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When building your organic search strategy, it’s important to know your SEO competitors and identify strengths and weaknesses in their strategies. Using Similarweb’s organic search data and insights, you can easily identify your top organic search competitors, analyze traffic share, and pinpoint opportunities to close the traffic gap.
In this article, you'll learn how to use Similarweb to discover the insights you need to optimize your marketing strategy and win more traffic.
A SimilarStory Stumptown Roasters
Stumptown Roasters is a popular, award-winning coffee roaster competing in a crowded market.
Follow along as we uncover valuable metrics and data-driven opportunities for Stumptown Roasters to build a winning strategy. Bring on the buzz!
First things first - what is organic traffic?
Organic Traffic is the litmus test for any online business. Organic traffic is driven by user searches and it represents customer interests, awareness, and engagement -- which makes it a core focus for SEO and marketing teams. Understanding how to best position your site to earn more than its share of organic traffic is what makes a best-in-class marketing strategy.
Questions you should be asking: Who is pulling clicks away from us online? How does our site stack up against the competition in terms of organic traffic? Which search engines are driving organic traffic, and what's the quality of that traffic?
In this article, we'll show you how to find and evaluate traffic insights to help you optimize your marketing strategy using fresh and reliable data.
One way to zero in on your competition is to look at the websites that are pulling organic traffic from the same search terms that you're using. Put it this way: if you're in the coffee business and another company is gaining organic traffic with search terms like "organic," "roast," or "fair trade," then they're a competitor.
Step 1: Identify Competitors
- Under Search Intelligence > Website Explorer, select Search Competitors. Enter your website domain in the search bar.
- Stay on the Organic Competitors tab to find your top competitors in the organic search space. Scroll down for a full list. Note that this report shows either desktop or mobile web traffic.
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Metrics that Matter: The domains that top the list are your leading organic search competitors. Competitors are listed in rank order based on Similarweb's Search Overlap Score, which reveals the sites competing for organic traffic |
Step 2: Uncover the Competitor's Overall Website Performance
With the list of top organic search competitors in hand, you can evaluate the traffic metrics and insights for the competitive set.
- Under Website Research > Website Analysis, select your site.
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Then click +Compare to input up to four of the competitors from the previous report.
- Use the filters in the upper right to refine your analysis (Time frame, Geography , and Traffic Type). Note that with the traffic type, you can do All Traffic here, which combines desktop and mobile web.
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Metrics that Matter: Based on your business objectives, use a combination of insights to identify and evaluate your key competitors and opportunities. Compare Visits Over Time to understand traffic trends, Marketing Channels to see traffic source distributions and Organic Search for a measure of audience interest and intent... and easily benchmark overall performance across your competitive landscape. |
Similar Story: Stumptown Roasters evaluated the Website performance page.
The Geography module is eye catching as it reveals that a key competitor, BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE (the green in the screenshot), is dominating in South Korea and Indonesia. Stumptown may want to explore this region and gain a foothold with the coffee lovers in APAC.
Now, let's talk about traffic share. In order to attract new users with organic search, you'll want to look at the available market -- to find that part of the addressable market that you can really compete for.
How does your site compare to your competitors when it comes to organic search traffic volume? What are the organic and non-branded keywords that are driving clicks?
Step 1: Find Traffic Share by Marketing Channel
Under Website Analysis page, navigate to Marketing Channels for a competitive view of where the traffic is coming from across the selected sites.
Tip: Hover over the graphs to see the % of traffic distribution for each channel
Step 2: Find the Share of Organic Search Traffic
Click Organic Overview to gauge overall search activity: Total Search Visits and Organic vs. Paid.
Step 3: Assess the Quality of this Traffic
Just like good friends, when it comes to organic search traffic it's not all about the quantity -- it's about quality. Digital signals like Visit Duration, Pages Per Visit, and Bounce Rate act as proxies for customer engagement and even loyalty -- the more time spent and the more pages visited, the more they seem to like you.
What percentage of your online traffic is engaged with your brand as compared to competitors?
To assess the quality of your organic traffic, go and select Desktop traffic in the top right corner. Then in the trend report, you'll see new metrics available.
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Metrics that Matter: Looking at the tabs across the top of the Traffic and Engagement graph: |
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Ask yourself questions as you go through the data. Think like a detective. What's happening across these metrics? What could be the cause of any drastic changes in engagement? See who's shaken up their strategy and what you can learn.
Step 4: Top Organic Search Keywords
Once you've analyzed the Search Traffic and Organic/Paid ratios, and the quality of that traffic (from desktop searches), let's jump to keyword insights. Click Explore search keywords at the bottom of the page to go to the Keywords report within the Search Intelligence module.
Now that you're in the Keywords report, let's dive deeper into the organic keywords. Set the filters to Organic Keywords, and Non-Branded Keywords to see the Total Search Visits and Competitive Traffic Share for organic search clicks. This will provide a list of top organic keywords, highlight Keyword Opportunities across the competitive set, and highlight current wins.
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Metrics that Matter: All together these insights show which organic, non-branded terms are driving the most traffic volume, who is receiving this traffic (competitive traffic share), and how this traffic is priced (CPC). Keywords driving traffic to your competitors and not you can be seen as a Keyword Gap. Use these insights to inform your organic search strategy and increase your visibility and search traffic share of the addressable market. |
Similar Story: Based on Stumptown Roasters' analysis, the competition is winning the top keywords like "coffee" and "french press coffee ratio." Stumptown might want to invest in these terms.
Complete the Journey with Landing Pages
Knowing the competitive search traffic and keywords driving that traffic are pivotal to building your own strategies. However, to where are they driving their customers? Is Stumptown missing out on a new coffee flavor taking the world by storm? Sure, Keywords can elucidate that kind of knowledge, however analyzing the actual landing pages that customers are taken to adds a hefty layer to your research as it shows us products they're potentially buying, or the content they're consuming. It also highlights what new content a domain has created and where they're gaining clicks.
The Landing Pages report lives under the Keywords report on the lefthand menu.
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