SimilarWeb Tutorial

In this SimilarWeb Tutorial, we will show how to get competitor web analytics data from SimilarWeb.

Before implementing the online marketing plans for your website, you may often need to get some web traffic data about your main competitors’ websites.

This web data is available through the SimilarWeb tool.

SimilarWeb provides 2 versions:

• Free
• Paid

In this tutorial, we will explain how to get the following data of your competitor’s website:

• Total visits
• From countries of the visits
• SEO Keywords the visitors have used when searching on search engines

Below are the topics in this SimilarWeb tutorial:

• Example of Competitor Website: Amazon.com
• Global Rank, Country Rank, Category Rank
• Traffic Overview
• Traffic by Countries
• Traffic Sources
• Search
• Referrals
• Social
• Display Advertising
• Audience Interests
• Topics
• Also Visited Websites
• Competitors & Similar Sites
• How Accurate Are SimilarWeb?

You may have developed your eCommerce site with one of the site builder solutions (or CMS) including:

• WordPress
• Shopify
• Shopline (A website builder solution that is suitable for Hong Kong businesses)

Before you can create and implement digital marketing strategies to acquire new visitors (and new customers) for your eCommerce website, you will first gather web traffic data of your competitor websites.

You can get the web traffic data of your competitor sites from the SimilarWeb tool.

We will use Amazon.com as an example, the number one eCommerce website in the world, to demonstrate how you can get competitor website data from the SimilarWeb tool.

Enter Amazon.com in SimilarWeb’s search box, and SimilarWeb will show you the web traffic data of the Amazon.com site.

SimilarWeb provides 3 high level data metrics, including:

• Global Rank:This is the rank of a website against the ranks of all the websites in the world.
• Country Rank: It is the rank of a website against the ranks of all the websites in the same country.
• Category Rank: It is the rank of a website against the ranks of all the websites in the same category (or industry).

Under Traffic Overview, SimilarWeb can display the high-level overall web traffic data of Amazon.com with the following metrics:

• Total Visits (of the recent one month)
• Average Visit Duration
• Pages per Visit
• Bounce Rate

Under Traffic By Countries, the data represents from where (i.e. which countries) the visitors were when they visited the Amazon.com site.

Under Traffic Sources, the Similar tool splits the visitors to Amazon.com by traffic channels, including:

• Direct: When a visitor enters the website URL directly into the web browser address bar and hits enter to open the website, SimilarWeb reports this visit (or session) under Direct. Refer to Google Analytics Direct Traffic for more explanations.
• Referrals: Includes visits from non search engine and non social media sites.
• Search: Includes SEO (i.e. organic search) and PPC (i.e. paid search advertising, for example Google AdWords)
• Social: Includes social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
• Mail: Includes visitors who came through email campaigns.
• Display: Includes visitors who came through online display advertising.

You may also refer to Free Traffic Sources to find how more than 200 websites/methods to get visitors to your website.

Under Search, SimilarWeb shows two sets of web traffic data:

• Organic (i.e. SEO)
• Paid (i.e. PPC)

You may refer to:

• Mobile SEO Best Practices
• Local SEO Best Practices

Under Referrals, it shows the web traffic that are not from search engines, and are not from social media sites.

Under Social, the data refers to the social media traffic sources including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, and more.

The data appears under Display Advertising refers to online multimedia and/or banner ads that were purchased to bring in website visitors.

Under Audience Interests, website visitors (i.e. audiences) are split into different categories based on their interests.

Topics are the exactly what the visitors have shown interests when they visited the website.

Topics are represented in the format of a visual map in keywords.

For example, people who have often visited the Amazon.com site, have also visited these websites, including:

• google.com
• ebay.com
• mail.google.com
• youtube.com
• en.wikipedia.org

Under Competitors & Similar Sites, SimilarWeb shows websites that are similar to Amazon.com.

You can find out how accurate SimilarWeb data is by applying this method:

• Install Google Analytics (a free web analytics tool provided by Google) on your website.
• Let Google Analytics gather at least one month of web analytics data of your site.
• Compare the data between SimilarWeb and Google Analytics, especially on metrics such as total visits per month.

Assume your website is developed with WordPress. You can refer to install Google Analytics on WordPress.

I have written a Chinese version of this SimilarWeb Tutorial.

• Ahrefs Tutorial
• SEMrush Tutorial
• Google Keyword Planner Tutorial
• Google Search Console Tutorial
• KeywordTool.io Guide