Once you grow your site, you face competitors. You’ll be eager to know the traffic your competitors are getting on their sites. Knowing the estimate of traffic your competitors are getting is beneficial for framing your blogging strategies, to grow your site, and to outrank your competitors.
If you are not spying on your competitor traffic, your blogging will be less interesting and lone journey.
Don’t worry. In this post, I’ll present you some traffic estimators and the tips to accurately estimate the traffic a site is getting.
You can make use of the tools and strategies that I mention in this post on your own site, and you’ll be amazed to know how close the estimate is to the reality.
Best traffic estimator tools
Below I'll mention some of the best tools to estimate the traffic of your competitor sites.
However there may be some fluctuations in between estimated and actual results. Nevertheless, you can easily get an idea of your competitor traffic.
SEMrush
This is by far the best organic traffic estimator for a site.
You just need to enter the site URL in its search box. The tool will return the organic traffic that the site may be getting based on the volumes of keywords that the site is positioned for.
Let’s do the math.
Harsh Agrawal publishes his traffic and income report periodically. According to his January 2016 report, he’s getting an overall Pageviews of 49081 per day, which includes organic traffic, direct and also referral traffic.
SEMrush is estimating the daily search traffic to be 63.1k
I’ve analyzed the traffic of the sites that regularly publish traffic reports in the same way.
I came to the conclusion that the organic traffic returned by SEMrush is inflated by an average of 170%. That means if a site is getting 100 organic page views per day, SEMrush shows 170.
Now you came to know how to accurately estimate the organic traffic of a site.
It also displays the traffic graph of the site over years.
It estimates the traffic with the help of Google and also Bing index. By default, it fetches the traffic estimate by looking at the rankings in Google.
It also displays you the estimate of traffic individual keywords are driving for a site, based on the ranking position.
Compete
Compete displays the number of U.S unique visitors a site is getting monthly. You can also select the page views on a daily basis in pro plan of Compete.
In the free version you can only determine the number of unique visitors a site is getting. You can opt for the professional plan to get access to detailed analytics and premium tools.
The traffic data is fairly accurate.
SimilarWeb
This is perhaps the most popular web traffic estimator tool out there.
SimilarWeb returns you the overall traffic of a site, along with traffic channels, bounce rate, pages per visit, and also dwell time.
The traffic estimate is more by around 180%.
Otherwise, all the other metrics are fairly accurate.
The percentage of traffic from various channels are accurate.
SimilarWeb has extensions for your browsers. They let you estimate the traffic of sites as you browse.
Alexa
Alexa rankings is the metric by Amazon.
The rankings is based on the traffic that a site got over a period of time. This metric is used by advertisers to determine the traffic of a site.
By looking at the Alexa rank of a site, you can roughly determine the traffic that a site may be getting.
Along with the traffic rank, it also displays the demographics, bounce rate and visit duration.
Remember that Alexa counts only the traffic sent by the visitors having Alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.
You can't rely fully on Alexa rankings. Because the rankings can be artificially boosted by the use of some blackhat techniques.
QuantCast
This tool displays the traffic of a site that is quantified by the tool.
QuantCast displays the web traffic estimates of the site. It also displays data about audience demographics, languages and also interests.
The main drawback is that some of the popular sites are not being displayed by the tool.
According to Moz, QuantCast only covers 13.99% of the data.
Rank2Traffic
This is another traffic estimator tool. It displays you the graph of the traffic and Alexa rank for the site.
The traffic is not that accurate and is more by around 300%.
It works very well for determining the Alexa rank history of a site.
Google Trends
You can get to know the amount of audience who search for a particular site on Google search.
You can just enter the brand name in the search bar and get the traffic trend over the years.
You can notice in the above image that the traffic of ShoutMeLoud is increased in the recent years. The traffic of QuickSprout is seeing a slight decline may be due to NeilPatel.com.
Although Google Trends do not show you the actual figures, it can give a great idea about the overall traffic trend in various countries.
For this tool to show you results, the brand needs to be popular.
Strategies to estimate traffic of a site
- Many of the popular blogs have the “advertise here” page on their site. In that page, they may have disclosed the traffic they are getting on their blog. This is one of the most underutilized strategies to determine the traffic of your competitors.
- By looking at the domain authority of a site, you can determine the search traffic that the site is getting. D.A is a measure of ranking power of the site. For this, you need to know average search traffic a site with a certain authority gets. This strategy only works if the link profile graph of the site is consistent over time.
- Analyze the comments on a site. This strategy works only if most of the traffic is natural and not referrals. On average, every 150 visitors / 250 page views on a site equates to a comment. By analyzing the number of new comments on a site, you can get to know a rough estimate of traffic to a site.
- Make use of Buzzsumo to determine the social popularity of a site.
Final words
There’s no completely accurate way to determine the traffic that a site is getting.
I use SEMRush, Compete and SimilarWeb to determine the nature of traffic that a site is getting. QuantCast is good, but does not display the traffic of the majority of the sites.
Once you gain experience in your niche and blogging, you will be able to determine the traffic of a website more and more accurately.
There’s no single tool that can estimate the traffic accurately. You need to make use of several resources, tools and your experience to estimate the traffic.
The post Top 10 Tools and Strategies to Estimate Traffic of any Site appeared first on GoBloggingTips.