How to find out the traffic of someone else’s site?

Information is the basis of success. Learning from other people’s miscalculations, analyzing the actions of leaders, understanding why this or that action was beneficial, checking website traffic is the right tactic for intelligence services of marketers and SEO specialists.

You need to know the competitor in person, and also understand exactly what the dynamics of changing positions is. Having statistics, it is much easier to adjust website promotion, analyze the success of campaigns and learn from the mistakes of others.

How to quickly and accurately find out the traffic of someone else’s site – about this article.

Why analyze competitor traffic?

If you have a young project, analyzing a competitor’s site is an excellent solution for testing a niche. The information you receive will allow you to navigate and draw up a marketing plan for promoting goods or services, as well as:

• identify their strengths and weaknesses;
• understand the priority ways to promote the site;
• roughly imagine the conversion and income of competitors;
• estimate the amount of the marketing budget;
• analysis of the site’s search results on request will allow you to determine what needs to be done to reach TOP positions for the main keywords.

How to check website traffic?

We are looking for competitors using Google and PR-CY

The first thing to do is to find competitors. An important point is that not all companies listed in the search results for a particular query are direct competitors.

You need to focus on companies of similar size operating in a particular region. Here is an example: a startup (bbknives.com) is engaged in the manufacture of knives for tourism, collecting and everyday use, enter the query “tourist knife” and look at the output.

For high-frequency queries on the first page of the search engine, large online stores and trading platforms are presented, which does not make sense to analyze. These are giants and a startup is far from them, they are not direct competitors. We will have to narrow and specify the query, for example: “handmade tourist knives”, “tourist knife manufacturer”, “EDC handmade knives”, “forged knives”, “knife manufacturer Ukraine” … As a result, we will find 5-10 relevant sites in Google .

For Bbknives, direct competitors are small manufacturers that operate in the same region and occupy a similar niche. By checking the main keywords in various forms, we get the basic information.

Another way to collect preliminary data on competitors is the pr-cy.ru service.

It is not a professional marketing or SEO tool, but it provides a free version of a general overview of the number of visitors, links and keywords, as well as some tips for optimizing your site.

Registration does not cause difficulties, then just enter the address of our web resource and get the results from open statistics:

PR-CY is good at preliminary analysis to get a quick overview of the situation, such as site views. Naturally, this is superficial information and it should be reviewed. The service is useful in that you can easily and quickly get traffic data, as well as find out the position of a competitor in Alexa:

Alexa is a professional specialized tool that collects the rating of sites around the world and in certain regions. PR-CY downloads data from this source quickly and for free.

After we have conducted reconnaissance in PR-CY and clarified the information in the Google search results, it is time to bring the main forces to the front, to use specialized services.

Competitor analysis in Serpstat

Serpstat is a popular SEO site analysis service. With its help, you can get a lot of useful information. To do this, on the first page of the site, enter the site address and indicate the promotion region.

We go to the “Overview” tab on the left side of the menu, the SEO Trafic parameter is the number of visitors to our site per month. Similarly, you can find out the traffic of someone else’s site.

Scrolling the overall report to Organic Competitors:

From this report, you can find out the popularity of the site (overall rating), but also a lot of other useful information:

1. the number of keywords in the search;
2. how many common keys your and competing sites have;
3. visibility indicator in dynamics.

We click on the site of interest and get a general report on the competitor. Serpstat calculates traffic by the number of CTR, taking into account positions in the issue and the volume of keywords. As you can see, Serpstat is a handy tool, everything is clear and extremely simple.

And with the help of Serpstat, you can compare two or three domains. To do this, go to the menu on the left side of the screen: “Domain Analysis” – “SEO Research” – “Domain Comparison”. In the window that opens, enter the addresses of the sites that we will explore, and we get the result:

From this report, we will get visual information on the number of common and unique keywords and find out how they compare in terms of quantity and place in the search results. The diagram shows how the test domain bbknives.com compares with its competitor knife.com.ua in terms of the number of keys. As you can see, the startup is clearly inferior in terms of the total number of requests. It is necessary to increase the semantic core and promote them to the TOP.

Even the free version of Serpstat provides a lot of useful information, even though the detailed report only includes the first 10 keywords. The data is presented in dynamics, which allows you to follow the changes on the site. For example, you added text to a product category with certain phrases, after indexing, you can determine exactly how it affected the search results. The same applies to link building. After collecting intelligence on marketing and SEO activities, you can get comprehensive information on their success.

We recommend that you create a separate spreadsheet and save all the information you might need for your own campaigns.

To get acquainted with other Serpstat functionality, I recommend reading the articles:

• Clustering queries with Serpstat
• What is the difference between search engine promotion (SEO) and contextual advertising (PPC) semantics?

But back to the analysis of competitors.

Working with SERanking

Another useful tool is the SERanking service. Its strength is the ability to analyze in detail the search and advertising traffic of sites. To do this, register and go to the “Competitor SEO / PPC research tool” tab. Here we enter your domain, select a search engine, region and get into the general organic search report:

Even it is quite informative, you can find out by what keys the competition is going on and who is in the lead. It also indicates the number of clicks and the estimated cost of traffic. The table shows the TOP of the main rivals. With the help of checkboxes, you can add to the chart and remove the domains with which you compare yours.

If you select “Paid traffic” – “Competitors” in the left panel, then advertising data will be added to this information.

In the paid version of the service, you can download full reports on organic and advertising search queries of all sites of interest and bring them into a single table. Then sort and select keys by frequency, demand and cost in PPC. The work is voluminous, but necessary. Thus, you can not only find out the traffic of someone else’s site, but also expand your own semantics, in a word – take all the best from competitors.

To get acquainted with the additional functionality of SE Ranking, I recommend reading the article – an overview of 4 useful tools from SE Ranking.

This is full-blown SEO combat. If you plan to win in the promotion, we recommend that you pay special attention to this service.

Site evaluation with SimilarWeb

Using the SimilarWeb web service, you can collect a significant amount of data. Features – moderate error and rich functionality.

Registration on the site will be quick – there is an option to log in with a Google account. Next, enter your site and click “Search”, we get general information:

As you can see, the site showed that the number of visits to our test site is less than 5 thousand per month. This is natural, because a startup.

In the left menu of SimilarWeb there is a tab “Social traffic”, we recommend that you pay attention to the use of social networks to attract the target audience.

As you can see, Facebook is the most productive of all, there is a 73% increase in traffic from this network, but you should also remember about the prospects of Youtube.

In the same way, we drive competitor sites into the “Search” and see their attendance and the situation with social networks. Don’t forget to transfer the data to the table.

In the menu on the left there is an analysis of the competitive environment. SimilarWeb gives the TOP of similar sites, you can use it, or analyze the resources that were previously identified by other services.

For each of them, it is not difficult to find out the traffic dynamics for different time periods, as well as data on the geography of visitors and traffic from different regions. The service shows how actively social networks and other areas are used for SEO offensives to attract the target audience.

Additional services to find out the traffic of someone else’s site

• Semrush.com is a great service primarily for SEOs and Internet marketers. In the free version, the functionality is not rich. Well generates reports on keywords, paid and free traffic. But there is no data on the Ukrainian segment of Google search results. Under ideal conditions, you can check the site traffic online on Google, and then only for sites that are aimed at a Russian audience. Not applicable to Ukraine. PRO version costs $70 per month.
• Bravica.net (closed) – the aggregator site looks for installed counters and shows the data. Displays Alexa Rank, site visit statistics on LiveInternet and data from our first SEMRush site, but, unfortunately, it cannot work with Yandex Metrica. This service will allow you to get the big picture, but will not reveal anything new to you. The service was free.

What to do next?

So we used these services, collected information on the attendance of competitors’ sites and entered it into the table. We know:

1. total number of visits;
2. the number of visits given by various channels for attracting traffic;
3. geography of potential customers;
4. what key phrases are most in demand;
5. what is the dynamics of the growth of the keys used on our site.

The most important thing now is to manage the data correctly, that is, to draw conclusions and understand what needs to be done in order for the site to take off.

The number of visits tells about the general situation in the niche, how many people visit the site to get acquainted with goods and services, and also what kind of traffic you can count on with proper promotion.

Analytics on visits from social networks allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of promotion in this direction. A powerful group with a lot of followers can generate a significant amount of sales. But don’t forget about SEO. Social networks make a profit depending on the popularity and virality of posts, a lot here is tied to the “wow” effect. Organic traffic is more stable, it is a base that is less subject to emotional fluctuations. Here is an illustration:

The graph of our test site shows sharp bursts of social activity, SMM-managers managed to make some very successful posts. At the same time, organic traffic is more or less stable and is gradually growing. I recommend. use the maximum number of promotion channels and experiment.

Next is geography. Understanding which region is interested in your product or service is very important. Two or three large cities can generate more income than the rest of the country. In this case, it makes sense to make pages on the site specially “sharpened” for these cities and filled with texts with the corresponding keys. The same applies to geotargeting.

In general, knowing which keywords are most in demand is a powerful tool to attract visitors. If we know what keys people use to access competitors, it makes sense to analyze and use this data wisely.

Writing texts for a blog, guest articles and reviews on Youtube – all this is directly correlated with search phrases. Write texts that respond to requests, shoot videos, make posts, and the audience will grow.

Analysis of traffic, site positions relative to the main competitors is the most important moment. We recommend that you conduct planned intelligence actions to collect SEO information regularly. It is important to keep statistics, see trends and apply them in your project.