If so, you’re on the right track. Identifying website traffic is a key factor in conducting a thorough competitor analysis.

Virtually all businesses in all industries can benefit from a competitor analysis, especially those in the ecommerce space. You can learn a lot about your competitors with a website traffic check and even improve your own marketing efforts by doing so.

What is a competitor analysis?

Google Analytics can tell you quite a bit about your own website and help you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) practices, increase website traffic, and improve lead outreach. But if you want to analyze a competitor’s website to get insights, Google Analytics just won’t cut it. You’ll need to use tools that can give you info about your competitor’s website.

A competitor analysis involves identifying your biggest competitors online and researching a variety of different things about their sites, such as competitor sales, visible strategies, products, website appearance, website functionality, and more.

When you check a competitor’s website traffic, you can discover a number of things. You can identify how many visitors they receive on a regular basis and how their traffic changes over different quarters. It’s also possible to identify keywords that they are using to drive a significant amount of traffic and pinpoint their best landing pages. You can even discover where their visitors are coming from.

A competitor analysis can help you understand a bit more about how your competitors run their businesses and find new opportunities to do better than them. You can also identify top trends in your industry through a competitor analysis.

Conducting a competitor analysis

One great way to conduct a competitor analysis for websites is to perform an outside audit. Using a variety of different tools and websites, you can easily check the website traffic of virtually any website with ease. This can provide valuable insight into how well your competitors are doing, how many visitors they receive, and more.

Luckily, just about anyone can use a website traffic checker to analyze the websites of competitors with ease and no coding know-how. We’ve found some of the best website checkers available that collect data via Chrome extensions, web crawlers, scrapers, ISPs, and so much more.

These tools can analyze valuable metrics such as unique visitors, overall views, the volume of organic traffic, page view duration, bounce rates, sources of traffic, and more. You might be shocked by how much information you can gather about your competitors just by analyzing their website!

Now that you understand what a competitor analysis is and how to conduct one, let’s dive into our eight top picks for services that will check competitor website traffic for you.

8 SEO services for checking website traffic

These tools of the trade are proven to be excellent services for checking website traffic:

1. Similarweb

Similarweb is a popular website traffic analyzer. The tool can give you a thorough view into your competitor’s website traffic and the specific places where viewers are coming from. This unique tool offers insight into the kind of channels your brand should be looking into when it comes to content marketing and sourcing leads.

Similarweb generates very detailed and descriptive reports of a particular website’s strategy for content marketing and traffic, including a full description of the website’s traffic and geographic locations of visitors. You get all of the typical metrics you’d expect with a website checker tool, such as page views, visit duration, traffic sources, bounce rate, etc.

Additionally, you can also discover which keywords your competitor is investing in, as well as the social media channels they are getting the most traffic from.

The social network aspect of Similarweb is its best feature. You’ll get a percentage down to the hundredth of which social websites visitors are coming from, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

You can learn a lot about a particular demographic by knowing which social network they came from. This kind of detailed analysis is key if your business strategy focuses a lot on social media but isn’t quite up to par with your competitors.

2. Ahrefs

One of the more well-known platforms on this list, Ahrefs is a beloved SEO tool. In fact, major brands like Facebook use their platform because it is so lucrative. Ahrefs’ website checker is just one of this software’s many helpful features, and it allows you to see exactly why your competitors are ranking the way they are.

Ahrefs is essentially a powerful web crawler. It crawls billions of web pages each and every day and has hundreds of millions of websites already indexed. That’s a lot of traffic data — and it can really give you the kind of insights you need to drive traffic and tackle your competition.

Ahrefs is unique in that it pulls much more information than your average website checker. You don’t need to feel overwhelmed if you’re not an SEO expert, though. The platform makes it incredibly easy to filter and organize data to find the exact metrics in the exact time frame you are looking for.

Ahrefs is on the pricier side, but they do offer an affordable trial period.

3. Semrush

You can’t go wrong with one of the most popular website checkers available today. Semrush is a traffic research platform designed to monitor the web traffic of virtually any public website. This tool can be used for a variety of things, such as keyword tracking, research, analytics, and more.

Use this tool by simply entering in one of your competitors’ URLs. Within seconds, you’ll receive a descriptive analysis of the website’s traffic. Semrush makes it easy to identify valuable website metrics, such as the overall volume of monthly traffic, how it changes through the year, and the distribution of traffic by geographic location. You can also get a clear picture of the keywords that are driving traffic for the website as well.

One of the most useful tabs on Semrush’s website analysis tool has to be the traffic analytics tab. This section provides the total volume of unique visitors, how often they visit, the amount of time they spend on particular pages, overall page views, and even the bounce rate.

All of this information can be used to improve your own website with ease. In the past, finding this kind of information about competitors’ websites was often difficult — but Semrush makes it possible to discover these key insights with a few clicks.

Need detailed reports? Semrush can compile all of the information on the search page into visualized, easy-to-understand reports that read more like infographics.

4. Alexa

It’s no surprise that an Amazon product made it to our list, and Alexa certainly deserves the spot. Alexa can be used as an SEO and competitor analysis platform. It was created to assist brands with understanding how their target market behaves in order to plan their own strategies.

Alexa boasts a website checker that’s free to use without having to sign up. If you’re new to competitor analysis, this is a great risk-free platform to try out. With the Alexa website checker, you can discover how well a website is performing with a wealth of user-friendly, simple, and informative reports.

These reports include things like opportunities for potential keyword search terms, full competitor analysis, information about the website’s traffic statistics, full audience insights complete with common keywords, and more. This can be very helpful for keyword research.

You can find a lot of information via these reports for free, but some information will be blocked by a paywall. If you want to unlock all of the potential data Alexa has to offer, you can enjoy a free two-week trial of the platform’s advanced plan. You might be surprised by how effective and easy to use the Alexa platform is for competitor analysis.

5. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is not very well known — but it should be. Neil Patel developed this tool that has a ton of different metrics and capabilities. The best part? It’s free to use, though it comes with a premium option for more analytics capabilities.

This tool is particularly easy to use if you aren’t a developer and don’t know much about the more complex aspects of digital or email marketing. In fact, Ubersuggest was built with newbies in mind and boasts a direct user interface. If you’ve never had to do SEO research or conduct a competitor analysis, this is the perfect tool for you to try!

Like many of the other website checker tools on this list, Ubersuggest gives users a descriptive analysis of a competitor’s website traffic over a specific period of time. It will also break down the keywords that are bringing in the most traffic and identify which landing pages on the website are the most profitable and popular. It’s as simple as typing in the website’s URL.

You get all the basics here when it comes to website checkers, but you also get a few bells and whistles with Ubersuggest. On the results page under the Top Pages tab, you can discover how many bloggers’ backlinks, guest posting backlinks, and social media shares are on a particular page. You won’t get this kind of detail for free from other platforms.

6. Sitechecker

Definitely a classic in the world of website checkers, Sitechecker is a fantastic SEO tool with a wide range of sub-tools that can be used to improve your website’s search performance in addition to conducting competitor analysis.

The platform’s biggest features are its site monitoring and rank tracking features, and its backlink tracker is quite beneficial when it comes to competitor insights.

Unfortunately, a majority of Sitechecker’s most useful tools are behind a paywall. The few free tools Sitechecker offers are nice, though.

The platform’s traffic checker can be used to analyze a website’s traffic and learn a lot about organic search occurrences, overall visits, visit duration, page visits, subscribers, bounce rates, conversion rate, referral traffic, and social sources like an influencer, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

If you want to plug your own website in and invest in Sitechecker Pro, you can access the Competitor tab. This tab essentially takes the responsibility and work of conducting a competitor analysis off your hands and can provide fascinating insights into websites you may not have thought were competition.

Regardless, the traffic section of this tool is completely free and no data is withheld. You can sort search traffic and organic traffic by individual countries and engagement levels as well.

This can be handy if you don’t want to pay for a website checker right away, but we definitely recommend trying out Sitechecker’s paid plans for the wealth of available tools alone. Unlike many platforms on this list, Sitechecker is inexpensive and starts at $19 per month.

7. WebFX

WebFX does not get the kind of love it deserves. This website traffic checker is completely free and just as easy to use as many of the other platforms on this list.

WebFX can offer a total view of a website and its SEO practices. What makes this platform different, however, is that you can access actionable recommendations for building upon the website’s positive points and SEO practices. You can easily plug your own website into this platform and learn what your unique pain points are. From there, you can access great advice on what direction to take for your marketing endeavors.

You can access a wide variety of data for free with a website check from WebFX. To start, you can discover if a website is indexed and getting traffic from Google or another search engine.

You can also analyze a competitor’s content and see how well their content is influencing rankings in search engine results by looking at organic traffic information, popular keywords, and how mobile-friendly Google perceives your competitor’s website to be.

You can also discover if your competitor’s website is using structured data, which provides Google with specific data about their website and leads to better recognition from the algorithm and higher rankings.

Like many of the platforms listed here, you can also use WebFX to discover a website’s backlink profile, overall website load speeds, and security practices. It doesn’t get much better than that.

8. SpyFu

SpyFu is more than a simple website checker. Like Ahrefs and Semrush, SpyFu offers a wide range of SEO tools with diverse feature sets. If you appreciate great customer support and top-tier reporting software, SpyFu may be the website checker worth trying.

The only downside to this platform is that it is designed with experienced marketing professionals in mind, so it might be too complicated for newbies. It also doesn’t feature in-depth web-crawling like Ahrefs does, but it is a less expensive option for the most part and could be ideal for your specific needs.

SpyFu may not be free, but it is fairly affordable at about $33 per month. You can use this platform to access keyword search and management tools, in-depth and simplified reporting software, and great metrics for discovering the paid advertising metrics of your competitors. You can easily examine your competitor’s backlinks.

The dashboard is clean and presents all the basic information you could need about your competitor’s website, such as PPC information, keyword volume, and visitor volume. You can even test your own established keywords against your competitor’s keyword volume to see if you are making similar keyword choices.

One handy feature of this platform that could be valuable for competitor analysis is SpyFu’s Competitor and Domain comparison search. You can put your website against your competitor’s and get a full comparative analysis to see how your website holds up. This makes the whole process of analysis much easier and faster.

SpyFu also offers unlimited data, no caps, and whole team options for those who want to implement this kind of marketing software into an established business. If you’re willing to make an investment, SpyFu is a worthwhile tool for existing companies.

Checking your competitors’ website traffic

How was our list of top-tier websites and tools for checking the website traffic of any site? Tell us what you think and which tool is your personal favorite in the comments below!