Knowing the popularity of your domain can be extremely useful in knowing where you stand within a niche. It will give you good insights into the demographics of your audience and whether your website fulfils their needs.
The websites mentioned in this article are all great at what they do, and are highly recommended. If you’re thinking about entering a niche and want to know how the competition is performing then these 3 tools will serve you well.
Alexa
If you were to be referred to a domain popularity tool Alexa is probably one of the first websites you’d be directed to. It has been running for over 15 years and for a good reason. There are many different numerical statistics that are handy. However the most important and used is the ‘Alexa Traffic Rank’ which gives you a relative estimate of the websites traffic compared to others. Even though the tool does also include page views as well as visitor counts it’s mostly reliable.
Other important metrics that it includes is the amount of sites that are linking in, its regional traffic ranks by country and some of its most popular search queries. All of these things can be used to give you a great insight into your domain or your competitors.
Quantcast
While not all websites are quantified under Quantcast, the ones that are certainly benefit. There is a large array of data available for the websites. One of the best things about Quantcast is the customer profiles that it has on its data sheet. You will be able to look into your customer demographics with specifics such as gender, age, income, education, family size and ethnic origin. All these can give you great cues into your websites profile and help you better target your audience.
One thing about the audience profile on Quantcast is that it also allows you to see what other websites your users like. This will give you an indication into competition but also other little niches which you could possibly tap into.
Compete
Compete.com is not operating anymore
Compete is another nifty tool that allows you to see some estimated traffic data and traffic rank. It will show data for a lot of websites, however for websites with little to no traffic it’s unlikely you will have access to the data. For the websites that do have relevant data it’s very helpful. It has a graph in the middle highlighting the estimated traffic for the past 12 months. As well as that it has the estimated traffic rank compared to other websites and its estimated amount of visits per month.
An extremely useful thing about compete.com is that it allows you to see how relevant other websites are to yours. It will have a match of around ten websites and rank them on similarity out of 100. This is great news if you’re wondering who the competition is, or who your users are also likely to visit.
These three tools can be great assets to your SEO and websites arsenal if you’re willing to put the time in. They can provide you with data that other companies would have charged you for. Use them wisely and you’ll have a definitive edge over the competition.
3 Comments
Sorry, but http://ahrefs.com is the best ! the number of links that they discovers is impresive.
the number of links that they discovers is impresive.
I hadn’t heard of ahrefs.com before – it’s fantastic! Just a shame you need to pay to use it in full force. I love the way you can see backlinks sorted by date, so you can see how many links you’re getting a day.
What I’m struggling with is the graphs. i.e. the top graph on the page shows a big drop off about July. Why would that be? Internal structure of my website? https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/petfoodratings.org