Checking traffic from search results and advertising. Data Accuracy Warning

Learning from the mistakes of others and adopting the tricks of industry leaders is a winning tactic for competent managers.

That is why more and more entrepreneurs are becoming traffic spies, trying by any means to obtain information about traffic to a competitor’s website, the sources of its traffic and the main search queries. Such studies make it possible to quickly achieve your goals, saving budget and time.

Do you want to reach the TOP and increase sales? Find out below what algorithm of actions is applicable for the correct analysis of competitors' traffic!

Why do you need to analyze the traffic of another company?

If you are just planning to open a project, studying statistics will be an excellent option for testing your niche. The data obtained is a guide to the upcoming amount of work, as well as audience coverage when using the same keywords as a competitor.

In addition to assessing the potential of the industry and the level of future income, checking the traffic of someone else’s portal will help:

choose the best website promotion strategy based on successful solutions of competitors;
decide whether to buy this or that site;
understand whether it makes sense to post guest posts on the site;
find out the approximate conversion rate from competitors;
study their strengths and weaknesses;
choose a benchmark in terms of content and usability.

Have in mind!

In Internet marketing, there is no magic button that, when pressed, will get maximum targeted traffic to your site. The secret of success is unchanged - you need to take care of your visitors, regularly publish honest and original articles, and improve your service.

But thanks to the analysis of the resources of colleagues in the field, you can learn about non-standard promotion methods and small tricks that can benefit your project.

See how it's done...

Analyzing competitors under a microscope

The SEO intelligence plan is as follows:

1. We calculate direct competitors

Look for similar websites with properties you are interested in (price range, similar geographic location, specific services). Having thought through the nuances of your activity and product, it will not be difficult to determine the important factors of labor.

Enter key phrases related to your business in different variations into the Google and Yandex search bar. Then carefully study the search and advertising units - get to know your opponents by sight.

2. We stop at 3–5 sites

Don't try to cover the vast - limit yourself to a few high-quality projects from competitors. Opt for experienced, proven resources that are involved specifically in your niche. Pay special attention to industry leaders.

3. Look at website traffic

For this, use attendance counters, manual checking or special programs, free and paid services. Below you will learn details about each technique and type of analyzer!

Advice: Regularly study your competitors, taking into account not only the number of visitors, but also traffic channels, mentions on social networks, and key queries from the TOP 10. This will make the picture more complete and objective.

Simple ways to find out your competitor's website traffic

So what options are there?

Counters

Most resources have informers in the footer or side column that show the number of views and readers per hour, day, week, month.

Page "Advertising on the site"

Owners of popular sites usually do not hide traffic data from search engines from potential advertisers, sometimes even providing interesting facts about the demographics, gender, and age of the audience.

Example on Jlady

Example from Dajlapu

Please note! This information is not always up to date. You need to trust only those online sites that indicate the date of the last update of statistics.

Request numbers in person

Nothing prevents you from pretending to be an advertiser and asking a blogger about the traffic to his resource. This is one of the most reliable methods, but even it does not guarantee 100% objectivity. The webmaster is able to fabricate data to increase the interest of advertisers. In addition, not everyone has Google Analytics installed and configured correctly.

Assumption

The most inaccurate method. You can also determine the popularity of a site by indirect factors. For example, by the number of posts, likes on social network buttons, shares and comments (we take into account the average). Backlinks and a guest book will help you evaluate how alive the project is.

If the website is associated with a YouTube channel, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki or Facebook groups, be sure to go to them and analyze the activity.

Services for assessing search traffic

You're probably wondering which ones? The list of the most popular analyzers is as follows. The data in the table and prices are current as of December 2017.

Market	Paid version	trial version	Free version
CIS, US, EU	$1099 per month	—
CIS, US, EU	$19-$2500 per month	—	Yes, 10 requests per day
CIS, US, EU	$99.95-$399.95 per month	—	Yes, 10 requests per day
CIS, US, EU	$99-$999 per month	7 days for $7	No
US, EU	$99-$149 per month	7 days	No
US, EU	N/A	N/A	Yes, limited functionality

SimilarWeb

If the subject’s site does not have a traffic counter, we recommend using the analyzer mentioned above (before the rebranding it was called prodvigator).

This easy-to-use, multifunctional service demonstrates search analytics, provides analysis of keywords and paid results. In addition, you can find out the position of the resource, monitor backlinks, receiving data in the form of understandable infographics.

Also, you can find the most similar competing projects in terms of traffic and relevance

Without registration and in the free version, the functionality will be reduced. Individual plans start at $19 per month, and for companies - from $499.

Allows you to obtain information about site traffic in a matter of seconds. An analysis of keywords, product advertisements of other companies, and a visual comparison of their domains are available for viewing.

You will receive an analytical report on the success or decline of the site’s position, and you will be able to carefully study the advertising strategy of your competitors. The presented service also makes it possible to study the authority and types of backlinks, audience engagement from social networks.

Price for monthly plans - $99.95-$399.95, there is a free version.

A reliable assistant to an optimizer aimed at winning the fight for visitors. It focuses on cross-link analysis, domain name comparison, and key query checking.

Knowing your opponent's articles that received the most shares will help you adjust your content strategy. And reports on the dynamics of the growth of its link mass will make it possible to eliminate the likelihood of falling under the filters of your own resource.

Website owners note not only the efficiency and versatility of the platform, but also its high cost: from $99 to $999 per month. For this reason, purchasing a tariff plan is only advisable when it comes to working on a large portal.

Alexa

This service is used to determine the popularity of a site using the Alexa Traffic Ranks parameter - the amount of visitors from social networks, search engines and other sources.

On alexa.com, the user will receive information about the most popular sites in different categories and countries, and will quickly find similar projects, that is, their direct competitors, based on the overlap of keys and audiences. A useful tool is a competitor keyword matrix: it will show you the queries you are not using that will bring in new readers.

The issue price is $99 for the basic version and $149 for the advanced version (monthly).

Another foreign service with a demonstration of ranking, intended mainly for English-language blogs.

By visiting, you will be able to find out the traffic of the resource, as well as the age, gender and geographical location of the target audience. Such knowledge is indispensable for those who want to win the favor of potential readers and product customers. However, you will receive this information only if the competitor himself added his online store here for audit and promotion.

You should only think about using the service if you have an English-speaking business.

LiveInternet

Do you want to know the traffic of a competitor’s site?

If the numbers on the counter of a competitor's site from LiveInternet are hidden from outsiders, enter http://counter.yadro.ru/logo;site.ru/?29.1 into the browser line, replacing site.ru with the name of the desired site. Thus, you will see the number of views and visits per day, week and month.

Data Accuracy Warning

The services are not responsible for errors in calculations, so you cannot rely entirely on the statistics provided. Each site uses its own algorithms and metrics, the error of which is 20–70% in the direction of overestimation or underestimation. Moreover, finding out the exact traffic of a young or small site is most problematic.

Therefore, treat the data received as relative, compare your competitors with each other, figure out how much you lag behind your competitors.

Conclusion

In addition to analyzing competitor traffic, analyzers can provide a lot of useful information. Therefore, we advise you to test all popular programs and extensions.

The most important thing you should understand from analyzing the traffic of competing businesses is not the absolute numbers, but the strategies that allowed you to achieve the set heights.

Which service do you use, and how useful is it? Share your experience in the comments!

We've released a new book, Social Media Content Marketing: How to Get Inside Your Followers' Heads and Make Them Fall in Love with Your Brand.

In this article, we will look at five methods/tools that you can use to find out the traffic of almost any website. To understand which of the listed tools works best, we conducted a small experiment.

Why do you need to know how much traffic a site gets?

If you came to this blog page using Google (that is, you specifically chose a search engine as a method for finding a site), I would venture to assume that you did this for the purpose of researching competitors.

For what? Because when you are planning to enter a certain niche (for example, the blogging niche), information about how much traffic your competitors' sites receive will be useful for you to:

Understanding search volume in a niche. You can estimate how much traffic you can get by ranking for similar keywords.

A general idea of the scope of work. That is, you will know how much you will have to do to attract X number of visitors to the site. If a competitor has thousands of links and over 10,000 clicks per month, you'll have to work hard to be able to compete.

However, competitor research isn't the only reason you might want to know how much traffic a competitor's site gets. There are three more scenarios:

You are interested in advertising on a certain site. There is no point in paying for advertising on a portal with a small number of visits or even on a dead resource.

Are you interested in purchasing a website? It's obvious here.

Are you looking for guest posting opportunities? Again, there is no point in publishing guest posts on portals with zero traffic - then no one will see what you wrote.

5 Ways to Find Out Your Competitor's Website Traffic (+ Some Bonus Tips)

Here are five methods/tools you can use to estimate how much traffic a site is receiving (in no particular order).

Use the tools:
- Similarweb
- Ahrefs / SEMRush / SpyFu

View promotion page

Ask the site owner

There are some bonus tactics waiting for you at the end.

1.Alexa

Alexa is the most popular way to find out your competitor's traffic. The service is owned by Amazon.

This is a simple tool - after entering the domain, site statistics will appear, including “Unique Visitors” and “Page Views”.

Other available data includes:

Global ranking (Alexa ranking).

Information about the location of visitors, i.e. the distribution of traffic by country. This is useful if you are interested in advertising on sites with a specific geography.

Engagement metrics – bounces, time on site, average page view time, etc.

Search traffic indicator, plus the top keywords that bring the most traffic.

Alexa not only shows the approximate number of visits, but also gives insight into who is visiting the site and from where. This is useful for advertising and competitor research.

But there are two main problems:

Alexa doesn't always show traffic. In our experiment - only for 27% of sites.

To access basic statistics, you will have to pay (from $149 per month).

If you don’t want to pay, you will only have access to this picture:

$149 per month to pay for access to Alexa, plus the possibility of receiving inaccurate data. You might consider getting around the system by using Alexa Ranking, which is how websites are ranked according to the company.

Alexa Ranking ranks websites based on a combination of unique visitors and page views. [...] The site with the highest combined score ranks first.

[...] sites with relatively low measured traffic will not receive an accurate Alexa score. We don't have enough data to make rankings beyond position 100,000 statistically reliable.

Alexa.com

But what about Alexa traffic statistics. Can she be trusted?

To answer this question, we need to know where the service gets its data and how reliable it is.

Here's what it says on the Alexa website:

Alexa's traffic estimates and rankings are based on user behavior in our global data panel, which is a sample of all internet users using one of 25,000 different browser extensions.

[...] We also collect most of our traffic data from direct sources, including sites that have installed Alexa script and certified metrics.

Alexa.com

This is a rather vague description. We believe that " ... people in our global data dashboard” refers to Alexa Toolbar users (but we're not sure!). Alexa claims that their toolbar is used by "millions of people." This sounds impressive, but even if we assume that this audience is 50 million (note: this site estimates the audience at 15-20 million), this is a very small percentage of Internet users.

Additionally, I personally don't know anyone other than online marketers with an Alexa bar installed. So chances are that most of those “millions of people” are internet marketers (although Alexa claims this is a myth).

In conclusion. Alexa is probably not the most reliable way to decipher site traffic (why - the answer is in our experiment below).

2. Similarweb

SimilarWeb appears to rely on more reliable data to provide traffic statistics (although it may simply be more transparent about its data sources than Alexa)

And here are a few indicators that Similarweb evaluates:

Total number of visits for the last month - information that traffic is increasing / decreasing compared to the data for the previous month.

Average visit duration.

Number of pages viewed per visit.

Bounce rate.

The tool also provides a graph with statistics for the previous 6 months.

NOTE

Users of the paid version can view statistics for another 2 years. This is useful for assessing the development of the site. In addition, it is possible to select a custom range - if necessary, you can get more detailed estimates.

But that's not all the data. Scroll down the page and you'll get a bunch of other useful features, including:

Traffic by country (desktops only).

Traffic sources (direct visits, referrals, referrals from search, etc.).

Top referring sites (useful when building a link profile or posting guest posts that actually lead to increased referral traffic).

Top 5 keywords that give organic traffic.

By the way, Similarweb also has a “Global Site Rating” (similar to Alexa Ranking), which shows the popularity of one site relative to others.

In fact, this method is similar to Alexa. And just as limited in its capabilities.

3. Ahrefs / SEMRush / Spyfu

Ahrefs, SEMRush and Spyfu are useful if you are only interested in organic traffic (traffic from search engines).

Each of the tools provides a wealth of data and allows for fairly detailed competitor research. Their capabilities for studying traffic are approximately the same. Using each of the listed tools you can see:

Traffic from search engines (by country).

Keywords leading to search referrals (by country);

Most expensive keywords/traffic.

You'll notice that the traffic in the screenshot (101K) is significantly lower than when using Alexa and Similarweb. The difference is explained simply: we look exclusively at organic website traffic, and not overall traffic.

It's also worth noting that although the three tools are similar, traffic stats may differ depending on which service you use.

Let's take the site ahrefs.com. Let's see what kind of traffic all three tools show for it (USA only):

Ahrefs: 22,000 per month.

SEMRush: 22,900 per month.

SpyFu: 87,300 per month.

NOTE

Ahrefs is the only tool of the three that will show you “global” search traffic, that is, for all countries combined. SEMrush can show search traffic separately for each country, while SpyFu is limited to US/UK.

That's why in the above screenshot you see Ahrefs' metric of 101k per month, but the list only has 22k - that's " US only».

Each of these tools gets its data from a single source, its own index. It contains information about the keywords for which the site ranks, search volume and position in Google.

This data is then reversed to calculate traffic statistics.

Since each tool uses its own database of keyword volume, search volume, and also has its own algorithm for calculating traffic, discrepancies in statistics are inevitable.

4. Check the Advertising page

Many bloggers receive emails with the text: “ I'm interested in advertising on your site, how much traffic it attracts" It is advisable to simply post this information on a publicly accessible advertising page. That's what some people do.

Their page shows the number of unique visitors per month, page views and other useful information (for example, statistics for pages on social networks). Not only large sites do this, I’ve seen the same thing among bloggers.

But this tactic is not foolproof. There are several potential problems. In particular:

Not all bloggers publish these numbers on their promotional page.

Data is not always up to date. Sometimes bloggers add numbers when they launch a site, but then don't update them. You're seeing data that's months or years out of date.

The way out of the situation is to look for blogs that leave information about the date of the last update. Here's an example from TravelFashionGirl.com:

It clearly states that the data was updated in March 2017 (so very recently), so the numbers can probably be trusted.

If the site hasn't updated its statistics for a long time or hasn't added information about the date of the last update, it's unlikely that the indicated traffic volume is accurate. Don't trust such sites.

5. Ask the site owner

How else can you find out site traffic? By asking a question about traffic directly to the webmaster or blogger. This is the most accurate and obvious way to obtain information. But most website owners do not send data to just anyone. You must have a reason for the request - for example, interest in using the resource as an advertising platform.

But most website owners do not send data to just anyone. You must have a reason for the request - for example, interest in using the resource as an advertising platform.

While this method is generally the most reliable way to find out how much traffic a site has, it is not 100% error-proof. Here's why:

Some bloggers/webmasters may fabricate traffic statistics to get money from advertisers.

Not everyone has Google Analytics installed; some rely on less accurate analytics platforms. For example, WordPress plugins.

Google Analytics may not be configured correctly, affecting the accuracy of your data. If the stated numbers are too high, try checking the site for duplicate GA code - ask what the failure rate is, if it is very low, then it is probably a duplication.

After receiving the data from the site owner, check it using the tools we listed above. If the scatter between the data is not very strong, most likely, you were given accurate data.

Website traffic statistics obtained using special services are a good starting point for studying competitors, but the popularity of a website can also be assessed manually. There are a few things you need to check:

If you pay attention to the Ahrefs blog, you'll see that almost every post has a lot of comments.

Since most readers don't bother commenting, a blog with a lot of comments is likely to attract a larger audience.

And finally, there is YouTube.

If you look at our YouTube channel, you will see that all the videos have a decent number of views. Again, this confirms that our site has a high volume of traffic.

Which tool gives the most accurate numbers: experiment

What is the best tool to find out website traffic?

We did some research to determine the reliability of each tool/method mentioned.

Here's what we did:

We selected 37 sites that published traffic statistics on their “Advertising” page. We were only interested in those resources that updated data at least once in the last 3 months.

After that, we compared the number of visitors according to site owners with the number shown by the above tools - Alexa, Similarweb, Ahrefs, SEMRush and SpyFu.

Here are the main results:

Alexa. Unreliable. Typically underestimates the number of unique visitors by about 38%; due to limitations in traffic estimation, it does not work for all sites.

Similarweb. Reliable. Typically overestimates the number of unique users by approximately 58% (on average);

Ahrefs. Reliable. Shows traffic from search and almost always underestimates the indicators.

SEMRush. Reliable. Almost on par with Ahrefs.

SpyFu. Reliable. The results are the same as Ahrefs or SEMRush.

Let's look at the results of each of the services.

Alexa

The most unreliable of all the tools on the list.

It gave us rough traffic statistics (unique visitors + page views) for 27% of the sites we checked.

NOTE

Here are some more numbers:

On average, Alexa underestimated the number of unique visitors by 38% (note: the sample size was very small because Alexa did not provide data for several sites) and overestimated the number of page views by 28%.

In 80% of cases, Alexa underestimated the number of unique visitors (in 20% it overestimated) and underestimated the number of page views in 62% of cases (in 38% it overestimated).

And here's how the numbers from Alexa correlated with the actual numbers:

Similarweb

Here the results were more reliable than with Alexa.

However, for 16% of sites with low traffic, the service returned the default response “<5000». Мы не стали учитывать результаты по этим сайтам при расчете статистики ниже.

By the way, I didn't register. I was able to obtain all the data using a free account.

Here are some numbers:

On average, Similarweb overestimated unique visitors by 58% and page views by 53%.

In 35% of cases, Similarweb underestimated the number of unique visitors (in 65% it overestimated) and underestimated page views in 38% of cases (in 62% it showed higher).

And here's how the numbers from SimilarWeb compare to actual traffic:

Ahrefs / SEMRush / SpyFu [Results]

Ahrefs, SEMRush and SpyFu gave the same results. This is most likely due to the fact that they all work exclusively with organic traffic and use similar methods to estimate traffic.

Irina Vinnichenko

Content Marketer SEMANTICA

By the way, in SEMrush you can get data not only for individual countries. There are also global statistics, just like Ahrefs.

However, the author of the study did not take this fact into account and limited the sample for SEMrush to the United States, without doing the same for Ahrefs. This sampling approach calls into question the details of the study. However, if we consider the conclusions as a whole, they are rather correct. All tools provide indicative estimates only. You can only get accurate statistics by accessing counters.

Conclusion

Although you can get website traffic statistics using various tools, they are not reliable.

The best solution is to ask the site owners directly. This is the only way to get 100% accurate statistics.

If you use any of the other methods mentioned in this article, keep in mind that this will be a very rough estimate. Some tools overestimate (for example, Similarweb), but most underestimate (Ahrefs, SEMRush, SpyFu, etc.)

If you know of any other reliable ways to evaluate/find website traffic statistics, please let us know.

Other materials

When working on website promotion, one of the most effective strategies is: “Do it like the TOP.” Competitors have already done their best, spent dozens of hours thinking, wrote tons of content, built a high-quality link profile, and are now reaping the fruits of their work. There is no need to be stubborn, we just take it and do what the industry leaders have achieved, and only then look for new features.

You can gain useful knowledge from competitive analysis not only in terms of SEO optimization. In fact, there are a lot of growth points that can work in certain areas, but in others be useless. By paying attention to what a particular tool brings to industry leaders, you can protect yourself from unnecessary expenses and focus on what’s important.

What you should pay attention to when analyzing:

format and intensity of promotion of competitors on social networks;
semantic cores of sites in the TOP 10;
parameters of the resources under consideration;
purchase of advertising;
building a content strategy;
assortment and prices;
presence on third-party sites.

SEO analysis of competitors' websites

One of the most desirable types of traffic for website owners is search traffic. It is shareware and, with good work on the resource, can bring a lot of targeted visitors. But before you count on a piece of the pie, you should understand who you will have to compete with on the first page of search results in Yandex and Google.

To begin, create a pool of the most obvious and interesting keywords for you.
Next, we go to search engines and go through the selected keys, adding sites in the TOP 10 to the table.
We check competitors' social networks.
We pay attention to the types of content that search leaders use.
We estimate the amount of traffic for TOP sites.
Next you need to go through the service pages.

When conducting the initial analysis, try to notice all the interesting points. New techniques and tricks appear frequently and you won’t find a recent enough manual that will cover absolutely everything.

We return to the previously generated table and begin to analyze the domain indicators.

In separate columns opposite each site we write:

age
number of pages in Google/Yandex search
incoming domain links
attendance per month
Availability of search engine filters/sanctions

Free domain analysis tools:

RDS-bar - plugin for Mozilla Firefox (age, TIC, indexing)
whois-service.ru (age)
SimilarWeb - plugin for Mozilla Firefox (traffic)
xtool.ru, feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/ (filters, sanctions)

What will it give

understanding what to strive for
assessing your site's ability to rank in the TOP
promotion deadlines
Is it worth entering the niche at all?

Unfortunately, there is no formula by which you can accurately calculate the time it takes for your site’s pages to reach the TOP. However, collecting the described metrics will give an approximate understanding of affairs in the niche and a real look at things.

Competitor keyword analysis

In order to find out the semantic core of a competitor, you can go in three ways: turn to online services for help, use parsers, or resort to manual analysis.

For a superficial understanding of what search queries competitors’ websites are promoted for, visiting the main pages may be enough. Browsing the menu, catalog sections, and service pages already provides valuable information. Many people settle on completely copying the site structure from the TOP 10 and it works. But don’t do it thoughtlessly, if you don’t sell collars for kittens, then don’t create such a page just because your competitors did it.

In order not to miss a single page on a competitor’s website, you can resort to analyzing the sitemap file, which is usually located at konkurent-site.ru/sitemap.xml. If such a file is missing (although this is strange for a leader), we turn to parsers.

Programs for analyzing competitors' websites:

SiteAnalyzer by Majento (free)
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free, but with limitations). On the Free Version, the parser will crawl only 500 pages of the analyzed site
Netpeak Spider(paid, there is a 2-week trial period)
- Windows - yes
- Mac OS - yes
- Linux - no

Online services for searching competitor keywords:

Serpstat— you can see what phrases the domain is promoted for, as well as its individual pages. (paid, free option is very limited, coupons can often be found)
Spywords is paid, but definitely worth the money. Ultimately, you will receive a huge table (uploaded from the service), where you can see all the keys by which the competitor is promoting.

What you should pay attention to when analyzing the link profile of competitors’ sites:

dynamics of link mass growth;
date of indexing of links;
number of domains linking to a competitor;
which sites link (their quality);
types of links (dofollow/nofollow);
which anchors predominate (image / anchor / brand / direct link);
which pages receive more weight;
donor topics.

What to do with this information

Write down all relevant sites that link to your competitors. You will buy links from them in the future. Make sure that this list does not include sites with low domain characteristics. Pay attention to whether the sites are under search engine filters and whether they are suitable for your topic.
Based on your analysis, determine which pages you should promote first.
Calculate in percentage terms how many links you need and what they should be. Example: 70% branded, 20% anchor, 5% direct link, 5% image.
Ultimately, you will gain an understanding of how much money and time it will take to reach the level of your competitors.

Services for analyzing the link profile of competitors:

megaindex (paid)
linkpad(free, paid plans available)
ahrefs (paid only)
serpstat (paid)
majestic (paid)

Working with a link profile is perhaps one of the most labor-intensive areas. Before you start work, decide for yourself whether you have enough material and labor resources to pump up your site with links. If your budget is limited, go for free services, this will be enough to get an approximate picture.

Analysis of competitors' website traffic

It's always interesting to know how much traffic your competitors get. Here you can quietly envy and find out what prospects there are in your niche. Going deeper, traffic analysis can show which channels are giving your competitors the most visitors. This could be e-mail or social networks, search or direct calls, and more. If sites in the TOP actively work with social networks and devote a minimum of attention to search engines, this definitely means something.

Where to start? We answer:

We are looking for statistics counters on a competitor’s website. Many resource owners open analytics (Yandex Metrica and Liveinternet) for public access. Widgets are most often located in the footer, and Liveinternet statistics can also be found on the site itself.
We go to the TOP social networks and see what’s going on there.
Please note whether there are subscription forms (e-mail, push notifications, social network widgets).
Manually, using serpstat or spywords, we check whether advertising is used.
Register with Similarweb (free options are limited) or install the extension of the same name in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Here you can see the number of visits, as well as competitors’ traffic sources.

Analysis of competitors' advertising in Yandex Direct and Google Adwords

Please note:

how many ads are present on the page for the desired key query (bottom, top);
prices for products and promotions of competitors;
estimate the budget and the level of rates through the “Budget Forecast” tool from Yandex Direct;
Pay attention to the quality of your competitors' landing pages.

Most often, the most expensive advertisements for keys contain the words “buy”, “price”, “with delivery”. You need to pay attention to them and put them in your promotion plan. Optimize your pages for these keywords today and you will have a better chance of getting traffic from them in the future.

Looking to the future, it is worth saying that many are coming to the conclusion that context is necessary. Advertising is often even targeted to keywords associated with a brand or company name. Especially if you are a leader in the market, competitors will not miss the chance to appear higher for your brand queries. Even if you are in first place in organics, you are still 4th or 5th, at the top are paid ads.

What tools to use to analyze competitors' advertising:

Spywords - expensive, rich. If you have broad semantics and large budgets, this is the place for you;
Serpstat- clear and convenient;
Advse

Analyze:

keys
headers
ad texts
quick links
what extensions are still used (addresses, prices)

Buy access to the service, conduct a thorough analysis, use this information to compose your ads and select keys. Everything will pay off in the end. Advertising done in haste is more likely to fail.

Competitor Analysis Tools

1. RDS-bar - plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Opera

The extension allows you to view many website parameters directly in your browser. To fully work with the plugin, registration is required on the official website of the service developer - recipient.

Service capabilities:

Shows the TIC of the site
Number of pages in Google and Yandex
Site age
Number of incoming and outgoing links
Approximate attendance
And much more

It is worth noting that some functions of the service are paid. The plugin can also be integrated with various services, which increases its capabilities by providing even more site parameters for tracking.

2. SimilarWeb - plugin for Mozilla Firefox.

You can view the following site parameters directly in your browser:

Number of transitions per month
Traffic sources and their percentage of the total number of transitions
Geography of visits
Audience Interests
Other

Some functions are limited, others are paid, but for a superficial analysis of the site, the free tools are quite enough.

The online service similarweb.com is an expensive but very powerful tool. Expands the functionality of the plugin.

3. SiteAnalyzer from Majento - free site analysis tool

scans pages, photos, documents
defines page response codes (200, 301, 302, 404, etc.)
shows meta tags and headings: Title, Description, H1-H2
indicates the page nesting level
other possibilities

Also, all received data can be exported in CVS and Excel format.

A powerful tool from an English developer. The free functionality includes:

search for broken links, redirects, errors
meta tag analysis
audit of language attributes (hreflang)
search for duplicates
xml file generation
limit 500 url.

The service is perfect for analyzing small sites.

5. Netpeak Spider

comprehensive SEO audit. Paid tool, there is a 14-day trial period.

Possibilities

checks more than 50 SEO parameters
shows internal optimization errors
analysis of incoming and outgoing links
search for broken links
shows duplicate titles and meta tags
calculation of internal PageRank
ability to export a report

Hello, dear friends!
In this post, I decided to write about how to recognize your competitors. The article will contain a selection of interesting services with which you can identify and select some of them to promote your project.

A few months ago I wrote for an article. But if there is already a well-promoted competitor in your niche, then you can easily look at some of his requests. For example, I prefer to look at interesting ideas for writing posts or the main keyword, and then I select various tails and additional queries for it. So let's get started.

1. Seobuilding.ru
Using this service, you can make a complete analysis of your competitors’ keywords and more. The service shows the quantity, main competitors, the approximate cost of the site, dimensions, IP address and much, much more. At the very bottom is a list of all resource requests for which it is promoted. Keywords can be exported to Excel:

2. Xtool.ru.
I really like this service. Using it, you can find out how spammed the resource is with links, and see the approximate promotion of the site in search engines. Below, the service shows very valuable information: competitor’s search queries, site positions for these queries, frequency according to wordstat and even the price of one impression in Yandex Direct.

All you need to do is enter the site in the line and click on the “check” button. At the very bottom left there is a button “Export (Execel)”, which allows you to export all queries.

3. Megaindex.ru.
This service is very useful for any webmaster; it allows you to find out a lot of information about the site. In the “SEO services” – “site visibility” section, you can find out your competitor’s keywords. Moreover, the site’s position for these queries, keyword statistics according to wordstat and the cost in Yandex Direct are also shown.

4. Pr-cy.ru.
The service shows good visibility of the resource in the search engines Yandex and Google. In addition, you can see the site’s position by request, impressions per month and the approximate cost of promotion. As I see, it is not possible to export queries, but you can simply copy them and paste them into Execel.

5. Cy-pr.com
Here, before looking at competitors’ keywords, you need to register, since for ordinary users the service shows only a few queries. After registration, all queries can be exported to Excel.

6. Attendance statistics.
Sometimes it happens that a competitor has open traffic statistics and you can even look at search queries. This doesn’t happen often, of course, but if you try, you can find it. First you need to, which I wrote about in detail yesterday, and see what statistics are connected to the site. Then click to go:

For example, in the most popular queries you need to search in the section “by search phrases”, “positions in Yandex” and “positions in Google”. If they are not hidden, then you are very lucky:

7. Title tag.
If a competitor promotes a resource based on search queries, then at least one of them will be listed in the title tag. In order to see all the title headings of a competitor’s website, you need to enter the following construction into Yandex:

Or on Google this address:

Instead of the website, do not forget to enter the competitor’s address. Now all that remains is to go through the headings and identify the keywords. I think it will be easy for you, as a SEO, to do this: smile:. I like finding ideas for articles more using this method. After all, you can even go to the page, see the number of comments, and find out how relevant the article is and how necessary it is for visitors.

In the same way, keywords can be written in the H1 and keywords tag. Some optimizers highlight queries in text with bold, italics, or underlining.

The best paid way to analyze your competitors' keywords.
Service Spywords.ru
You can find out 5 queries on this site for free, but if you want more, you need to pay. This service differs from all others in that it shows several times more queries than all free services. You can also see directly on the service how the site will look in the Yandex and Google search engines for queries.

The service also has a very interesting tool, even shareware, called “domain battle”. With it you can compare 3 and even find common queries. I advise you to register on this service, it’s a very useful thing.

That's all for today! Now you know how to find out your competitors' keywords. Good luck, friends ;-).

Services that allow you to calculate the main sources and volumes of competitors’ traffic. With the permission of the authors, the CPU publishes the list in full.

First of all, competitor analysis is important when you are determining the main development strategies for a business - you need to remember nothing and keep an eye on the main players. You may be missing something significant.

Similar Web

Generally speaking, this is my favorite tool for analyzing competitor sites. The free version provides quite a lot of information. Yes, you won’t learn everything about your competitor, but you will learn the basic things, namely: where does he get the main traffic from and in what quantity.

It looks like this:

Ozon.ru is taken as an example. We find out that he has 17 million uniques per month, which is approximately 560 thousand per day. Visitors spend quite a lot of time on the site and view an average of 4.6 pages. Ozon uses JIRA for task management; this is not very useful to know, but it is interesting.

By the way, if you are evaluating a media project, then this information will help you calculate the approximate income of the portal from placing banners. We take the number of banners on the site, multiply by the CPM cost of advertising (for media platforms this is approximately 300 rubles), multiply by the number of visits and the number of pages viewed by users. We get the maximum possible income for the portal, taking into account that not the entire volume is sold out (therefore it is necessary to enter a certain coefficient k = percentage of impressions sold) and that, generally speaking, media portals earn not only from banners, but also from special projects and all sorts of other tools.

The next screen lets us know that Ozon is buying a lot of traffic on the Traforet teaser network. Personally, I tried this network - for my taste, there is a lot of traffic, but no use, and besides, the transitions are very expensive. With a minimum purchase, the price is 3 rubles, which is much more expensive than other teaser networks, but it is obvious that Ozon has different purchasing conditions. The next source for Ozon is the Utarget clickers, and then comes the normal source - Yandex.Market, then the cityads CPA network and the AdLabs Retail retargeting system. Generally speaking, this information alone can make you think about a lot and change your advertising channels somewhat.

The rest of the information in the free account is not so interesting, at least it cannot be used in any way. Therefore, let's consider the paid version. I must admit that it gives almost magical power, but it also costs quite a lot.

We can get all organic traffic search queries, all contextual ad queries and even see what these ads look like and what keywords they answer. The screenshot already shows Ozon’s big brother – Amazon.

In addition, we can see all the creatives and banners.

What is important is that in a paid account you have the opportunity to view all subdomains, all landing pages, all affiliate partners. That is, by purchasing a paid account, you can safely copy the entire advertising strategy of your competitor and improve it. This is where I will finish the review of Similar Web, whose capabilities are frightening in their greatness.

SemRush

Recently, this service has become, in general, a clone of Similar Web. The price is lower, and you can see much more for free.

It has all the features that are in the Similar Web paid account, with reduced demo access. It's very convenient. You can learn a lot about your competitors using SemRush, but with the caveat that it mainly only sees large sites. Perhaps I was just lucky, and SimilarWeb saw sites that SemRush did not see. In SimilarWeb you also cannot find very small sites. But if you are trying to figure out your competitors, then don’t be lazy and look at both services, this is always useful.

Advse contextual advertising spy

Quite an interesting Russian service. It allows you to detect keywords that your competitors use in contextual advertising on Yandex and Google. The information is useful, but you should use it carefully.

You need to understand that you will get their search queries for ridiculous money (30 rubles for one competitor). But this does not mean that you will be able to copy their advertising campaign; you will have to work for a long time. It will be necessary to divide them into groups and write beautiful advertisements. No one guarantees that all of these keywords are effective. You can use this information, but only for informational purposes, for example, if you want to collect not targeted queries, but expand the campaign with cheap topic-related queries in order to run teasers in YAN.

Advancets Teaser Spy

The information is useful if you are working on a one-page campaign: using this service you can view and simulate all teasers on the topic you need from any known grid.