How to Check Website Traffic for Any Site

June 15. 2021

Regardless of what line of work you are in, if you are a business owner – you are going to need a website. Websites represent the main way new clients will find out about you and your services. It’s also likely that most of your marketing efforts will be built around your website. Therefore, it makes sense to check up on your site from time to time and see how it’s doing. You may even want to peek over the fence and scope out the competition and how their websites are performing. We are going to take a look at how to check website traffic for any site, even your own.

The importance of website traffic

Websites don’t grow on trees, and you probably paid a designer to make one for you. Perhaps you managed to create a site yourself, but that definitely required skill, time, and effort. Good for you, but even then it wasn’t really free. If you paid for something, it’s only natural to wonder where your money went and how it’s performing. Once you know how to check website traffic for any site, you will be able to compare your site to your competitors. By doing this you can gain a lot of data and see which areas of your website might need improvements. There are many ways to increase traffic, and you can even use some of Google’s features like star ratings.

Measuring traffic also helps to see how specific areas of the website are doing. You can even use the data you obtained to figure out how well a marketing campaign is performing. If things aren’t working out, you can do a course correction instead of spending money on hopeless causes. Realistically speaking, all areas of your website need to be functioning properly or you will lose traffic. Websites need care and maintenance, and here at WP Full Care we are dedicated to keeping your WordPress site up-to-date and functioning smoothly.

Check up on the competition

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. By finding out how your competition is doing, you can see what works for them and apply a similar strategy. Even if you’ve got your own thing going and you think you don’t need any loaned ideas, it’s still good to know how others are performing. You can use other websites as a reference and something to compare your site with. Otherwise, it might be a bit hard to tell if you are doing well or not.

If you own a website, measuring the traffic is easy. You can add Google Analytics to your site and get very accurate numbers for free. But that’s probably not why you are here. You want to find out how to check website traffic for any site including your competition, industry leaders, and trendsetters.

Important stats to track

When we are discussing website traffic, you need to realize we don’t mean just measuring a single number. There are multiple stats you should keep tabs on. Once you start combining them you can get useful information.

Here are the most important website traffic stats you should be monitoring:

• Unique visitors. This represents the number of different people (IP addresses) that visited your website. Of course, once visitors arrive at your site, it’s also good to know how they are behaving and which pages engage them the most.
• Pageviews. The number of different pages users accessed. Sometimes also linked with pages per visit, representing how many pages a user viewed in a single session.
• Organic search traffic. The number of people who found your website through the use of search engines and the use of relevant keywords. Find out which keywords you are ranking for.
• Referrals and other traffic. This can represent users who came to your page from other websites like Facebook or YouTube. It’s useful to know where your traffic is coming from.

The best tools to check website traffic for any site:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is probably the most popular SEO tool. It’s great for checking out your competition and how they are ranking. The search overview from Ahrefs will tell you about organic search traffic to your site. However, it doesn’t offer information on traffic that you receive from social media. It’s good to keep that in mind since many modern marketing campaigns focus on social networks. After a 7 day, trial Ahrefs requires a monthly subscription. Many popular brands like Facebook and Netflix opt to use their analysis tools, so that might be saying something.

2. Google Search Console

Yup, good old trusty Google has plenty of tools that are available for free. The Search Console can give you information regarding search engine traffic. The way search engines view your website directly determines your rank in user’s search results. Google’s Console can give you information such as clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and your overall keyword position in search engines.

3. SEMrush

SEMrush is another comprehensive analytics tool that offers features to research your competition. Besides showing you visitor data and where they are coming from, SEMrush can also give info about competitor’s keyword ranking. The amount of data gained is almost like having insight into your competitor’s Google Analytics. You can even compare multiple websites at once. There is a free version available with limited functionality, but it might be enough to give you a taste of what this SEO audit tool is like.

4. SimilarWeb

Besides giving an overview of the total traffic for a website, SimilarWeb can offer the main sources of that traffic. What’s also interesting is that they offer a breakdown of traffic by country. This will allow you to get a better idea of where your users are located. The analysis offered by SimilarWeb is one of the most accurate ones you can find. However, it might not work well for smaller websites or those that have just recently launched. This has to do with them using lightly smaller sample sizes to form their data reports.

Whether you are measuring up the competition, or just figuring out if your marketing is getting the job done – it helps to know how to check website traffic for any site. You can get useful insight into what users are interested in. If you respond and cater to those needs your traffic will surely increase.