Report is a competitive research tool that provides estimated desktop and mobile traffic reports on any website.
It’s important to remember that these reports are estimates because SEMrush does not have access to every website’s internal analytics.
Instead, the reports are based on “petabytes of clickstream data that comes from multiple proprietary and 3rd party data sources, SEMrush’s proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms, and Big Data technologies.”
In other words, data is collected and approximated from real internet user behaviors. The next best thing after having direct access to your competitor's Google Analytic account.
Let’s take a look at the report and see what metrics we can unearth for our working example, Shopify.
In SEMrush, click on Traffic Analytics from the side menu and enter the domain – e.g. “shopify.com” – you want to analyze:
Traffic
The Traffic Analytics Overview report gives you an estimate of the queried website's traffic and engagement.
You can apply filters – historical data, location, and device – to modify the results. And next to the filters is a set of blue bars noting the Estimated Accuracy of the report, which is based on the size of the domain and filters.
Shopify has 3 bars, which means the data has a higher level of accuracy:
Shopify had an estimated 33.9M visits in June 2019, which, as you’ll see below in the historical trends, is a slight dip compared to previous months (possible a result of the June core algorithm update).
Action item:
Go to the SEO Toolkit >> Traffic Analytics >> Traffic Overview report to find the Total Monthly Visits count for each competitor and enter them into the Global Traffic Overview section of the template:
Use the Total Visits metric as a guiding stick. i.e. focus your traffic analysis on competitors that are driving the most traffic each month, as they will likely reveal the clearest opportunities to increase website traffic.
Engagement
Next to Visits, are estimated metrics for engagement.
- Visits - an estimate of total visits to the website over the chosen month.
- Unique Visitors - an estimate of total unique visits to the website over the chosen month. (note: a visitor can have multiple visits)
- Pages/Visit - an estimate of how many pages (on average) a person visits in one session on the website.
- Avg. Visit Duration - an average estimate of the amount of time spent on the site during each visit.
- Bounce Rate - an estimate of the website’s average bounce rate, or percentage of visitors that leave the website after viewing just one page.
Think of it as the closest thing to getting a behind-the-scenes look at each of your competitor's Google Analytics Audience Overview reports!
Historical Trends
Under the engagement metrics is a historical trend graph. You can select the time frame – 6 months, 12 months, or All-time. And you can also switch to see the domain’s trend of Total Visits, Unique Visitors, Average Visit Duration, or Bounce Rate:
The trend lines are for All Devices (blue), Desktop (green), and Mobile (orange).
In our example, you can see visits (all sources) to Shopify were increasing steadily up until March 2019, then plateaued for a couple months, before taking a drop at the beginning of June. Note: this could be the result of getting hit by the June Google core algorithm update. We’ll dive into this more later.
Action item:
Go to the SEO Toolkit >> Traffic Analytics >> Traffic Overview report and enter several of your direct competitors:
Enter the engagement metrics - Pages/Visit, Av. Visit Duration and Bounce Rate - for each competitor. Also, flag whether the traffic is increasing, decreasing or plateauing across each device type:
If a competitor's traffic is consistently increasing over time, dig in and find the source(s) of that growth, and replicate it.
Traffic Sources
The Traffic Sources report estimates how much traffic a website gets from each channel:
- Direct - traffic via URLs entered in a browser’s search bar, saved bookmarks or links from outside a browser (such as PDFs or Microsoft Word documents).
- Referral - traffic from a hyperlink on another domain (other than a Social Media domain).
- Search - traffic directly from a search engine such as Google, Bing, etc.
- Social - traffic from links on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
- Paid ads - traffic from paid advertisements on Google Ads. ( Includes PPC ads in search results and product listing ads e.g. Google Shopping, in SERPs.)
In our example, you can see that over the last 12 months Shopify acquired the most traffic from referrals.
In the next report, you can filter the traffic source data by All Sources, Referring Sites, Search Engines, or Social Networks:
And on the right, you can see the Traffic Count, Traffic Share and Change percentages.
In our example, the top referring site is myshopify.com, (with 43.81% of the traffic), which kind of skews the data, as this domain is used when setting up each store’s domain settings.
But, if we look at the actual estimated traffic from referrals of non-Shopify sites – rather the Traffic Share % – you can see it's a significant number.
For example: Fashionnova drives over 126,000 referral visits to Shopify each month.
From here, you can quickly identify the referral sources that could drive the most referral traffic to your website. And this is where you'd want to focus your link building/ PR and/or guest posting efforts.
If you select the Search Engines tab, you'll see which search engine drives most traffic:
In our example, Google (organic) drives 85.88% traffic to Shopify, followed by Google (paid) with 6.31%.
Note: Again, while the paid percentage appears small, it’s worth noting that Shopify is investing a lot in Paid Ads, and is now driving over 372,000 paid search visits a month!
As we’ll see later in the Paid Traffic section, Shopify has been gradually increasing investment in this channel over time.
Action item:
Go to the Traffic Sources tab and enter the top 3 traffic channels for each website into the Global Overview section of the template:
Next - scroll down to the Traffic Sources Details report and click the Referring Sites tab. Enter the total referral visits, trend and top 3 traffic referrers into the Referral Traffic Overview section of the template:
Geo Distribution
The Geographic Distribution report shows you the countries and regions that drive the most traffic to a website.
The report includes a map illustration followed by a table showing the Total Traffic and Traffic Share % from each country:
Plus the Pages/Visit, Average Visit Duration, and Bounce Rate so you can identify which countries interact the most with the website:
In our example, Shopify acquired most of its traffic from the USA (42.54%) in June 2019. But it’s also getting significant traffic from other international locations. So, from a strategy standpoint, its important to find out how they are targeting those countries?
One possibility might be they are using multiple languages for each country. And a quick check of the source code for references to the “hreflang” tag will help shed light:
Action item:
Go to the Traffic Analytics report and select the Geo Distribution tab. Scroll down to the Traffic by Countries report:
Enter the countries driving the most traffic to each of your competitors:
This report will help you pinpoint any gaps in your international SEO strategy.
Devices
The Traffic Analytics report also highlights the difference between desktop and mobile traffic. You can see Shopify has nearly twice as much traffic coming from Desktop devices:
Subdomains
The Subdomains report shows you which subdomains on the website acquire the most traffic:
In our example, you can see the Shopify “App” and “CDN” subdomains get the most traffic.
For other websites, this report can help you identify if a competitor is using a blog subdomain to drive top-funnel traffic, or housing products on a separate shop subdomain.
For example:
If I wanted to see how HubSpot was driving website traffic, specifically at the top of the funnel, I'd start by analyzing only their blog subdomain:
Similarly, if I was selling beard products online and wanted to see how a website such as Beardaholic was driving traffic with commercial intent, I'd start by analyzing their shop subdomain.
SEMrush' SEO Toolkit makes this granular traffic analysis a breeze (more on this in the next section):
Segmenting by subdomain or subfolder can help you better prioritize the traffic analysis process.
Competitor Comparisons
As you've seen, the Traffic Analytics Overview report allows you to compare competitor data side-by-side across all the categories mentioned above.
The comparisons will allow you to fill out the traffic analysis template much faster.
Simply enter the domain names into the search boxes at the top of the report and click ‘Compare’:
For example, I’ve added BigCommerce and BigCartel as competitors of Shopify.
Now you get a series of reports comparing each website’s estimated traffic (and level of confidence):
While Shopify gets the most traffic, it took the biggest month-over-month hit in June. BigCartel saw the biggest drop in Average Visit Duration. All sites had a rough June. From here, you’d want to drill into the specific channels that took the hit, and uncover why.
From July 2018 to March 2019, Shopify grew its traffic from ~24M to ~38M visits a month. Over the same time period, BigCommerce and BigCartel were basically flatlining.
If I was a competitor, I’d drill into the channels report to find out where the majority of the traffic growth came from, and then dig deeper into those channels to find out which strategies were driving the growth, and replicate them as fast as possible.
Audience Overlap
This report shows you the percentage of users who visited a specific domain and its competitors. According to SEMrush, there is a higher audience overlap between Shopify and BigCommerce.
Armed with this knowledge, one thing I might decide to do is set up a social PPC campaign and target all the people interested in the competitors with a higher Audience Overlap percentage.
Action item:
Enter the Audience Overlap percentages for each of your competitors:
For this working example, we can see that Shopify has a really high audience overlap percentage with Shopify. This is another indicator that you should focus in on Shopify's traffic strategies as their audience is very similar to the one you are trying to reach.
Use the Traffic Analytics report to uncover new channels where competitors are getting a lot of website traffic, but your website is lagging behind. Then, drill in to uncover the specific strategies they are using to drive traffic from each channel.
Note: If you are only interested in analyzing organic and paid traffic sources, you don’t need Traffic Analytics. Instead, sign up for a free 30-day SEMrush Pro account and get access to all the other Toolkits - SEO, PPC etc.
Or, read this post to see which SEMrush trial is best for your business.
Alternatives: Later in the post, I’ll show you some other tools like SimilarWeb that help to get a top-level snapshot.
Step #2: Find Out How Much Organic Traffic a Website Gets (at the Subfolder, Page & Keyword Levels)
The Traffic Analytics report gave us a global view of all traffic sources over time.
But now we’re going to use the Organic Research report in the SEMrush SEO Toolkit to dive deep into your competitor’s organic traffic channels. Again, we’ll take a top-down approach for the traffic analysis:
- Overview
- Subfolder/subdomain
- Page/post
- Individual keywords
Each additional layer we peel back will provide more insights that can be used to build a field-tested strategy to drive more website traffic.
For this section, we’ll use The Wirecutter as our working example.
In SEMrush, select SEO Toolkit, click on Organic Research from the side menu, and enter the domain – e.g. “thewirecutter.com” – you want to analyze:
The Overview report shows the total organic traffic and keywords:
In our example, The Wirecutter has 2.7 million keywords in the Top 100 search results and is getting an estimated 4.4 million organic visits per month.
Under the headline figures are some historical trend graphs. Let’s compare growth over the last year vs. all time:
Over the last year, The Wirecutter saw a steady growth in traffic from 3.6M to 4.4M visits a month.
But over the last two years, traffic has grown from less than 2M to 4.4M visits per month. Traffic growth is accelerating!
Editor's note:
In the Organic Research Overview report, you can break down the Branded vs Non-Branded organic traffic counts:
Typically, you'll want to focus on the competitors getting the most Non-Branded organic traffic.
The figures so far have been for Desktop. But we can switch the filter at the top of the page to get Mobile traffic figures as well:
Over the last year, The Wirecutter mobile traffic decreased slightly from 3.0M to 2.9M visits a month.
In the All time report, we see that mobile traffic has plateaued since the inflection point that occurred in February, 2018.
(Note: desktop traffic started in Jan 2012, but mobile traffic started in March 2015.)
Action item:
Drop each competitor domain into the SEO Toolkit and go to the Organic Research report.
Next - enter the organic traffic count (brand and non-brand), organic traffic cost, and trend data into the Organic Traffic Overview section of the template:
By subdomain
Ok, let’s go a little deeper and check subdomains.
For this report, we’ll use Shopify as our example.
Enter your domain – e.g. shopify.com – and click the Subdomains tab in Organic Research:
You can see Shopify has 58 subdomains driving hundreds of thousands of monthly organic visits. (Results are sorted by the estimated desktop traffic.)
Most traffic (61%) goes to the main domain, but the remainder is spread to the various subdomains including those for the Help Center, App Store, Themes Store, and various language-specific sites like Spanish.
Remember: use the subdomains to get laser focused with your traffic analysis.
For example:
If you see an ecommerce competitor selling products on a shop subdomain, prioritize your traffic analysis on that subdomain to find commercial intent keyword opportunities:
Editor’s Note: If you want to learn the exact keyword research processes I use to scale organic traffic for my clients, check out my premium training course, The SEO Playbook.
You’ll learn how to find, qualify, prioritize and map keyword data:
Screenshots of the Aggregate and Keyword Mapping tabs in The SEO Playbook.
By folder
Next, we’re going to analyze the subfolders on Beardbrand.
Using advanced filters in SEMrush, you can find specific types of keywords.
For instance, you can use URL subfolders like “/collections/” or “/product/” to return all the (BOFU) commercial intent product-related keywords for an ecommerce site. On the other hand, using a URL subfolder like “/blog/” returns all the (TOFU) informational intent keyword ideas.
Pro tip: remember to consider which search intent aligns best with your site monetization model.
For example:
Ecommerce site? Drill into the product and category subfolders to find the most valuable traffic opportunities.
Affiliate site? Drill into the review subfolders, or search for modifiers like “best” or “alternative” in the URL strings.
AdSense site? Drill into the blog subfolders to find higher traffic opportunities.
Enter your domain – e.g. beardbrand.com – and click the Positions tab in Organic Research
report:
At the moment there are no filters, and there’s a total 43.1K keywords and 159.K visits/month.
But if you apply filters to the report, you can zoom in on the different intent keywords.
For example:
Beardbrand houses all its categories and products within the /collections subfolder:
Let’s check for commercial intent keywords with these filters:
- Include > URL > Containing “/collections”
- Include > Words Count > Greater than 1 (to eliminate single-term or branded keywords)
With the filters applied the number of keywords (476) and traffic (15.6K) drops considerably.
Now let’s check for informational intent keywords with these filters:
- Include > URL > Containing “/blogs/”
- Include > Words Count > Greater than 1 (to eliminate single-term keywords)
From these results, you can see Beardbrand gets significantly more traffic for its informational intent keywords (102.7K) than its commercial intent keywords (15.6K).
But, since we’re an ecommerce competitor, we’d prioritize traffic analysis at the /collections subfolder, and work our way back up to the /blog folder.
Action item:
Go to the SEO Toolkit >> Organic Research >> Subdomains tab:
Enter the top organic traffic subdomains for each competitor in the Top Subfolders/ Subdomains section of the template:
By page
Staying with Beardbrand, you can check which individual pages are ranking for the most keywords and driving the most organic traffic across each stage of the funnel. This is a much better indicator of which topics (rather than keywords) to target in your SEO strategy.
Here’s how:
Enter your domain – e.g. beardbrand.com – and click the Pages tab in Organic Research report:
Here’s the report with no filters.
But we can add the same filters as before to separate the keywords by intent.
Add this filter for the commercial intent keywords:
- Include > URL > Containing “/collections”
All these pages are bottom funnel product pages with high traffic and keywords.
Now add this filter for the informational intent keywords:
- Include > URL > Containing “/blogs”
All these pages are top funnel blog posts with high traffic and ranking for a lot of informational keywords.
Action item:
Navigate to the Organic Research >> Pages report.
Use the Advanced URL filters to quickly find the top 3 organic traffic pages for each stage of the funnel - top, middle and bottom:
Bonus resource: How to find your competitors most valuable keywords.
By keyword
Finally, we’ll look at which keywords are driving the most traffic.
For this example, we’ll use Wirecutter again.
Here’s how:
Enter your domain – e.g. thewirecutter.com – and click the Positions tab in Organic Research report:
The top traffic-driving keyword is “wirecutter”. But we can add filters to remove branded keywords and focus on the mid-funnel investigational intent keywords (for affiliate sites) that you’ll find in the “/reviews/” subfolder:
- Include > URL > Containing “/reviews/”
- Exclude > Keyword > Containing “wirecutter”
Now the report shows the mid-funnel keywords that drive the most traffic.
Similarly, you can also filter out the most valuable traffic opportunities using common mid-funnel modifiers such as “best”, “top”, “vs” or “alternative”:
Another example is the K9 Of Mine website who focus on using keyword modifiers like “best” rather than a subfolder for their mid-funnel investigational intent keywords. So the filter is:
- Include > Keyword > Containing “best”
Featured Snippets
Featured snippets grab a lot of valuable SERP real estate.
If you can identifying which terms trigger them, and figure out how to steal them from the competition, you'll drive a lot more traffic to your website each month:
SEMrush' SEO Toolkit makes it easy to find all your competitors featured snippets.
Once you have entered a competitor's domain, scroll down to the SERP Features report on the Overview tab:
Click the Featured Snippets link to see all the keywords that your competitors are ranking for with a featured snippet:
Check the number of featured snippets for each competitor and enter it into the template:
Bonus Resource: How to Get a Featured Snippet (and Rank in Position #0)
Editor's note:
Remember to download the template, grab one of the free trials below, and follow along step-by-step with this tutorial.
Step #3: Find Out How Much Paid Traffic A Website Gets (and How Well It Converts)
Are your competitors driving a lot of traffic to their website from paid search?
It’s definitely worth checking. And you can do that with the SEMrush Advertising Toolkit.
This tool will quickly help you discover how much competitors are spending on Google ads, which terms they are bidding on, how they are winning the click, where they send paid traffic, and which keywords convert best.
As you’ve already seen, traffic totals only tell a small portion of the story. In the case of paid search, you want to know HOW competitors are acquiring and converting that traffic.
So again, we’ll peel back the layers to uncover the most valuable (and actionable) insights.
Besides Traffic insight, you’ll uncover:
- Keywords - to get you in front of the audience
- Ad Copy - to win the click and earn the visit
- Landing Pages - to get the conversions
The SEMrush Advertising Toolkit provides an all-access backstage pass to show you how competitors are doing all three, so you can eliminate the guesswork and prevent wasted time and budget.
After all, your competitors have already done all the heavy lifting for you 🙂
These are useful insights for any business, especially if you’re starting fresh and need to purchase some SERP visibility while the organic SEO efforts are kicking into gear.
SEMrush Advertising Toolkit
In SEMrush, select Advertising Toolkit, click on Advertising Research from the side menu, and enter the domain – e.g. “shopify.com” – you want to analyze:
Overview
At the top of the Positions report, you’ll see three overview numbers detailing your competitor’s use of advertising:
- Keywords - the total number of keywords where the domain was found with a PPC ad ranking in the Top 7 Google Ads positions.
- Traffic - the estimated traffic coming from these paid keywords (based on keyword search volume and CTR averages per position).
- Traffic Cost - the estimated price of paying for the PPC ads to rank in the top positions.
Below the headline numbers are the trend graphs:
You can switch between Traffic, Keywords, and Traffic Cost, plus change the timeline between 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, and ‘All Time’.
The trend graphs let you gauge whether a competitor is spending more over time. Any trends you spot you can analyze deeper.
It also gives you an idea of how much you’ll have to spend to get similar traffic levels. Or, how much traffic you can expect from specific topic categories.
Action item:
Enter the following data points into the Paid Traffic Overview section of the template:
- Monthly paid traffic
- PPC traffic trend
- Number of paid keywords
- Traffic cost
- Budget trend
Also, check the Display Advertising and PLA reports in the Advertising Toolkit and flag whether or not compeitors are using those paid strategies to drive traffic.
Keywords Report
Underneath the trend graphs is a table containing all the keywords that Shopify is bidding on to run their ads:
Aside from their own brand name, you can see they are targeting competitor brands like Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, Wix, and Squarespace, plus search terms like “t-shirt printing”, “web store”, and “dropshipping”.
You’ll also be able to see if ad positions are up or down, the CPC and estimated traffic coming from each keyword.
Scan through the list of keywords, or use the filters to hone in on specific products, services and topics. Select the terms you want to target by placing a checkmark next to each one.
Ok - once you’ve built a keyword list, it’s time to find out how competitors are winning the click and driving traffic from those terms.
Bonus tip: if you notice that a competitor's PPC traffic is increasing, check to see which new keywords they are bidding on in the Position Changes report:
Scroll down to the New Paid Search Positions report to see a list of all the new keywords, along with search volume, CPC, target landing page URL etc:
Similarly, if you notice PPC traffic is decreasing, check the Lost tab to see which keywords a competitor stopped bidding on. This could be an indication that the terms didn't convert well or deliver a positive ROI.
Ad Copy
The Ad Copies report shows you how your competitors are attracting their audience. You can see the headlines and CTAs they use in the Ad copy, plus the target keywords and landing page.
Let’s take a look at an example.
Enter your domain – e.g. shopify.com – and click the Ad Copies tab in the Advertising Research report:
At the top of the report, you can see the headline, copy, and landing page.
If you click the drop-down, you can see the target keywords for each ad:
In our example, you can see Shopify is targeting a range of “hosting” keywords. Anyone searching for these terms will likely see a Shopify ad.
Why target hosting? Because the Shopify platform includes hosting, whereas a competitor like WooCommerce requires WordPress hosting.
Ads History
The Ads History report allows you to see all the keywords that a domain purchased over the past year.
Enter your domain – e.g. shopify.com – and click the Ad History tab in the Advertising Research report:
The number in the blue cell indicates the position of the ad each month. And the Coverage % shows how long the ad ran in the last year, where 100% equals all year.
So, in our example, Shopify had an ad targeting the keyword “Wix” every month over the last year that was in position #1 or #2.
You can also click on any of the blue cells to reveal what the ad copy was for that month:
It’s a useful way to compare how competitors change their ad copy or CTA each month. In our example, you can see Shopify changed their ad copy slightly, by rearranging the order of the sentences:
May:
Grow Your Business With Our Unified Platform. Start 14 Day Free Trial Now. Customize Your Store With Our Website Builder. Social Media Integration. Drop Shipping Integration. 100+ Professional Themes. Fully Hosted. 99.99% Average Uptime. Unlimited 24/7 Support. SEO Optimized.
June:
Customize Your Store With Our Website Builder. Grow Your Business With Our Unified Platform. Start 14 Day Free Trial Now. Social Media Integration. Fraud Prevention. 99.99% Average Uptime.
Note: if a competitor is using the same keyword and ad copy for an entire year (especially if it is for an expensive term), you may be able to infer that the keyword/ad copy combination drives a lot of qualified traffic.
This can help you quickly streamline your paid keyword list down to the best (likely highest-converting) opportunities.
Landing Pages
The Pages report shows you a list of the top landing pages for your competitor’s PPC ads. It’s a useful way of checking the design, copy, and calls to action for each page and getting some inspiration for your landing pages.
Enter your domain – e.g. shopify.com – and click the Pages tab in the Advertising Research report:
Click the gray arrow pop-out beside the page URL to open the landing page.
The majority of Shopify ads land on their homepage, which contains lots of information about the platform. But if you check the free trial landing page, you can see how much more concise the messaging is:
Again - don’t feel like you need to start from scratch when it comes to building out landing pages to convert paid traffic. Look at what the competition is doing, and model their success.
Action item:
Open the Advertising Research >> Pages report and list 3-5 pages getting the most paid traffic:
Since competitors are spending a large portion of their monthly ad budget sending traffic to these pages, they'll likely be testing variations to improve conversions.
As a result, these pages will typically highlight the best page layout and copywriting principles to replicate across your landing pages.
4 Alternatives to Check Website Traffic
If you don’t have access to SEMrush, here are four more ways to check website traffic.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb starts with a Traffic Overview that includes engagement stats – Total Visits, Average Visit Duration, Pages per Visit, and Bounce Rate.
All traffic estimates include both mobile and desktop traffic for the last six months.
As you scroll down the page, there are additional stats for:
- Traffic by Countries
- Traffic Sources (Direct/Referrals/Search/Social/Email/Display)
- Top Referring Sites
- Search Traffic (Top 5 Organic and Paid Keywords)
- Social Traffic
- Display Advertising Traffic
SimilarWeb collect their data from a variety of sources.
Additional resource: 6 Best SimilarWeb Alternatives
Alexa
Alexa’s website traffic tool includes competitive analysis, so entering your target domain – e.g. shopify.com – automatically adds competitors to the dashboard – oberlo.com, bigcommerce.com, hubspot.com, and myshopify.com.
There’s a lot of data on the page including:
- Alexa site rank
- Unique Visitors
- Visitors by Country
- Engagement metrics (pageviews per visitor/time on site/bounce rate)
- Traffic sources
- Site Flow (sites visited before and after target)
Alexa tracks data for everyone who has the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, which accounts for less than 1% of internet users. So it’s not the most accurate, but gives you a rough idea.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is excellent for organic search traffic analysis. Their estimates include both desktop and mobile traffic.
Similar to SEMrush, traffic can be analyzed with a top-down approach:
- All organic traffic - viewed as a whole or broken down by 170 countries.
- Keyword counts/ growth - check keyword and traffic growth trends.
- Subfolder/subdomain - use the filters to check whether traffic goes to top, middle or bottom of funnel.
- Page/post - use the Top Pages report to see which pages get the most traffic.
- Keyword - use the Organic Keywords report to see which keywords drove most traffic.
Check out my Ahrefs review for 50+ practical applications of the toolset.
Ahrefs’ data comes from the huge amounts of clickstream data that they process every day.
Note: Ahrefs' paid traffic analysis still has a long way to go, and you will not be able to get the same global insights that a tool like SEMrush Traffic Analytics provides.
Advertise Page
Some sites advertise how much traffic they get, so it’s worth trying an advanced Google search if you’re interested in finding traffic stats for a particular site.
Try this Google search:
site:website.com advertise with us
Example GeekWire
site:geekwire.com advertise with us
You’ll find stats like above, which may or may not be accurate and up to date.
GeekWire claims to get 1.2M visitors a month.
Example Healthline
site:healthline.com advertise with us
Healthline says they scale to 71 million users a month.
The “advertise page” can sometimes give you a ballpark traffic figure. But, you won’t be able to dissect each channel like you can with a tool like SEMrush.
Ready. Set. Analyze.
Traffic estimation tools are not 100% accurate, but the insights from a tool like SEMrush will give you a great idea of which channels, posts/pages, and keywords are driving the most website traffic. And, how that traffic interacts with a website's content.
These insights can be used to build out your own comprehensive content marketing and PPC strategies. No more guesswork, just a data-driven road map to more website traffic.
Editor's note: If you haven't done so already, make sure you grab one of the free trials below so you can follow along with the tutorial and build a rock solid traffic acquisition strategy for your business and/or clients.
If you're just looking to analyze how much organic and/or paid traffic a website gets, use the SEMrush Pro trial.
If you want traffic and engagement insights across all traffic channels, grab the Pro + Traffic Analytics trial.
Hello Robbie,
You have explained a great list of seo tools here but I am only using Ahrefs from the past 2 years and it is one of the best tools to check keywords traffic. this tool gives us also a nice insight of a site to make audit reports before start SEO.
Hi Niraj! Ahrefs is a great tool, no doubt. I use it too. However, it doesn’t currently provide the global traffic details, or the same level of PPC data. That’s why I focused on SEMrush in this post.
If I am right, you have just reupdated this post. I have already read this post in past. (May be in 2019)
2nd:- You are a good fan of SEMRUSH but not everyone else.
As you have mentioned about estimated traffic. I want to know have you checked your own traffic with semrush and try to match that data with Google analytics?
What is the accuracy?
Last:- I use Similarweb whenever I do competitor research in any niche.
This tool also tell top referral traffic sources in any niche and for any website for free.
Anyway Thanks
Hi Nekraj! There are definitely discrepancies. But, no tool is going to be 100% accurate. I use it more as a relative directional queue.
I’ve got to admit for brief checks on how much organic traffic a website or a page is getting my first point of call is to use Ahrefs as you mentioned as well as SEMrush. As you get to compare two types of traffic data Google’s keyword planner fed search volume as well as Clickstream data.
However, this is a great article for getting more specific estimates – so have definitely bookmarked this.
Thanks a lot!
Cheers Harry!
Hello Robbie,
Analyzing your website traffic can help to understand how users interact with your website. Google Analytics is a great tool to check your website traffic. It provides you comprehensive data. Using SEMrush along with is a win-win situation. It works like magic. Thanks for illustrating everything.
Regards,
Vishwajeet
My pleasure! Thanks Vishwajeet!
You are doing a great job. You gave great information by giving examples in this post. I have learned a lot from this post. Thanks for sharing this post. 🙂
Thanks Randy!
Understanding the potential for a site someone is planning to build is huge. In the affiliate marketing world I see beginners being told to build micro-niche sites all the time, but people rarely tell them how limited their traffic could be!
Thanks for weighing in, Leonardo! Definitely agree, competition is a good thing 🙂
Hi Robbie,
Thanks for sharing this article. Really you have given an in-depth knowledge about how to bring traffic on the website. Examples really gave me an interest in the topic and also helped me understand it. Thanks for sharing such good writeup.
Thanks Karteek!
Thank you so much for sharing and looking forward to learning more from this blog.
Thanks Prashanti!
I really appreciate your post and you explain each and every point very well.Thanks for sharing this information. And I’ll love to read your next post too.
Awesome Guide! Always love reading your content.
Waiting to read more by you 🙂
Thanks Rahul!
Hey Robbie,
Great Explained, When I want to check my website’s organic traffic I always prefer SEMrush as it provides all the global traffic details or PPC data. Thanks for sharing this informative blog.
Cheers Stephen!
Hi Robbie,
As a blogger one of the biggest hurdle that i face is traffic generation. People say you have to do what your competitors do. Understanding how competitors is generating traffic is key. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush are really important in understanding how to competitors are generating traffic. Thanks a lot for sharing your valuable insights.
Competitor analysis is always the place I start 🙂
Thank you for all! You’re best.
what a fantastic post! This is so chock full of infomation I can’t wait to dig deep & utilizing the resources you have given me.Your exuberance is refreshing
Thanks Dipak! Glad you liked it 🙂
Knowing your competitors traffic and ranked keywords tells us where we sit in the competition. I’m also agreeing with Niraj about the fact that I’ve only used ahrefs for this. But most of the other tools in this post will help me a great deal so thanks for sharing.
Thanks Joseph!
This is seriously brilliant. All of the data is right in SEMRush and we haven’t been using it. Thanks for opening our eyes!
Very welcome! Glad you enjoyed the post 🙂
One of the best semrush guides I’ve seen in a while for checking website traffic and distribution. Is there any way to accomplish something similar with ahrefs/moz? Thanks.
You’ll be able to pull the organic metrics with Ahrefs and Moz. But, SEMrush is unique when it comes to the Traffic Analytics insights, and superior PPC insights.
Dissecting your site traffic can see how clients interface with your site. Google Analytics is an incredible device to check your site traffic. It gives you far reaching information. Thanks for sharing this knowledge article.
Great post, competitor analysis is very much important, hope this will help to know about my competitors.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
Regards,
Kathir
Thanks Kathir! Glad you found it useful.
Thanks for this informative article!!!! Competitor’s website analysis is an important part of SEO strategy. I got complete information about it. Truly helpful.
Regards,
Ejaz
Thanks Ejaz!
Did not know that this is possible 😀 Thank you for the post, will try out the techniques presented here as they may be very useful!
Awesome – let me know if you have any questions along the way 🙂
Hey Robbie! The template is awesome! Great content. This will help a lot.
Glad to hear it. Thanks Lucio!
Nice work Robbie.
Thanks 🙂
SEMrush is a great tool, I use it for 2 years and it gives detailed information about websites.
Hi
So detailed and well explained steps about analysing website traffic. One thing which i like most is you have put images about explanation which made it very easy for me to understand everything easily.Thanks for sharing
You’re very welcome! Glad you enjoyed the post.
Thanks, I will definitely take a look at the Sem Rush traffic analyzer. Seems like a great tool on traffic observation. Thanks again.
Thanks Marcus!
Really cool ideas. Thanks man, keep it up
I love using Ahref SEO tool because it is more detailed than Alexa and the rest. Thanks Robbie for this blog.
Thanks Daniel! Ahrefs is fantastic for organic traffic analysis. But, if you want to go deeper into a competitor’s paid, social and referral traffic sources, I highly recommend SEMrush.
I am really overwhelmed with this article. I would like to thank for the efforts you have made in writing this post. Thanks for sharing these tips & tricks. I’m looking forward to use them. Great websites!! 🙂
Thanks Richa! Glad you found it useful 🙂
This is such a good article to learn how to analyze our competitor. Thanks, really cool article
Thanks Utomo!
Enjoyed reading the content above, actually explains everything in detail, the article is extremely interesting and effective. Thank you and good luck with the articles.
Thanks Sourabh!
Thanks for insightful article! Sem Rush seems to be a great tool, for analyzing my website traffic. Having been using other tools but would want shift to semrush!!
Cheers Vedang!
Thanks, I will definitely take a look at the Sem Rush traffic analyzer.
It seems like a great tool for traffic observation.
Thanks for the sharing! Just a quick question though, other than SEMrush is there a similar alternative? Because their pricing is quite on the steep side.
If you’re just looking to analyze organic traffic for competitors, check out KWFinder.
An excellent alternative to SEMRUSH is Serpstat. The service has a good database and tools for traffic analysis, backlinks, site audits. Prices are much more affordable than in SEMRUSH.
Thanks for sharing your insights, Gene!
Good stuff Robbie.
I’ve never actually used ahrefs that much, I mean I know about the tool for many years now, but I always used SemRush and all the Moz stuff.
Hi Robbie,
Wow! Awesome article – Wonderful analysis. It is highly informative. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Kedar!
I enjoyed reading the post and learn so many things. I personally using Semrush and I think Semrush has all the materials required for any kind of SEO.
Your template is awesome and I personally going to use this method
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Robbie, thanks for this informative post.
I think Google should release a free tool to analyse other websites ‘ traffic.
When the data comes from Google it would be very reliable.
Many reliable research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush are very expensive, it would be nice to see free alternatives which are as reliable as the paid ones.
I like the way you differentiated between the websites monetized by different methods.
Wow, it is interesting to see that SEMrush provides so much data about the competitors.
Yes, targeting non branded organic traffic is more beneficial than branded traffic because in the former, the searchers will be more open to the alternatives.
Do we need to take the permission of the webmasters to analyse their websites (using tools like SEMrush) and display their website data on our blogs?
I have used SimilarWeb and it doesn’t display data for all websites.
Do you feel that SEMrush is better than Ahrefs?
Thanks!
Thanks Naveen! Ahrefs doesn’t allow you to analyze a site’s entire traffic strategy, so I definitely prefer SEMrush for this as it gives you granular insights into organic, paid, social, and referral traffic sources.
Nice one Robbie,
Semrush has always been my best tool s far. i use it to spy all my competitors and always try to beat them in their own game.
Hey robbie
This is Amazing template
You shared Alot of good information
I like your blog so much
Keep it up
Hi Robbie hell of a post brother, I will use the technique you shared in this article.
I usually analyze traffic with SEMrush, that is my go-to tool.
Thanks Tarun! Glad you enjoyed the guide.
Wonderful content as usual Robbie. I always use SEMRush to analyse competitors’ traffic, even if it shows estimates, it gives me a good idea as it pulls information from different 3rd party sources. I am glad that you featured different means of measuring traffic, which will definitely give me a more realistic average.
Hi, This is an amazing content piece. Thanks for posting it. Also can you please write a blog on how to increase traffic on the website? keep posting
Hi Sohail! Check out this organic traffic guide 🙂 https://www.robbierichards.com/seo/increase-organic-traffic/