Understanding your competitors’ website traffic is an essential step toward optimizing your own strategy and outperforming them in your niche. While no tool provides exact traffic data, the insights from reliable platforms can guide your efforts to replicate their success and identify new opportunities.
In this post, we’ll walk through how to capture and analyze competitor traffic data across each channel and provide actionable examples of how you can make use of each insight. You’ll know by the end how these tools work and how they can be used to advance your SEO, SEM, and overall marketing efforts.
The Tools and Insights You’ll Gain
Using just a few tools, you can unlock as many as 16 actionable data points about your competitors, including:
- Volume and trend of traffic: To understand the volume and variation in their traffic volume.
- Top performing keywords: To find the organic and paid keywords where they are performing the best.
- Audience demographics: To gain a better understanding of what and why their audience likes and behaves.
- SEO Opportunities: Identify the gaps in content and refine your keyword strategy.
Understanding Organic Search Traffic
Organic search traffic is the visitor that comes to a site from non-premium search engine results. This source will help to identify what content and strategies currently work for your competitors.
1. Measure Volume and Value of Traffic
Estimate your competitors’ organic traffic:
- Use a tool like Ahrefs’ Website Traffic Checker to get an overview of the volume of search traffic, top-performing pages, and traffic value (an estimate of how much it would cost to get this traffic using paid ads).
This insight will help you benchmark your own performance and identify competitors that are killing it in organic search.
2. Identify Organic Competitors
Your direct business competitors may not always be the same as your organic competitors, who are those competing for similar keywords. A manufacturer of 3D printers might have an industry blog as a keyword competitor.
To find organic competitors:
- Enter your domain in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
- Go to the Organic Competitors report to see competitors ranking for overlapping keywords.
This wider pool of competitors is full of keyword ideas and inspiration for your content.
3. Identify High-Traffic Areas on Their Site
Find out what parts of a competitor’s site attract the most visitors:
- Utilize Ahrefs’ Site Structure Report to review how traffic distributes across their site. You may find they receive heavy traffic from tools, free resources, or specific product pages.
For example, Ahrefs itself drives significant traffic from its free tools, which shows the value of offering high-demand resources.
4. Analyze Top-Performing Pages
To identify what works best for your competitors:
- Fire up the Top Pages report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
This will show their most-visited pages and the keywords driving that traffic. Use this information to target similar keywords or refine your content strategy.
You can also inspect historical traffic trends for these pages to identify when and why their traffic improved.
5. Discover Keyword Opportunities
A competitor’s keyword strategy reveals priceless traffic opportunities. How to do this: Head to the Organic Keywords report in Ahrefs; Use filters, such as by difficulty, volume, or relevance to filter out keywords worth targeting. To find content updates that increased their rankings and apply them to your strategy, study ranking histories.
6. Content Gap Analysis
Content gap analysis highlights keywords that competitors rank for and you don’t. Here’s how you can do this:
- Use Ahrefs’ Content Gap Tool by entering your site and competitors’ URLs.
- Filter by keyword relevance to find topics your audience is searching for but your site hasn’t covered.
This is a goldmine for expanding your content plan and attracting untapped traffic.
7. Monitor Traffic Trends
Stay ahead by tracking competitors’ short- and long-term traffic changes:
Use Ahrefs’ Overview Report to monitor traffic trends over days, months, or years.
Track how Google updates or seasonal trends affect the ranking position.
This is the information that will keep you updated about the industry trend changes to adjust your strategy.
8. Compare Competitors on a Single Graph
Analyze multiple competitors simultaneously:
- Use Ahrefs’ Competitors Tab to overlay traffic data and identify leaders, emerging threats, or opportunities to overtake.
This visualization is especially useful for benchmarking progress and refining your goals.
9. Measure Organic Share of Voice (SOV)
SOV reflects how much organic traffic share your site commands compared to competitors. To track this:
- Set up Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker with your target keywords.
- Add competitors to see how your traffic share evolves.
Use this data to prioritize high-impact keywords and strengthen your content strategy.
Paid Search Traffic Insights
Paid traffic refers to visitors arriving through paid ads, primarily search engine advertisements. Analyzing competitors’ paid strategies can refine your own ad campaigns.
10. Discover Paid Keywords and Ads
To get a view of competitors’ paid search keywords and landing pages:
- Open Ahrefs’ Paid Keywords report.
- Apply filters for high-traffic keywords or ones that rank both organically and as paid.
This method emphasizes high-value keywords and ads to consider running.
11. Estimate Ad Spend
Knowing the rough amounts spent by competitors on paid traffic is helpful in planning your campaign budgets. So, to estimate:
- Use Ahrefs’ Paid Pages report to analyze ad spend by location or timeframe.
- This insight ensures your budget aligns with industry norms and maximizes ROI.
12. Analyze Total Traffic Volume
Tools like Similarweb estimate total traffic, including organic, paid, direct, and referral sources. Use this data to compare competitors’ overall performance.
13. Know Your Audience Demographics
Platforms like Sparktoro unveil granular details in audience insights, including the following:
- Social media habits
- Demographics
- Interests in common
This data refines your persona development and brings forth potential influencers to work with.
How Reliable Is This Data?
Most competitor traffic tools rely on estimated data from sources like:
- Web crawlers: Automated bots gathering information from the internet.
- Clickstream data: Aggregated data from users’ online activity.
- Social media APIs: Data from platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
While this data isn’t exact, it provides accurate directional insights to inform your strategy.
Final Thoughts
Analyzing competitor traffic helps you identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities within your market. By leveraging tools like Ahrefs, Similarweb, and Sparktoro, you can gain actionable insights into your competitors’ performance and refine your strategies to stay ahead.
Whether you’re focused on organic SEO, paid search, or overall traffic trends, these tools empower you to benchmark effectively, find untapped opportunities, and optimize your approach for sustainable growth.