SEO
15 Unique Ways to Check Competitor Website Traffic
You only need three tools to get sixteen highly actionable data points on your competitors’ traffic.
Before we dive in, let’s set the right expectations: no tool will give you your competitor’s exact traffic data. However, it’s still well enough to see what works for them, copy their best ideas, or set realistic benchmarks.
We’ll cover:
- Types of data you can access, such as traffic volume, trends, organic and paid keywords, and audience insights.
- Practical use cases, including benchmarking, tracking progress, identifying content gaps, boosting your SEO and SEM, and negotiating budgets.
- Last but not least, how this data is gathered and its reliability.
With these tools and insights, you’ll be well-equipped to understand and outperform your competitors’ website traffic.
We’ll start with organic search traffic — the source on which you’ll get the most data.
How to analyze competitor organic search traffic
Organic search traffic refers to the clicks a site gets from search engines, excluding search ads.
There’s a lot you can tell about your competitors’ organic traffic and a lot you can tell from it. Here are my favorite twelve use cases with detailed instructions.
You can check that in seconds for free, right now:
The tool will also show you where in the world the traffic is coming from, some of the top pages and keywords, and traffic value (i.e., the value of the organic search traffic, if it were to be acquired via PPC in Google Ads).
Organic competitors are the sites that compete with you for the same organic keywords in search engines.
Typically, you’ll have more organic competitors than your regular direct business competitors. For example, a 3D printer manufacturer may be competing for a fair share of keywords with a 3D printing magazine — completely different businesses, same keywords.
So by rounding up your top organic competitors, you gain a bigger pool of keyword ideas you can potentially target. Much bigger than if you’d just take into account your direct competitors.
Here’s how to identify all organic competitors.
- Open Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and enter your domain.
- Go to the Organic competitors report.
From there, you can look at the common keywords to see where they outrank you or click on Competitor’s keywords to see keywords you don’t rank for but they do (a.k.a. your content gap).
If your competitor is doing SEO, typically their blog will attract most of their organic traffic. But this is not always the case. They may have found other ways of getting clicks from Google, like free tools or free resources, and you could do the same.
- Open Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Go to the Site structure report.
For example, someone analyzing our site could see that our free writing tools get more organic traffic than years of writing on the blog.
To see your competitor’s top performing pages:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Go to the Top pages report.
The first use case here is targeting the same keywords as their top pages to channel some of that traffic your way.
There’s more. You can use the report to see which pages contributed to an uptrend or downtrend in your competitor’s traffic.
Or, focus on top-performing pages and use the Compare pages view to see when those pages started to pick up traffic.
Now to see what the competitors did to improve the pages, click on the caret next to the page and click Inspect.
Then choose the date on the calendar and view changes made to the text in that time.
If you’re already doing SEO or considering it, seeing a list of your competitors’ keywords is almost like they’ve shared their keyword research with you.
You can use keyword data to find:
- Top-performing keywords and “steal” some of their traffic with your own content.
- Top-performing keywords in specific countries.
- Keywords with specific terms to find content ideas around certain topics or phrases.
- Low-difficulty keywords (typically, faster to rank).
To see your competitors’ keywords:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Go to the Organic keywords report.
- Use the filters to find what you need. For instance, use the KD filter to find low-competition keywords.
For example, you can track the ranking history of your competitor’s top traffic-generating keywords. If you see sudden spikes, it likely means they’ve updated the content to increase ranking. By using the calendar feature mentioned above, you can learn how they did it.
One of the best ways to find organic traffic you’re potentially missing out on is to do a content gap analysis. In SEO, it means identifying the keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t. Some of those keywords can make perfect topics for you to cover.
In Ahefs, you can do a content gap analysis automatically:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool.
- Enter your domain in the Target section.
- Enter your competitors’ domains in the Competitors section.
- Hit “Compare”.
- Click the Content Gap report.
Toggle Main positions to exclude your competitors’ rankings in SERP features like “Top stories” and “Image packs.”
Now look through the report and identify keywords that are relevant for your site. The volume column will show you which keywords are likely to send the most traffic.
Short-term organic traffic performance can inform you of the latest developments in your competitors’ rankings (say, within the last 24 hours to a couple of weeks).
For example, you can observe the impact of the latest Google Update on their site, see how much traffic they gained or lost last month, or check if any of their newly launched pages are already picking up traffic.
To see short-term organic traffic performance:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- In the Overview report, choose a timeframe in the Changes mode.
This will adjust the top-level metrics and traffic by location panel and show you the changes over the specified period.
You can go as deep as day-to-day traffic changes — a very helpful thing if you want to see Google’s update impact on your competitors’ traffic.
Date comparison is available in multiple tools and reports across Ahrefs.
As for long-term traffic performance, this allows to set a traffic goal to match or overtake your competitor’s traffic, and plan your budget based on competitor’s performance. You can also use it to forecast your competitors’ traffic.
To see long-term traffic performance:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Turn on the Years mode in the traffic graph.
- Adjust the time frame and export the data if needed.
Seeing multiple sites on one graph is useful if you want to identify the leader in your niche, compare your site to a few competitors simultaneously, and determine if you are catching up to the leader or if someone is catching up to you.
Here’s how:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your domain.
- Add competitors using the Competitors tab.
Organic share of voice (SOV) is an SEO metric that shows how much traffic goes to your pages compared to competitors’.
In other words, if you want to see your overall organic search traffic share in the market, and eventually increase it, this is the metric you’d want to use.
SOV is based on tracked keywords, so you first need to add them to the tool. These can be keywords you target on your blog, your product pages, or even all of your important keywords together.
- Go to Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.
- Start a New project.
- Select keywords to track. You can use the filters to refine the list suggested by the tool and add some keywords later on. Make sure to choose only important locations for your site.
- Add competitors. You can add specific sites or choose from the ones suggested by the tool. Notice the keyword intersect — the higher the number, the “closer” the competitor.
Once you finish the set-up, you will be able to see and regularly track SOV in the Competitors Overview section in Rank Tracker.
One of the ways your competitors could be getting traffic is from links from other sites (a.k.a. referral traffic).
Knowing who links to your competitors allows you to pursue the same or similar links which can help you not only get more referral traffic but also boost your SEO and increase your brand awareness.
To find pages with a high probability of sending traffic to your competitors, look for backlinks from pages with significant organic traffic. Here’s how:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Open Backlinks report. Pages with the most traffic will be displayed on top by default.
From there you can use the Referring page title filter to see only reviews or rankings where you could be listed, too. Simply add in words like “vs, review, tool, tools, top” as a way to identify these pages.
Here’s an example of such a page:
Another way to analyze your competitors’ traffic is to treat them as one entity. This allows you to:
- Benchmark your site traffic trend to your competitors as a market segment.
- Identify broader industry trends and seasonal patterns in traffic.
- Assess the collective impact of major events, such as changes in search engine algorithms or economic shifts.
- Monitor the overall health and growth rate of your industry.
For this, use the Portfolios feature in Ahrefs. The image below shows aggregated data for four sites, including organic traffic and paid traffic (from Google Search Ads).
Here’s how to set it up:
- Dashboard and click Create > Portfolio.
- Fill in the URLs you want to track. Note the URL mode selector. Use “Domain” to track the entire domain with subdomains, “Path” for folders, and “Exact URL” for single pages.
How to analyze competitor paid search traffic
Paid search traffic refers to the clicks a site gets from search ads on search engine result pages. Here’s how to check your competitors’s paid search traffic and how to use that knowledge to your advantage.
If you’re running search ads, checking out your competitors’ paid keywords can give you ready-made keyword research. This lets you see which keywords are working for them and helps you fine-tune your own ad strategy to target those high-performing keywords.
What’s more, you can reveal paid search data Google Keyword Planner hides by default: search volume for a particular keyword instead of a search volume range for a group of keywords.
And even if you’re not investing in ads, this info can still be super useful. It usually means these keywords are important to your competitors because they know these keywords bring in customers. Chances are, these keywords could be important for your business, too.
To find your competitors’ paid keywords:
- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.
- Open Paid keywords report.
From here, you can use filters to find keywords that meet your CPC, traffic, or relevance criteria, and sort the data to see the keywords which bring the most traffic.
Notice the Paid/organic traffic share bar. If you see both blue and yellow color, that means your competitor has invested in the keyword twice (through content and ads) and is trying to get as much SERP real estate as possible — consider pursuing these keywords as well.
Another way to gauge a keyword’s importance is to look at its ad position history. A long and consistent history suggests it’s likely a valuable ‘money’ keyword, while a short history might indicate your competitor is just experimenting with it.
Want to check out their ad copy and landing pages? Head to the Ads report. You can set the location where your competitor runs their ads and see the landing pages and keywords associated with each ad.
Interested to see how much your competitors spend to get all of that paid traffic?
- Go to Site Explorer.
- Enter your competitor’s domain.
- Open Paid pages report.
- Set the preferred location to see the budget per country (leave it set to all locations to see the total ad spend).
- Set the Performance report to Paid traffic cost set and adjust the timeframe.
Use this data to set a benchmark for traffic performance relative to ad spend and to negotiate the budget for your campaigns.
How to analyze other traffic sources
If you’re interested in the overall competitor traffic performance, here’s where to look.
To get a quick answer to how much traffic your competitors get overall (from all traffic sources), you can get that information for free with Similarweb.
Once you set up a free account, simply go to Website analysis > Website performance report.
Arguably, the best way to use Similarweb is in comparison mode. This approach ensures that the data is directionally accurate: whether the data is overestimated or underestimated, it is consistently so across all sites. By comparing your traffic with your competitors, you can identify the relative differences that set you apart.
Similarweb is not the only tool with general traffic insights. Another one is Sparktoro, an audience research tool.
What’s great about Sparktoro is that its data and functionality revolve around the users behind the clicks. So you can use Similarweb to understand how popular the site is and then Sparktoro to get to know the people who visit it. Take that data and use it for persona development, fine-tuning your messaging, and looking up influencers to partner with or sites to advertise on.
Simply set up an account at Sparktoro and type your competitor’s domain in the search bar. Make sure the “Visit the website” mode is on.
From there go to:
- Social networks: scroll down a bit and see which social network the brand uses the most. This not only tells which social networks likely send the most traffic but also which proved to be the most engaging.
- Demographics tab: see data like gender, age, geography and interests. What’s unique about this data is that it comes from social media profiles.
- Social accounts tab: to see what social media accounts site visitors are likely to follow and engage with. This is a great source of potential influencers to work with.
- YouTube channels, Reddit, and Podcast tabs: see where it’s highly likely to meet your competitors’ (and possibly yours) audience.
Where does the data come from? Is it accurate?
Depending on the tool, the data on your competitors will mostly come from:
- Web crawlers. Also known as spiders or bots. They are automated programs that browse the internet to gather information. For example, Ahrefs’ crawler is called AhrefsBot, one of the most active ones around.
- Clickstream data. Clickstream data refers to the recording of a user’s online activity as they navigate through websites. This data is anonymized and aggregated.
- Google Keyword Planner and Search Console. These tools provide valuable data on search engine performance and keyword usage. Also, this data is anonymized and aggregated.
- Social media APIs. Some social media platforms allow third-party tools to access their data.
This means that, in most cases, the data is estimated instead of actual data taken from your competitors and handed over to you.
So, when it comes to the data’s accuracy, you should expect a blend of estimated accuracy and directional accuracy. Despite best efforts, the data will be approximated and designed to give you an idea of relative performance because there’s no other way.
This also means that if you’re interested in a particular type of traffic, say traffic from search engines, it’s probably best to get a dedicated tool for that. You’ll get access to bigger data sets and more capable functionality, allowing you to do more.
Final thoughts
Want to go deeper into competitor analysis? Check out our other guides to go beyond traffic data:
SEO
Gen Z Ditches Google, Turns To Reddit For Product Searches
A new report from Reddit, in collaboration with GWI and AmbassCo, sheds light on the evolving search behaviors of Generation Z consumers.
The study surveyed over 3,000 internet users across the UK, US, and Germany, highlighting significant changes in how young people discover and research products online.
Here’s an overview of key findings and the implications for marketers.
Decline In Traditional Search
The study found that Gen Z uses search engines to find new brands and products less often.
That’s because they shop online differently. They’re less interested in looking for expert reviews or spending much time searching for products.
There are also frustrations with mobile-friendliness and complex interfaces on traditional search platforms.
Because of this, traditional SEO strategies might not work well for reaching younger customers.
Takeaway
Companies trying to reach Gen Z might need to try new methods instead of just focusing on being visible on Google and other search engines.
Rise Of Social Media Discovery
Gen Z is increasingly using social media to find new brands and products.
The study shows that Gen Z has used social media for product discovery 36% more frequently since 2018.
This change is affecting how young people shop online. Instead of searching for products, they expect brands to appear in their social media feeds.
Because of this, companies trying to reach young customers need to pay more attention to how they present themselves on social media.
Takeaway
To succeed at marketing to Gen Z, businesses will likely need to focus on two main things:
- Ensure that your content appears more often in social media feeds.
- Create posts people want to share and interact with.
Trust Issues With Influencer Marketing
Even though more people are finding products through social media, the report shows that Gen Z is less likely to trust what social media influencers recommend.
These young shoppers often don’t believe in posts that influencers are paid to make or products they promote.
Instead, they prefer to get information from sources that feel more real and are driven by regular people in online communities.
Takeaway
Because of this lack of trust, companies must focus on being genuine and building trust when they try to get their websites to appear in search results or create ads.
Some good ways to connect with these young consumers might be to use content created by regular users, encourage honest product reviews, and create authentic conversations within online communities.
Challenges With Current Search Experiences
The research shows that many people are unhappy with how search engines work right now.
More than 60% of those surveyed want search results to be more trustworthy. Almost half of users don’t like looking through many search result pages.
Gen Z is particularly bothered by inaccurate information and unreliable reviews.
Takeaway
Given the frustration with search quality, marketers should prioritize creating accurate, trustworthy content.
This can help build brand credibility, leading to more direct visits.
Reddit: A Trusted Alternative
The report suggests that Gen Z trusts Reddit when looking up products—it’s their third most trusted source, after friends and family and review websites.
Young users like Reddit because it’s community-based and provides specific answers to users’ questions, making it feel more real.
It’s worth noting that this report comes from Reddit itself, which probably influenced why it’s suggesting its own platform.
Takeaway
Companies should focus more on being part of smaller, specific online groups frequented by Gen Z.
That could include Reddit or any other forum.
Why SEJ Cares
As young people change how they look for information online, this study gives businesses important clues about connecting with future customers.
Here’s what to remember:
- Traditional search engine use is declining among Gen Z.
- Social media is increasingly vital for product discovery.
- There’s growing skepticism towards influencer marketing.
- Current search experiences often fail to meet user expectations.
- Community-based platforms like Reddit are gaining trust.
Featured Image: rafapress/Shutterstock
SEO
Google Clarifies Organization Merchant Returns Structured Data
Google quietly updated their organization structured data documentation in order to clarify two points about merchant returns in response to feedback about an ambiguity in the previous version.
Organization Structured Data and Merchant Returns
Google recently expanded their Organization structured data so that it could now accommodate a merchant return policy. The change added support for adding a sitewide merchant return policy.
The original reason for adding this support:
“Adding support for Organization-level return policies
What: Added documentation on how to specify a general return policy for an Organization as a whole.
Why: This makes it easier to define and maintain general return policies for an entire site.”
However that change left unanswered about what will happen if a site has a sitewide return policy but also has a different policy for individual products.
The clarification applies for the specific scenario of when a site uses both a sitewide return policy in their structured data and another one for specific products.
What Takes Precedence?
What happens if a merchant uses both a sitewide and product return structured data? Google’s new documentation states that Google will ignore the sitewide product return policy in favor of a more granular product-level policy in the structured data.
The clarification states:
“If you choose to provide both organization-level and product-level return policy markup, Google defaults to the product-level return policy markup.”
Change Reflected Elsewhere
Google also updated the documentation to reflect the scenario of the use of two levels of merchant return policies in another section that discusses whether structured data or merchant feed data takes precedence. There is no change to the policy, merchant center data still takes precedence.
This is the old documentation:
“If you choose to use both markup and settings in Merchant Center, Google will only use the information provided in Merchant Center for any products submitted in your Merchant Center product feeds, including automated feeds.”
This is the same section but updated with additional wording:
“If you choose to use both markup (whether at the organization-level or product-level, or both) and settings in Merchant Center, Google will only use the information provided in Merchant Center for any products submitted in your Merchant Center product feeds, including automated feeds.”
Read the newly updated Organization structured data documentation:
Organization (Organization) structured data – MerchantReturnPolicy
Featured Image by Shutterstock/sutlafk
SEO
What Is It & How To Write It
In this guide, you will learn about alternative text (known as alt text): what it is, why it is important for on-page SEO, how to use it correctly, and more.
It’s often overlooked, but every image on your website should have alt text. More information is better, and translating visual information into text is important for search engine bots attempting to understand your website and users with screen readers.
Alt text is one more source of information that relates ideas and content together on your website.
This practical and to-the-point guide contains tips and advice you can immediately use to improve your website’s image SEO and accessibility.
What Is Alt Text?
Alternative text (or alt text) – also known as the alt attribute or the alt tag (which is not technically correct because it is not a tag) – is simply a piece of text that describes the image in the HTML code.
What Are The Uses Of Alt Text?
The original function of alt text was simply to describe an image that could not be loaded.
Many years ago, when the internet was much slower, alt text would help you know the content of an image that was too heavy to be loaded in your browser.
Today, images rarely fail to load – but if they do, then it is the alt text you will see in place of an image.
Alt text also helps search engine bots understand the image’s content and context.
More importantly, alt text is critical for accessibility and for people using screen readers:
- Alt text helps people with disabilities (for example, using screen readers) learn about the image’s content.
Of course, like every element of SEO, it is often misused or, in some cases, even abused.
Let’s now take a closer look at why alt text is important.
Why Alt Text Is Important
The web and websites are a very visual experience. It is hard to find a website without images or graphic elements.
That’s why alt text is very important.
Alt text helps translate the image’s content into words, thus making the image accessible to a wider audience, including people with disabilities and search engine bots that are not clever enough yet to fully understand every image, its context, and its meaning.
Why Alt Text Is Important For SEO
Alt text is an important element of on-page SEO optimization.
Proper alt text optimization makes your website stand a better chance of ranking in Google image searches.
Yes, alt text is a ranking factor for Google image search.
Depending on your website’s niche and specificity, Google image search traffic may play a huge role in your website’s overall success.
For example, in the case of ecommerce websites, users very often start their search for products with a Google image search instead of typing the product name into the standard Google search.
Google and other search engines may display fewer product images (or not display them at all) if you fail to take care of their alt text optimization.
Without proper image optimization, you may lose a lot of potential traffic and customers.
Why Alt Text Is Important For Accessibility
Visibility in Google image search is very important, but there is an even more important consideration: Accessibility.
Fortunately, in recent years, more focus has been placed on accessibility (i.e., making the web accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities and/or using screen readers).
Suppose the alt text of your images actually describes their content instead of, for example, stuffing keywords. In that case, you are helping people who cannot see this image better understand it and the content of the entire web page.
Let’s say one of your web pages is an SEO audit guide that contains screenshots from various crawling tools.
Would it not be better to describe the content of each screenshot instead of placing the same alt text of “SEO audit” into every image?
Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Alt Text Examples
Finding many good and bad examples of alt text is not difficult. Let me show you a few, sticking to the above example with an SEO audit guide.
Good Alt Text Examples
So, our example SEO guide contains screenshots from tools such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog.
Some good examples of alt text may include:
Tip: It is also a good idea to take care of the name of your file. Using descriptive file names is not a ranking factor, but I recommend this as a good SEO practice.
Bad And/Or Spammy Alt Text Examples
I’ve also seen many examples of bad alt text use, including keyword stuffing or spamming.
Here is how you can turn the above good examples into bad examples:
As you can see, the above examples do not provide any information on what these images actually show.
You can also find examples and even more image SEO tips on Google Search Central.
Common Alt Text Mistakes
Stuffing keywords in the alt text is not the only mistake you can make.
Here are a few examples of common alt text mistakes:
- Failure to use the alt text or using empty alt text.
- Using the same alt text for different images.
- Using very general alt text that does not actually describe the image. For example, using the alt text of “dog” on the photo of a dog instead of describing the dog in more detail, its color, what it is doing, what breed it is, etc.
- Automatically using the name of the file as the alt text – which may lead to very unfriendly alt text, such as “googlesearchconsole,” “google-search-console,” or “photo2323,” depending on the name of the file.
Alt Text Writing Tips
And finally, here are the tips on how to write correct alt text so that it actually fulfills its purpose:
- Do not stuff keywords into the alt text. Doing so will not help your web page rank for these keywords.
- Describe the image in detail, but still keep it relatively short. Avoid adding multiple sentences to the alt text.
- Use your target keywords, but in a natural way, as part of the image’s description. If your target keyword does not fit into the image’s description, don’t use it.
- Don’t use text on images. All text should be added in the form of HTML code.
- Don’t write, “this is an image of.” Google and users know that this is an image. Just describe its content.
- Make sure you can visualize the image’s content by just reading its alt text. That is the best exercise to make sure your alt text is OK.
How To Troubleshoot Image Alt Text
Now you know all the best practices and common mistakes of alt text. But how do you check what’s in the alt text of the images of a website?
You can analyze the alt text in the following ways:
Inspecting an element (right-click and select Inspect when hovering over an image) is a good way to check if a given image has alt text.
However, if you want to check that in bulk, I recommend one of the below two methods.
Install Web Developer Chrome extension.
Next, open the page whose images you want to audit.
Click on Web Developer and navigate to Images > Display Alt Attributes. This way, you can see the content of the alt text of all images on a given web page.
How To Find And Fix Missing Alt Text
To check the alt text of the images of the entire website, use a crawler like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
Crawl the site, navigate to the image report, and review the alt text of all website images, as shown in the video guide below.
You can also export only images that have missing alt text and start fixing those issues.
Alt Text May Not Seem Like A Priority, But It’s Important
Every source of information about your content has value. Whether it’s for vision-impaired users or bots, alt text helps contextualize the images on your website.
While it’s only a ranking factor for image search, everything you do to help search engines understand your website can potentially help deliver more accurate results. Demonstrating a commitment to accessibility is also a critical component of modern digital marketing.
FAQ
What is the purpose of alt text in HTML?
Alternative text, or alt text, serves two main purposes in HTML. Its primary function is to provide a textual description of an image if it cannot be displayed. This text can help users understand the image content when technical issues prevent it from loading or if they use a screen reader due to visual impairments. Additionally, alt text aids search engine bots in understanding the image’s subject matter, which is critical for SEO, as indexing images correctly can enhance a website’s visibility in search results.
Can alt text improve website accessibility?
Yes, alt text is vital for website accessibility. It translates visual information into descriptive text that can be read by screen readers used by users with visual impairments. By accurately describing images, alt text ensures that all users, regardless of disability, can understand the content of a web page, making the web more inclusive and accessible to everyone.
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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