Checking out your Competitors with SimilarWeb

An important thing for any website is traffic. Everyone wants to know who is clicking on their website, how they got there, and what other interests they have, right? Thanks to SimilarWeb, you can find all the information out for free.

SimilarWeb is a free and simple to use tool that allows you to look at website traffic statistics.

First, you just have to go to the SimilarWeb . Then type the website you want to know more about in the search bar. For example, let’s look at Reddit.

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With that simple search, we can see already helpful information like Reddit’s rank Globally and its rank in the US.

Now, there is a limitation. SimilarWeb doesn’t have that information for every website, especially if it’s newer and quite small. Let’s search this website you’re on now, and you’ll see hardly anything comes up.

While it’s not useful in that regard, it is useful if you want to find out who uses your competitor’s website. Obviously, the people using your competitor’s site probably share many of the same traits as the people you’re looking to attract to your own website.

Let’s say I’m trying to build a website like Twitter. We’ll call it: Haikuu! It’s a hot, new text post platform where everyone can only write in haikus. Soon, everyone will be using Haikuu, leaving Twitter in the dust (unlikely, but please bear with me). ‍ Unfortunately, my Haikuu website is too new (so new it doesn’t exist yet). Instead of searching for my own site, I can use SimilarWeb to look at Twitter’s web traffic data.

The first thing we see on Similar Web is the Traffic Sources (this tells us how someone found a website). For my competitor, Twitter, it seems 74% of their traffic comes from people typing twitter.com directly in the search bar. It looks like 13% comes from people searching for the site on a search engine. Then 5% comes from other sites referring a user to Twitter, and another 5% comes from social media sites. The final <1% comes from email.

Looking more in-depth, I can also see what social media site is sending people to Twitter the most. In this case, it seems YouTube and Reddit are the most popular. I might use that information to decide I should promote my ad on YouTube or Reddit.

SimilarWeb also tells me the interests of people who my competitor’s website. The most important trait it seems is News and Media, which is not surprising if you use Twitter. Video Games are also a major interest. I guess it’s time to write some haikus about Princess Peach and Mario then for my next ad?

As you can see, SimilarWeb is extremely useful when it comes to marketing in the online world. It can help you decide what website to advertise on, and how to connect with your audience. It’s also just fun to snoop around… let’s be real. ‍

‍If you haven’t been using it already, I’m sure you will now! ‍ That kind of information is crucial, especially if you want to improve your own website’s performance. Seems like something worth looking into doesn’t it? Let’s dive into how you can use Similarweb and a detailed explanation of the kind of statistics it provides.