How To Track Competitors’ Website Traffic And Level Up Your Strategy

This post was sponsored by Similarweb. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

The athletes that win championships understand something that most people overlook — knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competition is just as important as training hard and analyzing your own performance.

Marketing is the same.

The key to dominating your market is constantly tracking your competitors in the “game”. With the right tools and data in your marketing arsenal, you can gain a major advantage.

After all, according to Think with Google, marketers who have at least five tools in their stack are 39% more likely to see improvement in their overall marketing performance.

One tool that we’re going to zero in on is Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence. This all-in-one solution gives you access to exclusive data and insights that help you:

• Optimize your whole strategy across multiple channels.
• Find new high-value keyword opportunities.
• Increase ROI from paid search campaigns.
• Discover the most valuable partners in your space.

Ready to win the game and grow your influence? Keep reading.

Learn exactly how Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence helps you level up your strategy.

1. A Holistic View: Uncover Competitors’ Secrets

The secret ingredient for a successful marketing strategy is knowing what your competition is already doing. How are they driving the right traffic and engagement across channels?

This starts by zooming out.

Here’s how Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence helps you get the big picture:

Website Performance

The Website Performance page offers a holistic view of your site traffic, in context. Here you’ll find a range of key traffic insights for your website including:

• Traffic and engagement.
• Visits over time.
• Traffic share by geographic region.
• Top organic and paid search terms.
• Marketing channel traffic distributions.

Marketing Channels Overview

Are people finding your site via social or coming straight to you? How are they landing on your competitors’ sites?

The Marketing Channels Overview page reveals crucial insights on just that. You select four competitors and understand where you fall on the map.

Diving into this marketing channel data helps you to understand where you’re winning traffic – and how you can grow your market share.

You can evaluate any website’s engagement, quality of traffic, and quantity of traffic it receives from each major digital channel, e.g., Organic Search, Email, or Referrals.

After all, if you get loads of low-quality traffic, are you really getting any traffic at all?

Use this to compare your website’s channel performance against the category benchmark and ensure your strategy is relevant to your industry.

You can make strategic data-driven decisions by:

• Identifying new opportunities: Uncover the channels your competitors use that you had overlooked.
• Prioritizing marketing resources: Focus on the channels that drive the most traffic and engagement for your website and plan accordingly.

Channels Overview

Get the scoop on which marketing channels generate the most traffic.

Since absolute numbers don’t tell you the full story, you can look at percentages to understand the volume and proportion of traffic driven by each channel.

Marketing Channel Trends

Traffic patterns often rise and fall due to factors unrelated to your marketing campaigns.

Oftentimes, these unrelated factors could be due to a shift in your global market’s needs.

To assess fluctuations and traffic trends, use Marketing Channel Trends.

For example, if you simply add your competitors at the very top of the page, you can see if a competitor’s traffic has spiked or dropped on a channel.

This data gives you direct insight into how your potential audience is consuming content.

If traffic is down for all of your competitors, a shift may be occurring in the needs of your target audience.

Now you’ll be able to know when you can adapt your tactics accordingly.

You can even run period-over-period comparisons, so you can see if a competitor has increased their website traffic from a specific channel compared to a similar time period or even year-over-year (YoY).

2. Keywords: Outrank Your Competition & Get Discovered Online

In today’s digital-first world, your website meets your prospects before you do.

Optimizing your website with the right keywords grows your reach – but how do you find the right keywords?

Let’s map it out.

Our Keyword Generator Tool makes it simple to find new keywords to outrank your competition, drive high-quality traffic, and improve conversion rates.

You’ll discover keywords your competitors win traffic on and identify opportunities for your website’s SEO-based growth.

Keyword Generator Tool

The Keyword Generator Tool can return thousands of relevant keyword suggestions based on a seed word or phrase, including:

• Phrase-match keywords.
• Trending keywords.
• Question queries.
• Related keywords specifically for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.

Then, you’ll be able to browse and select the best terms you wish to create or optimize your site content or paid campaigns for.

The Keyword Generator Tool helps you get the full picture by displaying a huge range of keyword insights, such as CPC, seasonality, volume, organic vs. paid traffic share, and more.

You can also see which of your competitors is leading for each keyword, allowing you to focus your efforts and take more traffic share for relevant terms.

Finally, you can build a custom keyword list that you can maintain from within the platform or export.

All this will help you to increase your visibility on search engines, get ahead of the competition, and expand your share of traffic.

Keyword Gap Tool

What keywords are sending traffic to you versus your competitors? With the Keyword Gap Tool, you have a fast and effective way to find out.

The Keyword Gap Tool provides your SEO, content, and PPC teams with a crystal-clear understanding of which keywords to prioritize.

With the Keyword Gap Tool, you can find:

• Keywords sending traffic to any site you are interested in.
• Keywords shared by you and your competitors.
• Keywords you own that have the largest share of traffic.
• Areas where your competitors are getting traffic but you’re not.
• Losses where you get less traffic than your competitors.

This kind of tool is invaluable as you can quickly develop strategies to address gaps and losses while capitalizing on opportunities.

Pro tip: Create a content campaign around a keyword term that you know your competitors rely on to siphon valuable, targeted traffic from them.

Seasonal Keywords Tool

Some keywords retain their popularity and relevance throughout the year, while others see spikes and drops due to seasonal trends.

You can sculpt a strategy that takes advantage of this.

For example, search queries related to major holidays like Christmas and Halloween tend to spike two months before their actual date.

Use the Seasonal Keywords tool to generate a list of the top keywords for any industry and see the months in which those terms gain the most traffic.

More importantly, see which of your competitors target those keywords and how much traffic they win from each term.

If you hover over a specific month, you can see precisely when each keyword spikes and peaks.

With these insights, you can:

• Predict when your competitors will shift their strategy based on calendar events.
• Discover new topics to focus content on throughout the year.
• Anticipate spikes in traffic and plan around them.
• Launch campaigns at the right times.
• Identify search and content gaps in your competitive set.
• Plan yearly evergreen content campaigns.

3. Paid Campaigns: Get Proven Traffic

The success of a paid search campaign is ultimately about reaching the right people and driving valuable clicks better than your competitors do.

By focusing on relevant targeted keywords and audiences in your campaigns, you may be able to gain a stronger presence than your competition.

If you follow that with landing page optimization, you can maximize conversion rates and generate maximum return on investment (ROI).

With Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence Solution, you can drastically reduce the time it takes to get that ROI.

Paid Search Overview

Easily evaluate the performance of your paid search strategies and those of your competitors from the Paid Search Overview page.

It features key metrics and insights such as:

• Top paid keywords driving traffic to websites.
• Paid search traffic over time.
• PPC spend.
• Engagement metrics.
• Ads driving competitor paid search campaigns.

Why would you need such a holistic view of any website’s paid search activity?

So you know exactly when your competitors invest in PPC campaigns, how they’re performing, and the channels they use.

See where your competitors are focusing their efforts and use that as a jumping-off point to develop better campaigns of your own.

Plus, when used with the keyword tools, you can identify new opportunities for your paid search campaigns.

Top Landing Pages

How do you know what keywords your competitors are ranking for? Better yet, can you take some wind out of their sails?

With the Top Landing Pages feature, you can uncover what keywords your competitors’ paid campaigns are targeting, the average CPC, traffic share, and the average amount of monthly searches they receive.

Once you know the keywords that your competitors’ landing pages target, you can develop an approach of your own to target similar or more affordable keyword terms.

4. Partnerships: Expand Your Network Beyond Your Competitors’

Beyond keyword strategies and paid search, another cost-effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website is through referral and affiliate marketing.

This brand-building technique can give you an advantage over your competitors.

By partnering with a reputable site in your industry, you can build awareness of your brand or business and generate traffic from new sources.

You’ll also discover websites linking to yours that you’re unaware of.

Through Incoming Traffic Insights and the Referrals Overview, you can find out exactly which websites are sending traffic to you and your competitors.

Incoming Traffic Insights

Affiliates, links, content partners, and traffic from direct media or news coverage are all great ways to perk up your website performance.

But do you know which websites are sending traffic to you and your competitors?

With the Incoming Traffic page, you can see overall referral traffic as well as a breakdown of domains referring traffic to your site.

You can also see how you stack up against your competitors by viewing affiliates that are sending traffic to them.

For example, using the Engagement leader filter (more on this below), you can see which referral websites send the most traffic to your competitors.

You could then partner with these websites and come up with a referral/affiliate marketing strategy to drive high volumes of traffic to your website and theirs.

To do so, look at the top keywords that drive traffic to your competitors and find similar, related terms to optimize your content for.

Pro tip: If you’ve already partnered with these affiliates and your competitors are getting a greater share of their traffic, it’s time to strengthen the relationship.

Alternatively, you could increase your paid spend to outbid your competitors on lucrative PPC terms so your landing pages appear first.

Get A Leg Up On Your Competition

Knowing how and where your competitors get their traffic from is just one piece of the puzzle.

Having the right tools to provide recommendations and insight is what actually gets you there.

Traffic patterns and keyword trends can change every month; what works today might not necessarily work in a few weeks.

With that in mind, aim to stay ahead of the curve by incorporating fresh insights and tracking what your competitors are doing.

Every change you make can have a massive positive or negative impact on your strategy.

It’s time to invest in the bigger picture. With Similarweb Digital Marketing Intelligence, you can. Check it out for yourself now.

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Similarweb. Used with permission.