Disclaimer: This article does contain affiliate links. If you purchase a tool through one of my links I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for the support. 

How much traffic does a website get?

To answer this question, we’re taking a top-down approach.

And by that, I mean we’ll start with a top-level look at the estimated total traffic of a website.

And then we’ll peel back one layer at a time to reveal each piece of data in more detail.

Here is a quick overview:

1. All website traffic – We’ll start by looking at the total amount of traffic a website gets each month, check estimated engagement metrics, and break down the numbers by device type.
2. By channel – Next layer down, we’re looking at how much traffic is coming from different sources. For example, we can check traffic numbers and trends across different channels like organic, paid, social, email and referral. Then, drill down into each channel to see the exact strategies competitors are using to drive that traffic.
3. By subdomain/ directory – Next layer down is really handy for larger websites, especially ecommerce sites, where you can see which product categories drive the most organic traffic.
4. By page/post – The fourth layer looks at the individual posts/pages that drive the most traffic to a site so we can start to prioritize the content strategy. For example, does the website focus on blog content, review pages or product pages to attract visitors.
    
5. By keyword – Finally, for organic and paid channels, you can drill down and find out which keywords (and modifiers) drive the most traffic across different stages of the funnel – top, middle and bottom.

Note: we’ll look closer at the intent break down later in the post.

The key thing to remember is that you can analyze traffic stats at varying levels of granularity, especially for organic and paid search channels. 

It’s important to remember that these reports are estimates because SEMrush does not have access to every website’s internal analytics.

Instead, the reports are based on “petabytes of clickstream data that comes from multiple proprietary and 3rd party data sources, SEMrush’s proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms, and Big Data technologies.”

In other words, data is collected and approximated from real internet user behaviors. The next best thing after having direct access to your competitor’s Google Analytic account.

Let’s take a look at the report and see what metrics we can unearth for our working example, Shopify. 

In SEMrush, click on Traffic Analytics from the side menu and enter the domain – e.g. “shopify.com” – you want to analyze:

The Traffic Analytics Overview report gives you an estimate of the queried website’s traffic and engagement.

You can apply filters – historical data, location, and device – to modify the results. And next to the filters is a set of blue bars noting the Estimated Accuracy of the report, which is based on the size of the domain and filters.

Shopify has 3 bars, which means the data has a higher level of accuracy:

Shopify had an estimated 33.9M visits in June 2019, which, as you’ll see below in the historical trends, is a slight dip compared to previous months (possible a result of the June core algorithm update).

Next to Visits, are estimated metrics for engagement.

• Visits – an estimate of total visits to the website over the chosen month.
• Unique Visitors – an estimate of total unique visits to the website over the chosen month. (note: a visitor can have multiple visits)
• Pages/Visit – an estimate of how many pages (on average) a person visits in one session on the website.
• Avg. Visit Duration – an average estimate of the amount of time spent on the site during each visit.
• Bounce Rate – an estimate of the website’s average bounce rate, or percentage of visitors that leave the website after viewing just one page.

Think of it as the closest thing to getting a behind-the-scenes look at each of your competitor’s Google Analytics Audience Overview reports!

Under the engagement metrics is a historical trend graph. You can select the time frame – 6 months, 12 months, or All-time. And you can also switch to see the domain’s trend of Total Visits, Unique Visitors, Average Visit Duration, or Bounce Rate:

The trend lines are for All Devices (blue), Desktop (green), and Mobile (orange).

In our example, you can see visits (all sources) to Shopify were increasing steadily up until March 2019, then plateaued for a couple months, before taking a drop at the beginning of June. Note: this could be the result of getting hit by the June Google core algorithm update. We’ll dive into this more later.

The Traffic Sources report estimates how much traffic a website gets from each channel:

• Direct – traffic via URLs entered in a browser’s search bar, saved bookmarks or links from outside a browser (such as PDFs or Microsoft Word documents).
• Referral – traffic from a hyperlink on another domain (other than a Social Media domain).
• Search – traffic directly from a search engine such as Google, Bing, etc.
• Social – traffic from links on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
• Paid ads – traffic from paid advertisements on Google Ads. ( Includes PPC ads in search results and product listing ads e.g. Google Shopping, in SERPs.)

In our example, you can see that over the last 12 months Shopify acquired the most traffic from referrals.

In the next report, you can filter the traffic source data by All Sources, Referring Sites, Search Engines, or Social Networks:

And on the right, you can see the Traffic Count, Traffic Share and Change percentages.

In our example, the top referring site is myshopify.com, (with 43.81% of the traffic), which kind of skews the data, as this domain is used when setting up each store’s domain settings.

But, if we look at the actual estimated traffic from referrals of non-Shopify sites – rather the Traffic Share % – you can see it’s a significant number.

For example: Fashionnova drives over 126,000 referral visits to Shopify each month.

From here, you can quickly identify the referral sources that could drive the most referral traffic to your website. And this is where you’d want to focus your link building/ PR and/or guest posting efforts. 

If you select the Search Engines tab, you’ll see which search engine drives most traffic:

In our example, Google (organic) drives 85.88% traffic to Shopify, followed by Google (paid) with 6.31%.

Note: Again, while the paid percentage appears small, it’s worth noting that Shopify is investing a lot in Paid Ads, and is now driving over 372,000 paid search visits a month!

As we’ll see later in the Paid Traffic section, Shopify has been gradually increasing investment in this channel over time.

The Geographic Distribution report shows you the countries and regions that drive the most traffic to a website.

The report includes a map illustration followed by a table showing the Total Traffic and Traffic Share % from each country:

Plus the Pages/Visit, Average Visit Duration, and Bounce Rate so you can identify which countries interact the most with the website:

In our example, Shopify acquired most of its traffic from the USA (42.54%) in June 2019. But it’s also getting significant traffic from other international locations. So, from a strategy standpoint, its important to find out how they are targeting those countries?

One possibility might be they are using multiple languages for each country. And a quick check of the source code for references to the “hreflang” tag will help shed light:

The Traffic Analytics report also highlights the difference between desktop and mobile traffic. You can see Shopify has nearly twice as much traffic coming from Desktop devices:

The Subdomains report shows you which subdomains on the website acquire the most traffic:

In our example, you can see the Shopify “App” and “CDN” subdomains get the most traffic.

For other websites, this report can help you identify if a competitor is using a blog subdomain to drive top-funnel traffic, or housing products on a separate shop subdomain.

For example: 

If I wanted to see how HubSpot was driving website traffic, specifically at the top of the funnel, I’d start by analyzing only their blog subdomain:

Similarly, if I was selling beard products online and wanted to see how a website such as Beardaholic was driving traffic with commercial intent, I’d start by analyzing their shop subdomain.

SEMrush’ SEO Toolkit makes this granular traffic analysis a breeze (more on this in the next section):

Segmenting by subdomain or subfolder can help you better prioritize the traffic analysis process.

As you’ve seen, the Traffic Analytics Overview report allows you to compare competitor data side-by-side across all the categories mentioned above. 

The comparisons will allow you to fill out the traffic analysis template much faster.

Simply enter the domain names into the search boxes at the top of the report and click ‘Compare’:

For example, I’ve added BigCommerce and BigCartel as competitors of Shopify.

Now you get a series of reports comparing each website’s estimated traffic (and level of confidence):

While Shopify gets the most traffic, it took the biggest month-over-month hit in June. BigCartel saw the biggest drop in Average Visit Duration. All sites had a rough June. From here, you’d want to drill into the specific channels that took the hit, and uncover why. 

From July 2018 to March 2019, Shopify grew its traffic from ~24M to ~38M visits a month. Over the same time period, BigCommerce and BigCartel were basically flatlining.

If I was a competitor, I’d drill into the channels report to find out where the majority of the traffic growth came from, and then dig deeper into those channels to find out which strategies were driving the growth, and replicate them as fast as possible.

This report shows you the percentage of users who visited a specific domain and its competitors. According to SEMrush, there is a higher audience overlap between Shopify and BigCommerce. 

Armed with this knowledge, one thing I might decide to do is set up a social PPC campaign and target all the people interested in the competitors with a higher Audience Overlap percentage. 

Use the Traffic Analytics report to uncover new channels where competitors are getting a lot of website traffic, but your website is lagging behind. Then, drill in to uncover the specific strategies they are using to drive traffic from each channel.

Alternatives: Later in the post, I’ll show you some other tools like SimilarWeb that help to get a top-level snapshot. 

The Traffic Analytics report gave us a global view of all traffic sources over time.

But now we’re going to use the Organic Research report in the SEMrush SEO Toolkit to dive deep into your competitor’s organic traffic channels. Again, we’ll take a top-down approach for the traffic analysis:

1. Overview
2. Subfolder/subdomain
3. Page/post
4. Individual keywords

Each additional layer we peel back will provide more insights that can be used to build a field-tested strategy to drive more website traffic.

For this section, we’ll use The Wirecutter as our working example.

In SEMrush, select SEO Toolkit, click on Organic Research from the side menu, and enter the domain – e.g. “thewirecutter.com” – you want to analyze:

The Overview report shows the total organic traffic and keywords:

In our example, The Wirecutter has 2.7 million keywords in the Top 100 search results and is getting an estimated 4.4 million organic visits per month.

Under the headline figures are some historical trend graphs. Let’s compare growth over the last year vs. all time:

Over the last year, The Wirecutter saw a steady growth in traffic from 3.6M to 4.4M visits a month.

But over the last two years, traffic has grown from less than 2M to 4.4M visits per month. Traffic growth is accelerating! 

The figures so far have been for Desktop. But we can switch the filter at the top of the page to get Mobile traffic figures as well:

Over the last year, The Wirecutter mobile traffic decreased slightly from 3.0M to 2.9M visits a month.

In the All time report, we see that mobile traffic has plateaued since the inflection point that occurred in February, 2018. 

(Note: desktop traffic started in Jan 2012, but mobile traffic started in March 2015.)

Ok, let’s go a little deeper and check subdomains.

For this report, we’ll use Shopify as our example.

Enter your domain – e.g. shopify.com – and click the Subdomains tab in Organic Research:

You can see Shopify has 58 subdomains driving hundreds of thousands of monthly organic visits. (Results are sorted by the estimated desktop traffic.)

Most traffic (61%) goes to the main domain, but the remainder is spread to the various subdomains including those for the Help Center, App Store, Themes Store, and various language-specific sites like Spanish.

Remember: use the subdomains to get laser focused with your traffic analysis.

For example:

If you see an ecommerce competitor selling products on a shop subdomain, prioritize your traffic analysis on that subdomain to find commercial intent keyword opportunities:

Next, we’re going to analyze the subfolders on Beardbrand.

Using advanced filters in SEMrush, you can find specific types of keywords.

For instance, you can use URL subfolders like “/collections/” or “/product/” to return all the (BOFU) commercial intent product-related keywords for an ecommerce site. On the other hand, using a URL subfolder like “/blog/” returns all the (TOFU) informational intent keyword ideas.

Enter your domain – e.g. beardbrand.com – and click the Positions tab in Organic Research
report:

At the moment there are no filters, and there’s a total 43.1K keywords and 159.K visits/month.

But if you apply filters to the report, you can zoom in on the different intent keywords.

For example:

Beardbrand houses all its categories and products within the /collections subfolder:

Let’s check for commercial intent keywords with these filters:

• Include > URL > Containing “/collections”
• Include > Words Count > Greater than 1 (to eliminate single-term or branded keywords)

With the filters applied the number of keywords (476) and traffic (15.6K) drops considerably.

Now let’s check for informational intent keywords with these filters:

• Include > URL > Containing “/blogs/”
• Include > Words Count > Greater than 1 (to eliminate single-term keywords)

From these results, you can see Beardbrand gets significantly more traffic for its informational intent keywords (102.7K) than its commercial intent keywords (15.6K).

But, since we’re an ecommerce competitor, we’d prioritize traffic analysis at the /collections subfolder, and work our way back up to the /blog folder. 

Staying with Beardbrand, you can check which individual pages are ranking for the most keywords and driving the most organic traffic across each stage of the funnel. This is a much better indicator of which topics (rather than keywords) to target in your SEO strategy.

Here’s how:

Enter your domain – e.g. beardbrand.com – and click the Pages tab in Organic Research report:

Here’s the report with no filters.

But we can add the same filters as before to separate the keywords by intent.

Add this filter for the commercial intent keywords:

• Include > URL > Containing “/collections”

All these pages are bottom funnel product pages with high traffic and keywords.

Now add this filter for the informational intent keywords:

• Include > URL > Containing “/blogs”

All these pages are top funnel blog posts with high traffic and ranking for a lot of informational keywords.

Finally, we’ll look at which keywords are driving the most traffic.

For this example, we’ll use Wirecutter again.

Here’s how:

Enter your domain – e.g. thewirecutter.com – and click the Positions tab in Organic Research report:

The top traffic-driving keyword is “wirecutter”. But we can add filters to remove branded keywords and focus on the mid-funnel investigational intent keywords (for affiliate sites) that you’ll find in the “/reviews/” subfolder:

• Include > URL > Containing “/reviews/”
• Exclude > Keyword > Containing “wirecutter”

Now the report shows the mid-funnel keywords that drive the most traffic.

Similarly, you can also filter out the most valuable traffic opportunities using common mid-funnel modifiers such as “best”, “top”, “vs” or “alternative”:

Another example is the K9 Of Mine website who focus on using keyword modifiers like “best” rather than a subfolder for their mid-funnel investigational intent keywords. So the filter is:

• Include > Keyword > Containing “best”

Featured snippets grab a lot of valuable SERP real estate.

If you can identifying which terms trigger them, and figure out how to steal them from the competition, you’ll drive a lot more traffic to your website each month:

SEMrush’ SEO Toolkit makes it easy to find all your competitors featured snippets.  

Once you have entered a competitor’s domain, scroll down to the SERP Features report on the Overview tab:

Click the Featured Snippets link to see all the keywords that your competitors are ranking for with a featured snippet:

Check the number of featured snippets for each competitor and enter it into the template:

Bonus Resource: How to Get a Featured Snippet (and Rank in Position #0)