How To Check ANY Website’s Traffic For FREE

Today we are reviewing free traffic checker services aka website traffic estimator’s.

Ever wondered just how well your competitors site is doing? Are they getting more visitors than you? Are they targeting different people than you? Where are these visitors coming from? Organic, social or do they buy website traffic?

Unless your competitor has an “advertising” page that displays their monthly impressions we are going to have to rely on good old website traffic estimator’s.

Luckily there are a few that do this pretty well and best of all for free.

If used correctly these traffic checker services can help you get free website traffic by finding out where your competitors strong and weak points are.

So let’s look at how to check website traffic free.

1. SEMrush (Free 7-Day Trial)

SEMrush Traffic Analytics is the latest released tool within their SEO program section. You can either analyse your website or even compare the source with your competitors. It shows the traffic volume & sources of your competitors or potential partners:

Check Website Visitors By Subdomain

Find out the most traffic-acquiring subdomains of analyzed sites

Top Landing Pages

check and reveal the most popular landing pages of your website or a competitors easily.

Traffic By Device

Here you can also evaluate desktop mobile traffic split and compare visitors’ engagement by device type, very useful stuff for understanding your audience.

Traffic By Countries

Here you can easily identify how your competitor performs in different regions and then discover which ones you need to target to be successful

Visitor Behavior

It helps to understand visitor’s behavior: visits, unique visitors, pages/visit, avg visit duration, bounce rate and even observe where users go after visiting the domain. This feature really sets SEMrush apart from the competition.

Verdict

Easily our favorite platform, SEMrush can really help you understand everything needed to dominate your niche. Their organic traffic and keyword data is fantastic making it one of the best traffic checker services available. On top of that SEMrush will also let you run an audit on your website to check for any on-page errors that are holding you back. You can also compare your content to your competitors and get a nice list of keywords you may be missing.

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2. Serpstat

Serpstat is a free to use all in one marketing platform that lets you get a detailed breakdown of both competitors and your own website.

Domain Analysis – Overview

Here we get a nice overview of the domain entered. The total visibility (The higher visibility of a domain is, the higher number of visitors it’s likely to receive). The monthly search engine traffic, The number of organic keywords the domain ranks for in the top 100 and finally any paid traffic campaigns the website is running.

Organic Keywords

Serpstat gives us a nice little overview of total organic keywords, with the position, volume and cost per click – these numbers are lower than whats reported in Google in terms of volume. Clicking on show all will give a more detailed look at these keywords.

Organic Keyword Positions

Here we have a nice little breakdown of the keywords, the serp features, difficulty, position, volume, traffic, cost per click, competition, results and the ranking page. Free plans on Serpstat are limited to 10 results which is pretty generous.

Keyword Position Distribution

A nice clean chart showing where the websites keywords rank in Google. A large amount are not found in the top 10 which could be an indication that the site needs to update its blog content to attract some fresh clicks from Google.

Traffic Trend For The Year

Serpstat show that this website has been hovering at around 50,000 visitors per month until the start of December when it skyrocketed to over 300,000 visitors. Digging into their back link profile and content for OCT / NOV might unearth some answers to this.

Keyword Trend For The Year

This graphic displays the amount of keywords in google that have been picked up every month by Serpstat. Notice at the end of November there was a small jump which correlates with the huge traffic trend above. My guess would be that their increase in visitors was related to the November 8th Google Algorithm update.

Top Pages

A nice breakdown of the top 10 pages and the amount of keywords in Googles top 50 results.

Competitors In Organic Search

Serpstat has a nice breakdown of your competitors with information on common keywords that you both rank for and how your visibility has changed.

Competitors Graph

For those who prefer visuals, here we can see your competitors in a nice graphic. The larger the dot the more keywords they rank for and the closer the dots are the more each site has in common.

Verdict

Serpstat have a great platform with tons of data. We loved how easy everything was to understand and unlike a lot of platforms they let you check competitors website traffic for free. Their UX is clean and easy to navigate so perfect for those just starting out in marketing.

Prices start from $69 which will unlock more data and let you access the full search analytics, position tracking, & backlink analysis. Considerably cheaper than other platforms.

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3. Similar Web

Similar web helps you get detailed data from different sites and gives you a comprehensive overview of how a website is ranked. From this, you get to see how the website is ranked globally, countrywide and according to its category.

Similar Web breaks down the data into easily digestible chunks which makes the whole process fast. They also offer a tier paid membership starting from $199 per month to $799.

Referrals

An easy to read diagram of the top referring sites, also included is the top sites that leave similar web.

Search Traffic

Probably the most important section for many. Those keywords your competitor is targeting, the organic traffic and PPC visits.

Display Advertising

If your competitor is running display advertising “banner ads” you can find the data here.

Content

Here we can see which sub-domain, folder and even page is the most popular. Very useful!

Audience

This data should match your own if its a direct competitor, pay attention to the tags and see if there’s any your not targeting

Competitors

It’s always a good idea to know just who your competitors are, similar web makes this an easy process.

Mobile Apps

If the website has a mobile app it will show up here.

Verdict

Similar web provides a lot of useful data that you can actually use straight away to asses your website and competitors. Becoming a PRO member will unlock even more useful data and allow you to check multiple websites.

4. Quantcast

Quantcast breaks down each report into 10 different categories.

It has been named the most accurate website traffic estimator; its main aim is to provide the behavior of unique visitors on a website. The website is able to measure things like gender, how long and their frequency on certain pages as well as the visitors age. One of the benefits you will get from this site is that you can track data in real time, this is an important tool as you can monitor changes that you might make on your site and see the impacts.

Quantcast requires that you sign up and place a tracking code on your own website to access its data. Well worth it in my opinion, especially for those who run advertising campaigns and need a better understanding of the type of visitors viewing the website you will be running ADS on.

Demographics

This data is invaluable when running ads on a website, here we can see that lifehacker is popular with young asian dads who are educated and earn a nice income.

Cross-platform

Running desktop advertising on Lifehacker? You may want to consider mobile only as we can see over 75% of visitors are using their smart phone.

Engagement

Quantcast breaks down the data even further by showing us how engaged each visitor is.

Shopping Interests

Here we can view the shopping habits of visitors of lifehacker, currently viewing the retail purchase affinity report.

Media Interests

Media interest data can be broken down further by streaming devices, movies, music & entertainment.

Business & Occupation

Find out which sector your visitors are working with, their revenue and industry.

General Interests

One of my favorite reports on quantcast. Here I can find out what visitors like and which websites they have visited.

Geographic

Top countries visiting lifehacker, can break this data down further into cities.

Politcal Interests

Self explanatory, this report breaks down any political interests visitors may have.

Verdict

Quantcast is honestly a must have tool for webmasters looking to get an edge on the competition. Even if you don’t have your own domain but run affiliate ads you should really have access to this if you want to convert those impressions. It does require that you sign up and have access to your own domain however.

5. Alexa

The oldest and first real traffic estimator tool, Alexa Internet has been around since 1996. Originally it was set up to help users find similar websites they may like via a toolbar installed on their web browser.

This toolbar allowed alexa the ability to crawl and archive millions of websites and visitor browsing habits (eventually leading to the creation of the internet archive).
Alexa has sadly been taken over in terms of features by sites offering more accurate data for free. Currently you can find out a websites audience geography, engagements, top keywords, bounce rate and backlinks. Paid membership grants you more access to data starting at $149.

Alexa Rank

Here we have a very basic look at the “alexa” rank over the past 12 months and the sites global and local rank.

Geography

The top 5 locations that visit lifehacker. If we compare it to the quantcast data we can see the top 4 locations are the same.

Engagement

Alexa keeps it simple with just three data points, bounce rate, page views per visitor and average time on site.

Search Traffic

I would take alexas search traffic data with a dump truck full of salt, we can see the top keywords are very generic and most likely incorrect.

Backlinks

Its free data so I guess we shouldn’t complain, but the “top” 5 backlinks for lifehacker are rather lackluster.

Verdict

It was once a fantastic tool but has seen a huge decline in what it offers for free. Alexa pro starts at price $149, and in my opinion you could get a lot more relevant data from a platform such as SEMrush or Ahrefs.

6. Traffic Estimate

A simple website that gives out basic information on any website. It seems to grab data by combining other sources and spitting out the results. The traffic pulled for lifehacker seems to be on the low side and the top “keywords” seem to be random and unrelated.

Keywords

Verdict

It’s free and only takes a few seconds to run a competitor analysis, the chance of finding any data the others haven’t? slim

Final Thought on Free Traffic Checker Services

Before going into this I must admit I thought Alexa would still be on top but after seeing what similar web has to offer its clear they are the winner in terms of accessibility and data. Not only is the service free to access its also pretty accurate*.

Getting a rough estimate of another websites traffic in your niche can help you increase traffic and dominate, something every company should monitor.
It makes me wonder whats going on with Alexa internet? Being owned by amazon I thought they would be displaying much more data. Do they not have access to amazon shoppers, fire, kindle and the hugely successful amazon echo owners.

* Third party traffic estimator sites can never be 100% accurate