How to find out the traffic of someone else's website?

Finding out your own website's traffic data is easy. You can use Google Analytics, plugins for your CMS, or services like Hotjar, Clicky, Mixpanel, and others. Choose the option that's most convenient for you and use it. But how do you find out someone else's website's traffic? How do you research your competitors and find ways to outperform them? And why do you even need to know how much traffic other companies in your niche are getting? These are the questions we want to answer today.

Why track website traffic statistics?

It's important to understand that your business, like your website, doesn't exist in a vacuum. Today, there are no niches left in the world that aren't competitive. Therefore, if you want to compete effectively, you absolutely must understand not only your audience but also other market players. 

Analyzing someone else's website traffic is a crucial component of successfully managing and developing a web resource. Here are just a few reasons why it's essential:

• Content optimization. Identifying the most visited pages helps you better understand what content is interesting and relevant to your potential customers. This allows you to adjust your content strategy and work more effectively. This also allows you to identify exit points where visitors leave your site and eliminate them.
• Improving the promotion strategy. Statistics help you test different variations of pages, UX/UI designs, calls to action, and more. Furthermore, you can analyze your competitors, borrow successful ideas, and avoid their mistakes when creating and implementing your promotion strategy. 
• Increasing conversion. Analyzing someone else's website traffic and conversions helps you objectively evaluate the effectiveness of a web resource and, again, use the most successful solutions to your advantage.
• Searching for ideas for development. Analyzing your competitors' most traffic-driven pages can provide ideas for improving or creating new content. And understanding which features or design elements are working well for others can help you improve your own website.
• General market analysis. Information about popular products, topics, and competitors' pages helps you objectively assess the market situation. With in-depth analysis, you can also analyze traffic seasonality and fluctuations, which helps you more accurately forecast demand and plan marketing campaigns.

Beyond all of the above, traffic statistics from other sites can be useful for identifying existing problems. You'll be able to identify which sections your competitors are losing traffic to and which elements of their strategy aren't working properly. This means you're learning from others' mistakes instead of your own. Isn't that a compelling argument?

Forming a list of competitors

The first and perhaps most important step at this stage is a thorough study of your market and niche. Determine the industry and market segment you operate in. This could be a geographic region, type of product or service, price range, and so on. You also need to define your positioning—your unique value proposition—to understand who you're competing with for customer attention.

Once you've accurately defined your market and niche, you can begin building a list of competitors. There are several ways to do this, but we recommend combining them:

1. Use search engines. The easiest way is to use relevant keywords related to your business or product. Search for them in Google (or another search engine) to see which of your competitors are currently ranking at the top.
2. Study the advertising activities. See who's advertising similar products or services to get an even more accurate picture of your direct competitors. It's also helpful to analyze social media ads to understand who's targeting the same audience.
3. Analyze links and mentions. Many tools, such as Ahrefs, allow you to find out which sites link to your competitors, thereby identifying the key players in your niche. Google Alerts or Mention can be used to monitor brand mentions.

Additionally, you can survey your own clients to find out what other companies they're considering and what they like and dislike about them. Attending various industry events and conferences can also be very helpful, whether they're held in your region or you're willing to attend one in another city. Not only can you identify competitors here, but you can also gain valuable insider information that can help you more effectively develop your own business.

We would like to give you some more useful tips:

1. Segment your competitors

We recommend dividing them into three categories:

• direct competitors - those who offer the same or similar products or services;
• indirect competitors are those that provide alternative solutions to the same needs or problems;
• Potential competitors are those who have only recently appeared and may enter your market.

Naturally, the primary focus should be on the first category. But monitoring indirect and potential competitors is also very useful.

2. Keep the list updated

Regularly monitor the market for new players entering the niche or changes in the positions of existing ones. Monitor trends in your industry that could impact the competitive landscape. Remember that business is rapidly changing. If you don't adapt to these changes promptly, you risk losing ground compared to other companies. Keep your finger on the pulse and note all important changes.

How to Find Out Website Traffic: 7 Services

Although we've described some practical ways to analyze competitors above, they don't allow you to determine a particular website's traffic. Just because a website ranks high in Google doesn't necessarily mean it gets a lot of traffic. Conversely, ranking third, fifth, or even tenth doesn't necessarily mean it gets little traffic. For a more accurate traffic analysis, we recommend using specialized services. These are the ones we'll discuss below.

SimilarWeb

This is one of the world's most popular traffic analysis services. SimilarWeb's database contains over 100 million websites, and its crawlers have indexed over 10 billion pages. Using it, you can:

• analyze traffic of any public website;
• receive data on advertising campaigns;
• analyze behavioral factors;
• find words and phrases that people use to find a site in a search;
• identify the most effective traffic channels.

SimilarWeb offers a free 7-day trial, and monthly subscriptions start at $14,500.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful service for SEO analysis and link profile research. It helps you analyze your website's traffic and rankings. In terms of competitor analysis, Ahrefs allows you to:

• evaluate the effectiveness and volume of organic traffic;
• study the backlink profile;
• analyze the effectiveness of paid traffic;
• evaluate the structure of the website, etc.

An Ahrefs subscription starts at $14,129 per month, and you get two months free when you pay annually.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a popular service among internet marketers, offering user-friendly and informative charts and statistics for both your own and other people's projects. It helps you learn:

• quantity and approximate cost of organic and paid traffic;
• the share of traffic that top keywords attract to the site;
• the amount of traffic attracted through paid tools.

A Pro subscription will cost you $14,999 per month.

Serpstat

The platform offers a fairly comprehensive set of tools for SEO analysis, keyword analysis, contextual advertising, and ads. Analyzing competitor sites with Serpstat will help you:

• find out the estimated website traffic;
• monitor positions;
• track traffic seasonality, etc.

Overall, Serpstat is more useful for analyzing your own website, but it can also be used to study your competitors' websites.

The cost of an individual subscription to Serpstat is $59 per month.

DataForSEO

A service from Ukrainian developers that provides a range of tools for analyzing your website and those of your competitors. With it, you can:

• track website rankings in search engines;
• analyze backlinks;
• research keywords.

Importantly, DataForSEO stores data for a year, making it easier to track traffic and ranking trends over time. The price of using DataForSEO depends on the services you're interested in. For example, you can access a keyword database for $40 or a SERP database for $50. Similar offers are available for backlink analysis, website visibility, e-commerce elements, and more. 

SpyFu

SpyFu is another convenient, though less well-known, service that provides a range of tools for solving SEO problems, including keyword analysis and competitor research.

With SpyFu you can:

• find out the share and estimated cost of organic and paid traffic;
• find out the monthly number of visitors;
• view traffic dynamics for 6 months, a year, 2 years, 5 years, or for the entire existence of the site;
• view the amount of traffic for the main keywords;
• see which pages are driving the most traffic.

The basic SpyFu plan starts at $14.33 per month when paid annually.

SE Ranking

A popular tool for competitor analysis, including studying website user traffic. With SE Ranking, you can learn:

• Which keywords bring in the most visitors?;
• how much traffic does advertising attract;
• which pages of the site have the highest number of clicks from search engines, etc.

The basic subscription to SE Ranking costs $52 per month.

Comparison table of services

As you can see, there are many ways to analyze someone else's website traffic and thoroughly study your competitors. Ultimately, the methods and tools you use aren't all that important. The key is to conduct such analysis if you want to not only be present in the market but also compete effectively in your niche.

We hope you found this information useful and can put it into practice. Wishing you success in your business and growth!