In the world of digital marketing, benchmarking is an activity that is often carried out. Benchmarking, or evaluating performance based on comparisons, has an important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.
The reason is, by carrying out these activities we can gain insight into how to increase the visibility and performance of the website in search engines.
Which tool is used for measuring site traffic?
In the context of SEO, you can carry out benchmarking activities, one of which is by checking the traffic of other websites.
Wow, then should we ask for their Google Analytics data? Of course, this is not possible to do, after all such performance data is confidential.
However, don't stop there friends. The good news is, there are websites that provide tools to check website traffic estimates. So, you can still find out your competitors' estimated website traffic without needing to enter their Google Analytics.
When you do search or Googling activities, there are actually quite a lot of sites that offer tools for checking traffic. In this article, you will recommend several popular tools for checking website traffic estimates.
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO tool for checking traffic that is quite commonly used by many people.
From the image above, Ahrefs is able to provide an estimate of the site's organic traffic along with the number of queries (keywords) that rank on Google and the value of the traffic.
However, to get further and more comprehensive data, you need to subscribe to their premium service. The prices are as follows:
2. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is also an SEO tool that you can use to check organic traffic estimates from a website for free.
Apart from traffic, you can also get information on organic keywords (keywords that rank on Google) and the number of site backlinks via Ubersuggest.
3. Semrush
.webp "How to Analyze Competitor Website Traffic and What Are the Benefits?")
Apart from Ahrefs, Semrush is also widely used by SEO practitioners. Different from Ubersuggest and Ahrefs when estimating traffic checks. Semrush provides more complete and comprehensive data, they also provide explanations other than traffic estimates.
There are also the number of backlinks, popular countries accessing the website, and even the search intent of the keywords targeted by the website.
4. Similarweb
Different from previous SEO tools, Similarweb provides a variety of information that is not limited to traffic estimates only.
There are several other metrics such as:
- Total visits
- Bounce rate
- Channel to get to the site
- Engagement time (time the user is on the site)
What are Limitations of 3rd Party Tools for Checking Traffic?
Using tools to check site traffic has limitations that are important to understand. Some of these tools, although useful, are only able to provide traffic estimates. This means that the data obtained cannot be considered a definite and absolute calculation.
Fundamental differences in data collection and analysis methods between third-party tools and tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console, of course cause variations in the results produced.
Google Analytics provides direct and detailed data about website traffic, based on user data collected directly from the site.
Includes information about user-behavior, traffic sources, conversions, and other important metrics. Meanwhile, Google Search Console, on the other hand, provides data about site performance in Google search results, including the number of impressions, clicks, and average search query ranking.
What are the advantages of looking at competitors websites?
Even though it only provides estimated calculations, of course there are still benefits and advantages. Checking competitor website traffic certainly has benefits that we can get.
1. Comparing Your Website Development with Competitors (Benchmarking)
In SEO, we compete with billions of websites spread across the internet. However, you don't need to benchmark with all sites.
Try to do research for simple benchmarking such as finding out which sites also provide the same content or sell the same products/services as you.
One of the benchmarking in SEO is the comparison of your site's traffic with competitor sites. From this traffic, you can use these parameters as a benchmark:
- Number of contents
- Created content niche
- Content quality
- Quality of technical SEO
- Backlinks/PR media/brand mentions
2. Estimating Audience Size
Checking website traffic can also be a way to estimate audience size. The method:
- Find competitor sites with the highest traffic or market share. The characteristics are ranking 1-3 in queries in a certain niche
- pay attention to organic keywords and what industry they are in
From websites or brands that control market share, you can find out how big the audience size is in your industry.
It is important to create targets that are in accordance with the SMART goals principle (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based). Not a target number that "falls from the sky".
3. Determine Traffic Targets
In SEO optimization, it is definitely accompanied by KPI targets. One of them is organic traffic targets. You can do the same thing by estimating audience size.
However, the difference is, when determining your traffic target, you also have to ensure that you have sufficient resources to achieve that traffic target.
4. Content Gap Analysis
Competitor traffic is data that you can use to apply content gap analysis. Usually, sites with high traffic also have quite a lot of content or pages that are indexed.
That means, you can do content gap analysis. What content is the biggest source of traffic and why is that? And is the competitor's content more complete?
From content gap analysis, you will find answers to these questions so that they can be taken into consideration when creating and determining next steps.
How often should you check competitor traffic?
Usually, sites that provide tools to check competitor site traffic will update the data once a month.
So, you can check competitor site traffic once a month, no need every day.
Conclusion
Estimating competitor site traffic data can be useful for many things, such as determining targets, estimating audience size, and conducting analysis.
However, it needs to be emphasized that, even if you know your competitor's traffic, you don't know the purpose behind creating content or pages that are successful in attracting that traffic, so it's best not to take ideas at face value from competitor sites.
If you just copy it outright. That means it's not much different from following someone else's diet menu, even though their health goals may be different or may not necessarily suit yours.
Take advantage of competitor traffic estimation data for the success of your SEO strategy!