Analyze Your Competitors' Performance
Written by Backlinko Team
Knowing how much traffic your competitors get, where it comes from, and how engaged their visitors are can help you benchmark your performance. And it lets you identify new opportunities to improve your strategy.
What Is a Website Traffic Checker?
A website traffic checker analyzes and estimates visitor data for a given website.
It shows you how much traffic a website receives (usually per month), along with where that traffic comes from, details about traffic value, and more.
Some traffic checkers (like ours) also provide insights into how that traffic engages with a website, along with the keywords that drove that traffic.
Why Website Traffic Analysis Matters
Analyzing your own website traffic can help you understand whether your SEO efforts are working.
So you can understand if you’re driving traffic for your target keywords. Or if recent page optimizations are leading to ranking gains.
But traffic analysis really starts providing value when you analyze your competitors.
This helps you:
- Understand your industry’s online landscape and spot market opportunities
- See how you stack up against competitors and identify their successful strategies (so you can replicate them)
- Confirm whether your marketing efforts are paying off compared to industry standards
What This Traffic Checker Can Show You
Monthly Visits for Any Website
See how much traffic your competitors receive, and their performance over time:
If their traffic increases a lot in a short space of time, it could indicate that they’ve launched a new content marketing campaign. Or picked up lots of new backlinks.
Engagement Metrics Like Pages per Visit and Average Visit Duration
Find out whether the visitors your competitors receive are actually engaging with their content. Compare this data with your own metrics to see where you need to improve.
For example, if your competitors seem to keep their visitors on the page for longer than you, check out their content to understand why:
- Do they have more images than you?
- Do they format their posts differently?
- Are they doing a better job of meeting the search intent?
Use these insights to improve your own content.
Top Organic Keywords
See which search terms drive the most traffic to your competitors to find gaps in your own keyword strategy:
You can see metrics like:
- Their current rank (and position changes)
- The percentage of their total traffic that their top keywords drive
- The total search volume for each keyword
- Search trends for each keyword
Backlinks and Referring Domains
See how your backlink profile stacks up against competitors. And understand whether you might need to scale your outreach efforts.
For example, if it looks like your competitor is attracting a lot of new referring domains, they might be running a link building campaign.
To keep pace with them, you might want to ramp up your own outreach efforts to boost your site’s authority.
How to Get the Most Out of This Free Traffic Checker
- Identify your top competitors: Enter each one into the tool to see their traffic metrics.
- Check their engagement metrics: Getting traffic is one thing, but providing valuable and engaging content is another. Compare these metrics to your own to understand where you need to improve.
- Track changes over time: Regularly check your competitors’ traffic to identify emerging trends. Also keep tabs on their backlink profiles and top keywords to spot potential strategy changes.
How to Make Strategic Decisions Using Traffic Data
Once you’ve gathered competitor traffic data, you need to turn these insights into actionable strategies.
Here’s how:
Analyze Traffic Sources
If your competitor’s organic traffic surges, analyze their recent content and keyword targeting. Are they targeting a new topic that you’ve missed?
Also pay attention to their top ranking keywords. If they’re driving a significant portion of their traffic, or they’ve recently gained positions, check their content.
Have they made major website improvements?
Are these topics you could also target and steal some of their traffic?
Identify Content Performance Patterns
Identify your competitor’s most-visited pages and analyze their content structure.
Are these pages you could create better versions of?
If so, start creating quality content on those topics and monitor your rankings over time.
Analyze Engagement Metrics
Engagement metrics can have a BIG impact on your business’s bottom line. You can use our traffic checker to understand how you stack up against your competitors for key engagement metrics.
For example, if your competitors’ visitors tend to stay longer, examine their content depth and format. Is it easier to follow than yours? Does it have more engaging images?
And if your competitors’ visitors are viewing more pages per visit, it could suggest they have a stronger internal linking structure than you.
Finally, if you have a high bounce rate compared to competitors, look for opportunities to create better-optimized content that gives users what they want.
How to Troubleshoot Common Traffic Checker Issues
While our traffic checker is straightforward to use, there are some cases where you could run into issues.
Here’s how to solve the most common problems:
No Data Available
This is likely the most common issue you’ll run into.
To fix it:
- Check you’ve entered the URL correctly, including the correct domain extension (like .com or .org)
- Remove any additional parameters or tracking codes from the URL
- Try checking the domain with and without “www”
- Try again another time (for new websites, it might just take time for data to appear in the system)
Data Discrepancies
As with any SEO tool, you’ll likely see differences in the data when you compare our traffic checker to another one. This happens because different tools use their own ways to collect and display the data and insights they find.
Do the following to ensure you interpret the data correctly:
- Remember that traffic estimates are based on sampling and may differ from actual analytics
- Compare data across multiple months (or years) to identify reliable patterns
- Focus on trends rather than exact numbers
- Consider regional differences that might affect data collection
Unexpected Traffic Drops
If the issue isn’t with the tool, and instead is with the website’s traffic itself, there could be a number of causes.
To find the reason:
- Cross-reference drops with major algorithm updates
- Check if the website underwent a domain change or migration
- Consider seasonal fluctuations that might affect the numbers
Why You Can Trust This Traffic Checker
Our traffic checker is powered by Semrush, which collects anonymized clickstream data from diverse panels, along with real-time search engine results. Proprietary machine learning algorithms then process this data to provide accurate traffic estimates.
All of Semrush’s tools use a similar, rigorous process to help you develop a winning digital marketing strategy based on real data.