Traffic is the lifeblood of any website or blog.

Thus, when creating content marketing strategies for your blog, it’s a good idea to spy on your competitors to check how much traffic they’re receiving.

There are several ways (both free and paid) to check traffic to a website. But how accurate are they? I’ve got your back. I reveal the tools that offer the most accurate website traffic estimates.

Note, the strategies in this post are only applicable for estimating traffic of other sites.

If you want to get traffic data from your own site, using Google Analytics is the best way. You just need to install Google Sitekit WordPress plugin and integrate it with Google Analytics.

Why is it important to check website traffic (including your competitors)?

The urge to get started on the next SEO or content marketing campaign is real.

But it’s important to know who you’re up against.

Because success in blogging also depends on how well your competitors are doing.

Here are some of the reasons to check website traffic before launching a campaign:

• Understand where you and your competitors currently stand (for benchmarking purposes).
• Analyze your and your competitor’s best-performing content.
• Check which keywords are traffic to which pages.
• Find opportunities you can target to drive traffic.
• Spy on your competitor’s paid traffic.

If something is working for others, why not replicate it?

Once you have the data, you can make a more informed decision.

Quick Decision

• Semrush is the best and most accurate tool to check website traffic to any website is Semrush. Users and SEO professionals, especially on Reddits and other forums, report it to be the most accurate. Semrush uses its own machine-learning algorithms and makes use of third-party Clickstream data to provide accurate estimates.
• For quick free estimates (albeit limited), go for Similarweb. The second-best tool to check website traffic is Similarweb. It collects 10 billion digital signals per day and analyze 2 TB of data daily. Users report the estimates to be inflated in some case, but some find it reliable. Similarweb is mainly used for website investors who need a birds-eye view of a website’s strategies and performance over a certain period of time, including revenue.
• Ubersuggest is cheapest. The most cost-effective option to check website traffic is Ubersuggest. While not as accurate as Semrush, it does offer good insight into a website’s content metrics. It’s a good option for small teams or freelancers who need to analyze a handful of websites on a budget.

Akshay’s note: The traffic estimates provided by these tools can be wildly inaccurate. For instance, if you check BloggingX on SimilarWeb, the traffic report can differ significantly from that of real analytics. These tools rely on search volume data and the average click-through rate on SERPs to estimate traffic, but they are not reliable substitutes for Google Analytics and other tracking tools. Google SERPs and click distribution are constantly changing, making it difficult to accurately estimate traffic using these methods.

Best website traffic checker tools

Semrush

For checking traffic of any website, I found Semrush to be the most reliable tool.

While it has discrepancies to the actual figures, the fluctuations are minimal compared to others.

The accuracy of Semrush lies in how it collects data. The tool has been around since 2008. Over the years, it has optimized its data collection and measurement system.

Semrush collects data mainly from third-parties to get the actual search results pages for over 500 million keywords. It then analyzes the top 100 results, including both organic and paid results.

By combining Clickstream data, Semrush provides a reliable estimation of the amount of traffic a specific website or blog receives. Although not perfect, it offers a valuable estimate nonetheless.

On top of that, Semrush maintains its own website traffic database.

So, I recommend Semrush as the first choice for checking traffic.

It’s fairly simple as well.

First, go to Semrush and click on the ‘Traffic Analytics option’:

Next, enter the domain for which you want to check traffic and hit ‘Analyze’

You’ll get all the traffic data like the following:

You can break down the traffic by root domain, subdomain, subfolder, top pages, geography, and devices. You can also compare it side by side to your website.

It’s almost like spying on your competitors’ Google Analytics.

I like how Semrush is transparent with the ‘Accuracy’ report. It is calculated by a proprietary formula considering each country’s deviation range of visits.

SimilarWeb

Another powerful tool for checking website traffic is SimilarWeb.

Just like Semrush, Similarweb has a robust data collection and processing system in place. The best part of SimilarWeb is it gathers data directly from first-party sites, which is from the websites themselves.

Users are prompted to connect their Google Analytics to SimilarWeb to get an accurate picture. And the platform collects and processes this data to make its traffic estimates more accurate.

Other than that, SimilarWeb collects data from its contributors network, from its partnerships with corporate intelligence firms, and internet service providers, and from publicly available data as disclosed in their Our Data section.

Thus, in some cases, SimilarWeb outperforms Semrush and offers more accurate results.

To check competitor’s website traffic, you don’t need an account. Simply head over to the website and put in the website name:

It will show you all the important metrics, including the total visits per month:

The report instantly provides key metrics like traffic, bounce rate, page per view, etc. It’s also great that I could see the traffic by demographics:

And can dig into the interest of the users:

The best part is you get so much data for free, without even creating an account. This makes SimilarWeb such a powerful tool for checking traffic any website is getting.

Similar to SEMrush, you also get a graph of traffic from different sources.

Here you can see:

• Total visits refer to how many people are actually visiting a website
• Desktop vs. Mobile helps you figure out the traffic share between the devices
• Average visit duration helps you see how people are interacting with a website
• In the graph, you can see that at any point in time how much desktop and mobile traffic a website is receiving

For total traffic estimation, Semrush and SimilarWeb are the only best tools I recommend.

UberSuggest

Ubersuggest, heralded by marketing guru, Neil Patel, is an SEO-focused tool that focus only on search engine traffic.

So it primarily collects the data from Google’s API. Ubersuggest has revealed that the tool doesn’t deal with direct traffic, social media traffic, or paid traffic.

So, if you’re looking to check SEO traffic any website is getting, Ubersuggest may show you a better picture.

To get started with Ubersuggest, simply head over to its homepage and enter the domain you want to check:

Under ‘Traffic Estimation’, you should get the data you need:

The tool reveals important metrics like organic monthly traffic, domain authority, organic keywords, etc.

You can also see the top SEO pages ranking on Google

And top keywords the pages are ranking for:

Ubersuggest offers a 7-day free trial and costs only $12 per month. Thus, it’s an affordable alternative to both Semrush and SimilarWeb.

Serpstat

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform that professionals use to check their search engine performance along with their competitors. It started as a simple keyword tool and later evolved into a complete SEO suite.

It shares many of the features with Semrush.

And one such feature is its ‘Website Traffic Checker’ feature. The SEO platform has revealed that it gathers the data from third-party services and its database covers 230 Google regions.

To check website traffic with Serpstat, head over to its traffic checker page, input the domain you want to check and hit ‘Get Traffic’:

You’ll see the traffic each page gets in a month under the Top Pages section:

Another important feature within Serpstat allows you to check organic keywords and shares done on Facebook.

Below, you can see the top organic keywords ranking for your website:

While a great tool overall, Serpstat is a tad pricier. If you can afford it, do go for it.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is often touted as Semrush’s alternative. That’s because of the similarity in features and robustness of its data.

For its data, Ahrefs crawls the entire web and collects petabytes of data about websites. In one the study conducted on search engine traffic analysis, Ahrefs emerged as the winner. In other words, most accurate.

However, that’s not always the case. Moreover, because of its steep price tag, I recommend you go for it only when you plan to invest in all the features.

To check website traffic with Ahrefs, go to website traffic checker page, put in the website URL to analyze, and click on ‘Check Traffic’:

In a new window, it will display a brief overview of the monthly traffic to that website. But it’s only organic traffic:

A paid account will offer you even more extensive metrics like the following:

Important metrics you should analyze

Now as you go about checking the traffic a website is getting, you should focus on certain metrics. These metrics give a better indication on how popular and competitive a website is.

• Search volume: This is the total number of times a particular keyword was searched over a period of time. The tools will show the top keywords driving traffic to the website.
• Total traffic: Total traffic is the total number of people visiting a website over a period of time. This is the metric you need to look at to check how much traffic a website is getting.
• Sessions: A session is the total number of interactions users have with a website. This differs from a visit in that a user can have multiple sessions.
• Average sessions duration: Average session duration reveals how long an average session lasts. This is the average time a user spends before leaving or closing the website.
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit a website but leave immediately without interacting with it. A low bounce rate is ideal.
• Devices: Devices breaks down the traffic by the equipment users use to visit the website. Most commonly, it’s mobile, desktop, and tablet.
• Region: Region breaks down the traffic by the location of the users. By default, the tools will display traffic by country, but you view by business region as well (EMEA, APAC).
• CTR: CTR or Click-through rate reveals what percentage of users click through to a website after seeing it. A high CTR means more people find the website/page relevant.

DETERMINING PAID TRAFFIC

If you are running PPC advertisements for your website, you may want to know some intelligence data regarding the paid traffic, ads, keywords of your competitor website.

In Semrush, when you enter any website under “Domain Overview”, it’ll return you paid traffic as well.

Domain overview of paid search traffic

As you can see in the screenshot, you can also see the keywords on which they are running ads and also total cost for them when it comes to paid traffic.

With the Advertising Toolkit of SEMrush, you can drill deep into your advertising data. SEMrush pioneers both in search ads as well as display ads.

Top ad keyword driving traffic

You can view the paid traffic a website is getting, ad keywords, and also traffic cost.

You’ll also get to know the top ad keywords that are driving paid traffic to the website.

Under ad copies, you can view the exact advertisements that the website is displaying for the keywords.

Here you can also see the top pages which are getting most traffic out of PPC ads.

WRAPPING UP

So these are some of the proven ways by which you can check traffic on any website.

As I told you before, these tools give you just an estimate of the traffic. The best way is always to rely on metrics reported by website tracking tools like Google Analytics, Clicky, Jetpack stats, etc.