I am sure that every SEO has once dreamed of prying into a competitor’s (or a client’s competitor) traffic stats. Now there is no accurate way of doing this and most of the scripts I’ve used thus far have been pretty misleading, however one does stand tall above all other traffic estimators.
Not sure who made this script but Traffic Estimate has made a pretty good traffic estimation script for us traffic metric junkies to use. I have used Spyfu for the past few months to track what my competitors were doing (even though the accuracy of the data is debatable) I could never really get a good estimation of their web traffic. Until now, Traffic Estimate seems to nails the spot when it comes to obsessive compulsive traffic monitoring of competitor’s website.
I practically check it everyday now, on a magnitude of different websites I visit, just to take a glimpse of what type of traffic certain websites are receiving. Now with that being said, I must warn you that the data is not that accurate, you may need to multiply the traffic estimate by about three. Either way, this is as close as you can get to stalking your competitors, for free atleast.
Check out http://www.trafficestimate.com/ and start spying now.
16 Comments
Meg
Francis
Apparently I had an estimated 185,000 visitors to my blog in the past 30 days. If I multiply that by 3… hmm I wish!
(for what it’s worth)
Francis Lee
Oh darn, it was pretty accurate for my own websites (as well as a few of my clients). I guess we must take in the information with a grain of salt.
I’m still looking for other traffic estimators though, other than Hitwise (there is no way I am paying the price they are after, don’t forget they only give you one industry vertical to look into).
Thiru
thats neat – 50,000 in 30 days for my blog!
Tony Dunphy
hi Francis
if you had 185k visitors wouldnt you have a higher page ramking?
Francis Lee
Hey tony,
Page rank has nothing to do with the amount of traffic you get, if anything, it only gives you a “glimpse” of how well you COULD rank on google search engine results. Unfortunately, page rank does not get updated often, and my website has been running for approximately 5/6months. I believe I missed the most recently page rank (on tool bar) update. If I have not mistaken, I should be sitting on a page rank of 4 (this is an estimate from the the links I have obtained and the PR of the page these links sits on).
To truely accurate way to spy on a website inregards with traffic, you would need something like Hitwise, which I unfortunately do not have a license for. Hence, I had to use traffic estimators which are not 100% accurate, if anything, its usually incorrect, so do take the information with a grain of salt.
Come next PR update, I should be on a much higher page rank than 0. I would also urge people to not heed too much attention to page rank as it does very little for traffic or ranking.
Peter
Hi Francis.
Is it not true that sites with higher page rank get crawled faster, deeper, and more frequently by Google’s spider?
Francis Lee
The frequency and length Googlebot crawls a website has very little to do with page rank though I would like to believe that page rank contributes to this factor. Please keep in mind that our toolbar page rank only gets updated every quarter or even every 6 months, where as Google’s internal page rank gets updated quiet often (daily, weekly, along these lines).
One main factor which contributes to websites being crawled more often would be the freshness of a website’s content, as well as how much content there is on a specific website. The more updates a website has, the more often Googlebot will come back for content, they could determine this via a website’s Sitemap, or if there was a trend of content being updated often.
Peter
Thanks for your insight Francis. I emailed you a few days ago using the contact form. Did you receive it? It was in regards to SEO/SEM careers in Australia. Cheers.
Francis Lee
Hey Peter, I will have a quick check, I don’t get many emails via the contact form for some reason so I hardly check that specific email address, I apologise if it seems like I ignored it.
I will reply to it as soon as I get a chance.
M
Thanks for the link!
I tried it on my site and there isn’t enough info. I guess my site is still too small. I do get about 5,000 visitors a month.
Crux
I fond a huge difference in traffic estimate between trafficestimates.com & domaintools.com
cindy
I wish I could figure out how to get my traffic and page rank up. I’ve been trying to market my website for almost a year now and I think I’m still a PR 1. I don’t get to frustrated because this is a hobby that I work on in my spare time, but it would be nice if there was some easy way to figure it all out
Francis Lee
I guess a good way to start is to build a keyword list which is first of all realistic for you to rank in, and second of all has good search volume. Aim to rank for these keywords, I won’t get into detail how as there are so many books, blogs and seminars who could explain it 10 times better than me. I wouldn’t look too closely at the Page Rank of a website as its not very indicative of the true ranking of a website.
sasha
Anyways, my favourite is http://www.webtraffic24.com
Vivek
Its no accurate and does not have even 50 percent accuracy for my site.
carla
There are many. But this traffic estimator also breaks down to the cities:
http://www.websitetrafficspy.com