Let’s be honest…

We’ve all been overwhelmed by the number of things there are to keep track of when you own a website.

There’s SEO to implement and backlinks to monitor.

New content needs to be constantly created and posted.

Plus, there’s your base of visitors to maintain.

Intimidating, right?

Fortunately, SimilarWeb promises to make this job a ton easier and lift the stress off your shoulders.

This tool can simplify your SEO, traffic, audience interests and retention, and today we’re going to find out exactly how SimilarWeb makes owning a website (and succeeding) easier than it’s ever been before.

What Is SimilarWeb?

SimilarWeb is a multi-purpose digital intelligence tool founded in 2009. It provides you with insights into your market by tracking and reporting a huge range of data points for both your site and your competitors’ sites.

After collecting this data, it presents it to you in a way that’s not only easy to understand, but also helpful and easy to put into action.

Today, SimilarWeb has a team of over 380 people with offices in four different continents. Their clients range from small companies to large multinational enterprises such as PayPal and eBay.

SimilarWeb Review: Know Your Audience, Win Your Market

SimilarWeb is a very simple but powerful tool that helps you keep track of several key aspects of your website, audience and competitors.

When you sign up for an account, you’ll see a screen like the one below prompting you to analyze a website.

After entering the website you want to analyze, you can view all the information that SimilarWeb has to offer, which includes in-depth traffic, SEO and audience data.

Traffic Sources

There are several viewing options here and various graphs to show you how your website is bringing in traffic.

The most important information to be gleaned from these different views is exactly where your traffic is coming from. You can categorize traffic sources by type (referral, search, organic, email, direct, etc.) and the website or application from which they were directed to your site.

Breaking each of these down even further, you can then access a graph view to see what percentage of your traffic of each particular type comes from any given source. An example of this is shown below.

Essentially, referrals will be broken down by the website from which they were referred, social traffic will be broken down by the social media sites they came from, etc.

If you use display ads, this feature is particularly helpful in understanding how your advertisements are working. And when used in conjunction with the audience analysis feature (which I’ll go in to below), you get an in-depth view of audience interests and how to capitalize on them through advertisements.

On the left-hand bar of this page, you can choose to explore any of the different types of traffic sources to see more details for them.

These traffic metrics are very important to follow because they keep you in tune with your website’s engagement. You can follow whether or not visitors are increasing, where they’re coming from, and how that’s changing over time.

Audience Interests

With this excellent audience analysis feature, you can break down your audience’s interests so that you can better understand their needs. This is essential to make sure you’re creating a website experience that your particular audience will enjoy and come back to.

The various views—like the word cloud, list view and category distribution—offer helpful insights into the internet habits of your audience.

Firstly, the word cloud categorizes search terms and interests by how common they are in a very visual format. Simply by looking at the biggest words in the cloud, you’ll get a better idea of what themes and topics interest your audience the most.

This is extraordinarily beneficial for creating engaging content that appeals to your target audience.

Similarly, the category distribution view shows the broader categories in which your audience is interested, like computers and electronics, art, news, career, etc.

And finally, the list view gives you a more qualitative understanding of your audience by breaking down search terms and websites by category, global rank and affinity score.

Ultimately, the website that knows their audience better will win their traffic, so this analysis isn’t a step to be skipped over.

Industry Analysis

The industry analysis feature is incredibly powerful and helps you understand exactly how your market is changing over time because of, for example, a competitor taking your business.

Industry analysis doubles as competitor analysis because the other people in the industry are your biggest competitors. Using this tool to compare yourself to the industry and better understand your competitors can give you the edge over them you need.

The great part about this tool is that it gives you detailed information about your competitors’ audiences and their internet habits. For example, you can access the average time of visits, average number of page views per visitor, traffic types and sources, and analyze the industry leaders.

With the industry leaders function, you can see who’s getting the most traffic from each type of source, which will in turn help you learn how to best utilize that type of traffic.

This powerful suite of competitor analysis tools truly gives you the edge by helping you understand your competitors, their audience, their traffic, and how to beat them.

Drawbacks

One potential drawback I found with SimilarWeb is that while it offers a large variety of tools, it doesn’t give you the maximum number of features within each tool.

For example, I feel that there’s a lot more audience data that could be included here, like demographics and engagement rates.

Quantcast is a similar tool that seems to fill these gaps quite thoroughly, giving you all this audience data as well as traffic monitoring.

Another downside is that the traffic data SimilarWeb gives you doesn’t always appear to be 100% accurate, especially for smaller websites.

Overall, however, it’s very simple to use and can provide some phenomenal results.

Pricing

The price of SimilarWeb completely depends on your personal situation, which is why there’s no specific pricing listed on the website.

One major plus is that you can use the free version for as long as you want, but only with certain features accessible.

I found the free version to be more than enough if you’re just looking after your own website.

But if you own multiple websites or have multiple people working on them, it might make sense to upgrade to the paid version. Enterprise plans allow you to add more users to your account so that different people in different departments are able to see and use the same data.

Final Thoughts on SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a great, versatile application that allows you to monitor various parts of your website, optimize it for your visitors and ultimately beat the competition.

At the end of the day, beating out your competitors is the key requirement for success.

Using SimilarWeb to understand what your audience is interested in and what your competitors are doing is an excellent first step to pulling ahead and winning.

I’d definitely recommend giving SimilarWeb a try to see how it can change the way you interact with your users and optimize the success of your website.

---

Yassir Sahnoun is a content strategist and copywriter who helps SaaS businesses attract more sales using content marketing. You can connect with him by visiting his website.

 

Hold Up, We Have Something for You!

Ready to take your competitor research to the next level?

CoSpot readers can now receive a free 30-day trial of the Monitor Backlinks SEO tool.

That’s a whole month of valuable, actionable insights on your keyword rankings, SEO metrics, backlinks and competitor SEO strategies.

With this free trial, you’ll get in-depth competitor analysis with a special focus on keyword rank tracking and backlink profiles.

Take advantage of this offer to see how Monitor Backlinks and SimilarWeb can work hand-in-hand to tell you everything you need to know about your competitors.

Claim your free month of Monitor Backlinks today!