In order to check website traffic, you don’t need fancy tools or expensive web applications.
Today if you want to check website traffic and improve the search rankings of your website, you can easily do that by going to a number of free and premium websites.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through a list of the top 10 tools that you can use to check website traffic.
Some of them are free while the other ones are premium.
The premium ones come packed with a ton of other features that you can use to optimize your blog posts for search engines and do digital marketing with a proper structure.
Before I walk you through the list, let’s learn a few things about website traffic and how it’s significant for the ranking and growth of your website or blog.
Let’s get started!
What’s website traffic?
If you are a newbie you might mistake website traffic for something entirely different.
In this context, website traffic is referred to the number of visitors that come to your website from any given source.
Your website might receive traffic from various sources such as search engines, social media profiles, news websites, and other websites in your niche.
Website traffic is a very important asset.
So much so that most sites with stable web traffic today are considered valuable online properties.
If you go to Flippa.com, you will see that some websites are sold for more than $1,000,000 which makes them more valuable than any real estate that you can purchase today.
But getting website traffic from Google and any other sources is not an easy task.
You need a solid website that’s fast and optimized for better page loading speeds and remarkable content that will drive traffic to your website.
Many entrepreneurs don’t understand this and fail miserably at starting a powerful blogging business online.
In order to succeed in any online venture, you need to understand how to check website traffic of your competitors.
How to monetize and optimize your search traffic properly.
How to increase your website traffic?
You can increase your website traffic by optimizing your WordPress website and making it faster.
If you don’t want to deal with tedious WordPress optimization processed, you can use CloudInnave. It’s a cloud-based WordPress optimization platform that minifies, optimizes, and compressed files only on our server to reduce the page load time of your website.
What’s the need to measure your own traffic?
As mentioned above, search traffic is a very valuable online asset. If your website is receiving stable traffic from Google and other search engines, you will make a lot of money with the help of affiliate marketing and display advertisements such as Google adverts.
But what is the need of measuring your website traffic?
Well, various monetization techniques and strategies require different quantities of traffic.
For example, if you want to do affiliate marketing you don’t need a lot of traffic as compared to display advertisements.
You will generate the same amount of money with just 10% of the traffic.
Getting an actual number of visitors that visit your blog on a monthly basis will help you in optimizing your blog posts and targeting the right type of people online.
You can see which articles are performing better and which ones aren’t. By using this data you can publish more articles that are going to perform better in the future.
This way you avoid making mistakes that you made in the past and help grow your blog or website at a faster pace.
Should you measure your competitor’s web traffic?
If you’re in a competitive niche and you want to outrank your competitors, and want to make your website the authority, you must do competitor traffic analysis.
Since there are a lot of tools online today that will let you do some level of competitor analysis, you can’t and you should not miss out on this opportunity.
Premium SEO tools will let you do research on the approximate traffic that your competitor receives in a month and what type of articles are ranking the most.
You can use this information to create similar articles with updated information.
Since your article is better than your competitor’s article, chances are that Google will consider your article when ranking for the keyword.
Are the competitor’s traffic estimates accurate?
I reckon you cannot get an exact number of visitors unless and until you are the owner of a website.
That being said you don’t actually need the exact number.
All you need is an estimate that is somewhere near the ballpark figure. By using this estimate you can determine various factors of their marketing campaigns.
What’s the best way to increase your website traffic?
The best way to increase your website traffic is to use an SEO-optimized platform or optimize your current WordPress installation. You should build a website that looks good, loads faster on the browser and is readable.
After you are done with building a fast and good website the next step is to focus on publishing high-quality content or updating your already ranking content.
How can your track your website traffic?
Hands down the best way to track your traffic are by using Google Analytics. Since its inception, Google Analytics is the industry standard for tracking website visitors and A/B testing.
There are some other alternatives but believe me, you just can’t go wrong with Google Analytics.
Furthermore, Google Analytics is completely free and you just need a Gmail account to sign up with Google Analytics. After signing up you can place Google’s tracking code inside your website’s header. Google Analytics will automatically track all the user activity on your website:
- You can see what type of blog posts are ranking the best.
- Which block posts bring the most traffic to your website.
- Which blog post doesn’t actually have any presence online.
- The bounce rate.
- The clickthrough rate.
- And many other metrics.
All these features make Google Analytics the best website tracking and traffic checking tool out there.
That being said, it does not help you with digital marketing or compotator analysis.
For that, you need the below listed free and premium boots to check website traffic.
10 best tools to check website traffic of your competitors:
Check Website Traffic: Semrush
SEMRush is by far the most popular digital marketing platform on this planet right now.
It offers a free trial of 30 days in which you don’t have to pay and you can use all the features that they offer.
On top of checking the website traffic of your competitors, you can do advanced keyword research, content gap research, backlink profile research, and much more. The only caveat here is that if you continue using SEMRush, you will be charged more than $100 per month after the trial period.
If checking website traffic is the only task that you need help with, SEMRush might not be the best option for you.
If you want to offer consultation services using your blog, you can make use of cloud-based appointment scheduling tools such as Trinitio or Calendly. Trinitio offers more features at the same price and this makes it my personal favorite.
Check Website Traffic: Serpstat
Serpstat lets you use its free tool to check website traffic. All you have to do is sign up for the free account and insert your target competitor’s website URL.
Within a few seconds, it will show a bunch of data related to that website.
What I like about this company is that it retrieves the data right from Google.
You can see what keywords they are ranking for, how much web traffic they receive a month, and some other SEO audit-related information.
I’d say if you are not comfortable in paying hundreds of dollars each month on an SEO platform and you want something in the range of $50, Serpstat is a good option in the market.
Check Website Traffic: SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a free website that you can use to analyze the traffic of your competitor.
Go to the home page, paste in your competitor’s website URL and click on the ‘analyze’ button.
Within a few seconds, you will get a bunch of metrics to determine the sources of the traffic and keyword.
Average estimated monthly traffic, cost of traffic the number of keywords that the website is ranking are some of the many features that you can play around with. Since I see ranking doesn’t offer that many features, you will not get confused.
It is a completely beginner-friendly platform that even newbie bloggers can easily use.
SpyFu
SpyFu is the most powerful competitors spying platform that exists today. You don’t even need to create an account to get basic data on the traffic of your competitors. Just paste the website URL in the search form and click on the magnifying glass. Instantly, it will return a lot of information such as:
- Organic search traffic
- Paid traffic
- Estimated monthly SEO clicks
- Organic keywords
- Organic competitors etc
if you want to unlock more features you can easily sign up for their paid account. But I think if you just want to check website traffic, you don’t actually need to sign up. There are limits as to how much you can search but if you want to search for a particular website it is one of the best platforms out there.
Check Website Traffic: Similar Web
Similarweb might not show the most accurate website checker tool out there but it offers a lot of data for free.
As mentioned earlier you don’t need to know the exact number of visitors all you need is a ballpark figure that you can use to optimize your own website traffic and determine the competition of your blogging niche.
Ubersuggest SEO Analyzer
Ubersuggest used to be a completely free true when it was acquired by neilpatel.com but now it will only let you do some level keyword research.
You can research with a limited number of features.
But if you compare this platform with all the others on this list, you will see that it is the most affordable one with all the features. Without actually signing up, you can do competitor website traffic checks and basic keyword research.
Historical data is exclusively available for premium customers.
Check Website Traffic: Alexa.Com
Alexa is powered by Amazon.
It is also the world’s first-ever website traffic checking platform.
Back in 2014, Alexa ranking mattered a lot.
If you have a good Alexa rating, your website will get more buyers and revenue if you flip it.
As of now, you need to sign up for a paid account to get the same metrics from Alexa.
If you have a paid account, alexa.com will show you the average monthly traffic, demographic data, historical traffic data and more.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the most sought-after alternative for SEMrush. What makes Ahrefs the best alternative for such a powerful platform is the fact that it is more geared toward competitor analysis such as backlink profile, average monthly traffic, paid traffic, and more.
Needless to say, that Ahrefs is also a premium offering.
So you can get a trial account for just $7.00 for seven days. Ahrefs is also used by many popular brands such as Facebook, Adobe, Linked In, Netflix and Uber.
So, you are in good company.
Check Website Traffic: SitePrice.Org
SitePrice was created for website flippers who wanted an estimate on the value of their website.
Fast forward today, you can get a lot of other metrics such as daily unique visitors, daily pageviews, and your website’s worth.
SitePrice retrieves data from all the popular platforms such as Alexa, Google Ad Planner, and Bing search engine.
Check Website Traffic: QuantCast.Com
Quantcast is one of the most reliable website traffic analysis platforms that exist today. It is a part of her digital marketing and digital advertising company that specializes in the targeted advertisement.
The only problem with Quantcast is that the traffic estimation is somewhat inaccurate.
For example, if your website receives 400,000 visitors per month, QuantCast will only show around 350,000 visitors. But it is still a better tool in this list to get an estimate of traffic visitors.
Conclusion: Check website traffic using free tools
In this article, I shared with you some of the favorite tools to check website traffic for free.
Although this list consists of some very reputable brands that you can use to do complete search engine optimization campaigns, there are some other SEO tools that you can use to determine the traffic of your competitors.
Their historical data and their accuracy are questionable.
So I avoided adding them to this list.
Which SEO tool would you use to check the website traffic of your competitors? And if you have used any of the SEO tools listed in this article, please do share your experience with us in the comment section below.