9 Things Only Similarweb Can Do for Competitive Research

Why is competitive research important?

Competitive research is the foundation of any strong marketing strategy, as it arms you with insight into industry traffic trends, as well as provides you with an advantage over the competition. Knowing how your competitors drive traffic gives you an inside look into how to optimize your efforts, race ahead of the competition, and increase your market share. Many competitive research tools on the market use scraping methodologies to collect data; however, this creates a problem as this system doesn’t produce the most accurate results. Similarweb is the only tool that stands apart from the crowd, taking a different approach to giving you data based on real user searches and engagement so you can create a strategic, data-driven marketing plan.

Similarweb’s unique data sources include anonymized behavioral data (based on a panel of users), which offer the most relevant and reliable data. This indicates that Similarweb is the only platform that illustrates what real users are searching for, exposes digital trends, and reveals referral traffic shares. With Similarweb insights at your fingertips, you’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, empowering you to make strategic decisions and increase your revenue.

What does that difference mean for you? Simple. It means Similarweb’s competitive analysis tool can do things others can’t such as

9 advantages you only get with Similarweb

1. Research Keyword Search Trends
2. Get Fresh Keyword Data
3. Take Advantage of Real Traffic Insights
4. Improve Your Effectiveness with Actual Engagement Metrics
5. Analyze Unique Visitor Data
6. Analyze Any Category and Create Your Benchmarks
7. Get Up To Date Data
8. Have Weekly Keyword Data at Your Fingertips
9. Utilize Month to Date Data

1) Uncover Top Keyword Trends

With Similarweb’s Top Keywords page, you are able to analyze on a category level how traffic is driven to any category based on real user searches and real clicks, not simply with click-through-rate assumptions. With this tool you can see:

• Organic vs. Paid traffic: Percentage of visits generated by organic search compared to paid search
• Search Traffic by Channel: Breakdown of search traffic by search channels, such as regular search, news, image, video, and others
• Search Traffic by Source: Breakdown of search traffic by source (or search engine), such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Moreover, you can conduct competitive research using a variety of filters to narrow your results and better focus your query. The following filters are available:

• All Search Channels: Filter keywords results by search channel, e.g. Regular, News, Image, etc.
• Branded and Non-branded: Analyze all keyword results or non-branded keywords only
• Newly discovered: Uncover new keywords to target (keywords that didn’t drive traffic in the month prior to the analyzed month)
• Trending terms: See which keywords experienced a significant rise in traffic compared to the previous month. In addition, this filter is available with data from the last 28 days, so you can gain quick insights into what’s currently trending
• Question queries: Find question-based keywords, e.g. containing who/what/when/why/can. Increase traffic and link-building opportunities, as relevant content that solves users’ problems will definitely attract clicks and links

2) Get Fresh Keyword Data

Similarweb can detect new and trending keywords that other SEO tools fail to catch. To create a strong SEO strategy, you need to continuously adjust your target keywords based on current events and updates to Google’s core algorithm. This was very apparent during the COVID-19 outbreak. As other competitive research tools struggled to pick up Coronavirus-related keywords, Similarweb’s data revealed which keywords were driving the most traffic. You can see the proof of this below as keywords related to entertainment such as Nintendo Switch and personal hygiene such as toilet paper, hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, Lysol wipes, and rubbing alcohol drove the majority of traffic:

This unique SEO tool helps you identify how a keyword has been performing by reviewing keyword search vs. click volume and finding which sites receive the traffic from it – both paid and organic – to target any keyword. Similarweb also allows you to gain a clear picture of the competitive landscape for any keyword by revealing the market size for the targeted keyword and uncovers the unique URL (landing page) per keyword for each domain.

3) Take Advantage of Real Traffic Insights

The traffic insights provided by Similarweb’s competitive analysis platform are invaluable because they shed light on overall traffic share, share of voice, zero-click data, and more. Zero-click searches refer to keywords whereby a search engine results page (SERP) answers a user’s search query on the page so the user doesn’t need any further clicks to get the information they need. A zero-click search is one that satisfies the search intent within the SERP.

The clicked vs non-clicked data that Similarweb supplies can aid marketing teams in optimizing for today’s world where a keyword might be searched frequently but fails to generate much traffic.

Brands should think about Search Optimization through two lenses:

• Optimizing for search visits (CTR) that generate site traffic
• Optimizing for zero-click searches that don’t generate site traffic but can support brand awareness

With Similarweb’s Zero-Click metric, marketers are better informed, meaning they can optimize their SEO, PPC, and Search strategies for keywords that actually drive website visits and user engagement. Since more often than not, a marketer’s prime objective is to drive traffic, they would want to prioritize keywords with higher “clicked” rates (CTR). The CTR or click-through rate is a ratio of people who actually clicked on a link to the total number of people who viewed the page.

4) Gauge Your Effectiveness with Actual Engagement Metrics

The Traffic & Engagement page under Similarweb’s Website Analysis tool gives you a sneak peek into the traffic of any website you’re interested in, including the number of visits, engagement, rankings, and more. Getting these types of engagement metrics for every marketing channel is invaluable information that only Similarweb can provide.

This competitive research tool is crucial to:

• Gain an overview of a brand’s digital market share
• Determine how a brand compares to its competitors
• Understand how well a brand is performing according to its visitor reach and engagement
• Discover emerging trends and seasonality
• Gain insight into audience behavior over time and across granular time frames (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)

The main advantages of using this traffic and engagement data are to help you effectively analyze and benchmark against the competition, uncover the quality of your traffic vs competitors, as well as reveal shifts in reach and engagement over time.

5) Uncover Unique Visitor Data

While other analytics tools track pageviews or sessions, Similarweb can provide you with unique visitor data on a monthly and daily basis. This tells you the number of devices visiting the analyzed domain, within the country and time period analyzed, and reveals the actual reach of your website.

You can compare the monthly unique visitor data to Total Visits (sum of all visits for a defined timeframe) to understand returning vs. new visitors. Additionally, if you compare the monthly metric to the daily metric you will be able to understand how often users visit your website.

This view is useful for:

• PR professionals and agencies measuring the reach of their campaigns
• Publishers assessing the exposure of a competitor’s piece of content
• Advertisers quantifying the impact of another company’s ad campaigns

6) Analyze Any Category and Create Your Benchmarks

Similarweb’s Category Analysis tool has 187 pre-existing categories which allow for easy analysis of a specific category and individual players within the category. However, you also have the ability to build your own category and perform the same analysis so you can customize the metrics to a specific list of sites, based on your unique needs. Below is an example of a category analysis for the top websites in the travel and tourism industry.

This allows you to extract insights into the top keywords, understand the best-performing websites, analyze outbound traffic, track your digital share of voice, and grow your market share.

7) Get Up-To-Date Data

Using the Last 7 Days filter you can discover the latest trends as they happen, monitor your competitors’ daily website performance for the last 7 days, and understand how current events or campaigns are impacting your website traffic.

While other competitive research tools show you data 3 months after the fact, Similarweb’s unique Last 7 & 28 Days filter only has a 2-day lag, providing you with the latest insights and giving you an advantage over your competitors.

8) Have Weekly Keyword Data at Your Fingertips

Similarweb analyzes keywords on a weekly basis, exposing almost real-time patterns and trends that are crucial for your marketing strategy. It provides weekly visibility into websites’ traffic share for specific keywords and drills down into the keywords that drove traffic to any site in the past 7 days or any specific week,  for real-time campaign optimization. You don’t have to wait until the end of the month to get these critical insights!

This unmatched visibility helps marketers see a campaign’s impact on traffic share from one week to the next. More importantly, it gives you real-time insights for trending keywords on the week of any major current event or holiday.

Although every marketer would love to have real-time insights easily available, this data can specifically help the following professionals:

• SEO/PPC Managers – Qualify whether to start optimizing for a new keyword. Understand the difficulty of obtaining traffic from the keyword, by analyzing who is currently competing for it, and better understand revenue potential for untapped keywords.
• PPC Managers – Understand a keyword’s market share, who is bidding for the optimized keywords, and which landing pages would work best for a particular keyword.
• Content Managers – Create or optimize existing content based on trending keywords for specific industries, and drive organic traffic to a company’s website and social pages. Understand which other companies are also incorporating the keyword into their content, and how.

9) Utilize Month to Date Data

The Month to Date data range for the marketing channel analysis feature helps users gain actionable insights without a month lag time for query results. Use this to better understand traffic and engagement trends to date per channel. This metric is available for marketing channels analysis (Direct, Email, Referrals, Social, Organic Search, Paid Search, and Display Ads) and allows marketers to conduct a thorough analysis, to discover competitors’ marketing strategies, and to reveal the quality of traffic won from each marketing channel.

With this type of marketing data at your disposal you can:

• Gain an overview of a brand’s marketing strategy over time
• Plan and prioritize resources by analyzing the leading channels generating traffic for competitors and the industry leaders
• Evaluate the quality of visitor traffic each marketing channel generates over time

Win More High-Quality Traffic with Similarweb

With Similarweb’s data, you can identify which marketing channels are performing best and where you have opportunities for growth. By backing your marketing decisions with reliable, vetted data you can more confidently create and optimize your strategy to give your website the competitive edge over competitors.

To learn more about how Similarweb can improve your business’s bottom line, check out our ebook, How to Build the Perfect Marketing Strategy.

by Sarah Mehlman

Sr. Marketing Intelligence Specialist

Sarah creates engaging content with over 5 years of experience. She enjoys traveling, family time, baking, and Netflix. Sarah holds a psychology degree from Clark University and lives in Israel.