Estimated website traffic data is available in many free and paid tools.
From analytics platforms, to generalized website tools like SimilarWeb and Alexa, to advertising intelligence tools, these come with varying capabilities and levels of accuracy.
Plus, you get access to purpose-built tools like SEO and PPC intelligence tools bundled with product suites like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Spyfu and KeywordSpy.
It is important to realize that most of these tools use educated methodologies to estimate traffic and are not involved in actual traffic statistics.
There are underestimated numbers that should not be considered 100% true.
However, these tools are not without value.
As long as you’re careful about the competitors and sites you’re using for comparison, you have a great opportunity to use trends and comparative data, not just topline traffic.
Check out 6 ways to use website traffic estimators in your SEO and marketing strategies.
1.Benchmark
Get stats ranging from total traffic to traffic by channel, traffic by device, and even deeper drill-downs into secondary metrics from website traffic tools.
We found this data to be excellent for our benchmarks.
Comparing your traffic to your competitors and competitors may reveal areas of differentiation where you can create growth targets.
The Google Analytics Benchmark Report is one tool that I think is underutilized.
This allows the selection and segmentation of similar industries for comparison, allowing real-world statistics to be superimposed with those from others in the same industry.
The downside is that industry competitors and peers are aggregated and kept anonymous compared to what other categories of tools can offer.
Google Analytics Benchmark Report2. Expectation setting
We all want to wave our magic wands and bring magical traffic sources to life.
If you’ve put a lot of effort into optimizing, targeting, messaging, and developing compelling content, but you’re not actually getting any traffic, you’re wasting your time and attention.
Using the website traffic tool to look at our competitors and comparable organizations can give us an idea of what our expectations should be.
Assuming you’ve done your own benchmarking, you can drill down into specific channels, content, and gaps on your site.
Conversely, you may find that you’ve likely developed a market.
We are by far the market leader, and when advertising and SEO research tools tell us the size of our audience, we can see the bigger picture.
It helps you know if pursuing untapped potential is your best option or trying to grab market share from other sites in your industry.
3. Determination of right channel mix
You can learn a lot about your audience by looking at competitors in your industry, other sites, or thought leadership spaces.
Make sure you have the right mix of competing or comparable sites you are profiling first and validate that they are seeking the same audience.
By seeing what other sites are experiencing with specific channel breakouts, you can determine what they are doing well and where web audiences are finding them.
You should look at many other sites for comparison so that you can control variables such as how well a particular competitor is doing with SEO and social media.
Whether you’re seeing clear trends about which traffic sources are performing the best, or a completely different picture, you’ll know their strategy and level of commitment to each channel.
This will help inform and confirm which digital marketing channels and overall combination is right for you.
4. Content Topics and Formats
Updating or reviewing your channel mix is a great starting point for determining your content needs and investments in them.
Beyond that, and listening to our own audience as well as looking at our competitors is a great way to determine the topics of content we should talk about.
You should be able to quickly access your unique mix of desktop and mobile traffic and access more detailed breakdowns by device, browser, technology, and more.
However, analysis using traffic estimators of competitors and aspiring comparable sites can help you spot opportunities for growth and determine what the ideal combination might look like in the future for your target audience. increase.
Investing in content can be costly. Knowing what formats to invest in (e.g. mobile) and how people get there (e.g. social media) is important.
Tools like SimilarWeb and SEMrush (or a combination of other tools) can be used to map out your current location, your competitors’ locations, and your desired location to aid your roadmap.
5. Keyword Intelligence
Search marketers already have many tools available, including website traffic estimators.
Standalone keyword spy tools, SEO and PPC suite tools, and even broader website traffic tools (like SimilarWeb) all include keyword data in paid programs.
Much of our attention in search is focused on content and aligning it with what your audience wants.
That’s definitely on target and what we should be doing.
But it’s a loss if you don’t look at your competitors.
Knowing how well your competitors are performing can give you a big head start.
Look at the top keywords and long-tail terms that your competitors are doing well in search and combine that with your top traffic pages.
Looking at rankings is one thing, but seeing how much traffic those rankings generate is a whole other level.
You don’t want to waste your efforts chasing the wrong rankings that aren’t driving the traffic you need to reach your overall business goals.
6. Link building research
A traffic estimator can be a great source of information for link research.
Link research and link building can be hard work and a full-time job.
Other times, you get to the point where you feel like you’ve run out of opportunities.
Once you’ve combed through all the link research SEO tools have to offer, you’ll branch out into spy tools and more general tools. They may shed light on some new and different opportunities.
No single tool can show you all the links and the entire web of who links to whom, so broaden your research to include as many tools as your resources and scope warrant.
Get the most out of website traffic estimator insights
As SEO professionals, we have access to a wide variety of tools.
If we’re search marketers, we probably live on search platforms that offer reporting capabilities, research tools, and other ways to do our job efficiently.
When you’re immersed in your day-to-day work, you don’t always want to see more tools and data layers.
We hope these creative ways to use website traffic tools will help you open up new opportunities for setting expectations, benchmarking, content strategy, and more.
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image credit
Screenshot by author, March 2021
