SimilarWeb: a free tool to analyze competitors’ traffic!

Want to analyze a competitor’s site to see where their traffic is coming from and get an idea of how much SEO, social media, referral and direct traffic they are generating? SimilarWeb is an online tool that allows you to discover such data.

SimilarWeb, What Is It?

SimilarWeb is an Israeli company based in London and founded by Or Offer in 2007. Specialized in traffic analysis and competitive analysis, SimilarWeb offers free and paid services to web and SEO professionals. With SEMrush, Yooda Insight, Alexa as main competitors, the tool tries to diversify by offering data that its competitors do not offer, especially on mobile applications.

SimilarWeb, A Competitive Intelligence Tool SEO / SEA / SMO For Website :

Concretely, SimilarWeb allows you to analyze many things about the websites and mobile applications of your choice (the tool is especially interesting to analyze the competition). Let’s have a look at the main features of the web interface.

What Is Your Ranking And That Of Your Competitors In The World ?

Strongly inspired by Alexa, the tool offers a report that presents the global ranking of your website against your competitors. A ranking by country is also proposed by the site. A green or red arrow shows you the recent evolution in terms of ranking of the analyzed website.

What Is The Average Monthly Global Traffic Generated By The Analyzed Site ?

Knowing the approximate traffic of your competitors is always interesting, if Alexa offers you an approximate curve, SimilarWeb also has such an analysis that gives you an idea on the average global traffic of the analyzed site (SEO, SEA, referrer, social networks and direct).

Average time spent on the site, average page views per session, average bounce rate, the tool also gives you relevant indicators that you can usually only find on Google Analytics.

A graph shows you an overview of the acquisition sources identified by SimilarWeb for a site, the numbers are pretty close to reality overall.

SimilarWeb will therefore give you an estimate of the traffic :

• generated by search engines
• generated by direct access
• generated by referral sites that link to the site in question
• generated by the different social networks
• generated by email marketing
• generated by display advertising

And this for all the sites that have enough audience to have accessible data on SimilarWeb.

 

Wich Sites Redirect Traffic To The Analyzed Site ?

SimilarWeb will provide you with the details of the top referring sites that redirect traffic to the analyzed site. The top sites to which the analyzed site is referring traffic will also be presented.

If you want to learn from the referral traffic acquisition strategy of one of your competitors, this report can help you find the main sources to analyze.

What Are The Best SEO / SEA Traffic-Building Keywords ?

The tool will also allow you to discover what is the share of SEO VS SEA traffic of the analyzed site. It will also list the keywords that it has analyzed as the biggest contributors of traffic in these two cases. Each time the free version reports are not very detailed but they allow you to obtain good statistics all the same.

Which Social Networks Bring The Most Traffic To Your Competitor ?

To find out which social network brings the most traffic to your competitor or any of the analyzed sites, SimilarWeb also offers a social report dedicated to this feature.

Apart from these reports, SimilarWeb also offers you a list of sites similar to the one analyzed or the list of interests of the audience that lands on the analyzed site.

 

Analyze Traffic And Key Data Of Mobile Applications With SimilarWeb

This tool allows you to analyze websites but it also has a section dedicated to mobile applications. Let’s have a look at the features offered by this iOS or Android mobile application analysis tool.

What Is the Ranking Of The Application In The Play Store or Apple Store?  What Is Its Average rating ?

SimilarWeb allows you to know how a mobile application is ranked on the store where it is referenced. You will also be able to know what is its average rating on this store and how many reviews have been posted on the app. You will also be able to know its ranking by country.

What Are The Traffic Sources Of The Analyzed Application ?

How did users get to the application’s page on the PlayStore or App Store? Did they arrive via the search engine? Via the application rankings? Via the applications highlighted by the store? You’ll get a graph like the one above listing all in-store traffic sources.

SimilarWeb also presents a report dedicated to external traffic sources to the stores. This will give you an estimate of the traffic acquisition sources of competing mobile applications.

What Are The Keywords That Users Search For To Find The application ?

An important element for ASO (App Store Optimization) is to know which keywords are driving traffic to your competitors’ mobile apps, SimilarWeb allows you to know some of this data for free via a dedicated report.

Other Reports

SimilarWeb goes even further with its pro version, you can for example know what is the retention rate of the analyzed mobile apps.

 

SimilarWeb Is Good, But Are The Data Reliable ?

SimilarWeb’s data is not 100% reliable and guaranteed, the tool is there to give you the closest possible indication of the traffic of the analyzed sites and applications.

You can’t rely 100% on these figures to say that you have the traffic data of your competitors, but the tool will give you a good overview of your situation compared to your competitors for example.

You can do the test on your own website to give you an idea of the relevance of the tool. With the application of a ratio divided by 2 on the traffic displayed by the tool, we generally obtain data already closer to reality, however, it really depends on the websites.

It is always advisable to take the data displayed with a pinch of salt, like all tools of this type, SimilarWeb is there to provide you with trends rather than exact figures.

If you want to know more about the data SimilarWeb uses for their analysis, it’s here : https://www.similarweb.com/ourdata

WARNING: SimilarWeb Will Not Work For All Sites !

If the sites you wish to analyze do not have enough traffic, the SimlarWeb tool will not be able to display the data in its interface. It is therefore recommended to use this tool for sites and applications that already generate an audience of more than a few hundred visitors per week/month. If you want to analyze the traffic of small sites, you can do it from other tools like Yooda Insight. SemRush will not be of any more use to you if you want to analyze small websites. For mobile applications, we don’t know of any similar tools (if you know of any, please let us know in the comments).

 

How Much Does SimilarWeb Cost ?

As previously explained, the basic version is free but if you wish, you can opt for the more complete pro version with much more data and reports. It will cost you a minimum of $199 per month, so it’s not for everyone!

Our Opinion On SimilarWeb

Overall, using the service occasionally and for free, we are quite satisfied with the service provided. We present you below the strong points / weak points that we could identify during our use of the tool.

SimilarWeb Positive Points (+) :

• Overall the SimilarWeb tool is very interesting if you take a step back on the announced figures that very rarely correspond to the exact figures. On the other hand, after analyzing several websites that you own, you can establish a kind of ratio that will give you a very good idea of the traffic of the other sites analyzed thereafter.
• The good thing about Similar Web is that the free version already offers you a certain amount of relevant data, so for occasional users of this type of service, you won’t need to pull out the blue card!
• You can analyze both websites and applications: this is a real plus compared to competing tools like SEMrush for example. The data presented for free for both websites and applications is already very detailed.
• For advanced users, SimilarWeb has an API.
• The tool has a Mozilla Firefox extension and a free Google Chrome extension.

The Negative Points (-)

• The price of the paid plans! With a basic plan that starts at $199 per month, SimilarWeb’s price is really out of reach for the small independent web marketer around here! On the other hand, for companies and agencies with a bigger budget, the prices should not be too much of a problem as long as they use it frequently.
• Data relevance: you can’t rely 100% on Similar Web data, as explained above, the tool doesn’t have access to the web analytics solutions of all the websites, so the figures presented are only estimates that should be taken with a bit of distance.
• Smaller websites and lesser-known applications cannot be analyzed: if you try to analyze the website of the hairdresser in your town, there is little chance that the tool will give you data. Other tools allow you to do this.

 

Now that you know everything, or almost everything, about SimilarWeb, all you have to do is test it (or not) in the free version to see if the tool seems relevant or not. Don’t hesitate to come back and give us your opinion once the solution has been tested.