AskPat 719 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 719 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

Now here's today question from Corey.

Corey: Hi, Pat. I've been looking at competitors' websites, and I've been trying to estimate the amount of traffic that goes to those websites. I found some free online tools and what not, but the estimates vary quite a bit from estimating tool to estimating tool. I was wondering if you had a recommended, or suggested technique or more reliable technique to come up with how much traffic was going to a particular website. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Corey. What's up? Thank you so much for the question. I do agree with you. A lot of these tools are out there to help you find traffic for other people's websites, and a lot of them spit out a lot of different information. I'm going to give you a couple quick tips and maybe a couple tools that I'll share with you that I use to estimate and see what other people's traffic is like. The first thing I want to mention is that sometimes you can get an idea not for website traffic but for how popular another website is by looking at sites other than Google, or looking at Google traffic or even their own websites. If they have a YouTube presence, for example, it might be interesting to look at some of their YouTube videos and see how many views they have, how many subscribers they have.

If you're looking at different competitors using their YouTube views related to each other is going to actually give you some more precise information because YouTube tells you how many views the video has. YouTube tells you exactly how many subscribers they have, which is really interesting. Now if only it were that easy for something like web traffic or even email lists, but unfortunately it's not that easy. However, there are a couple tools out there that will help you. Now Alexa.com, A-L-E-X-A.com, will give you some information on a website's ranking. It's ranking is based on traffic versus other websites. It's not going to tell you the exact traffic numbers, but if you are there with a specific Alexa ranking you can see where other sites are against you. If another site has a higher Alexa ranking, generally speaking it's going to have more traffic than you. Again, this is the Alexa ranking at Alexa.com.

There's another site that I use that actually is my favorite tool for web-based keyword research and potentially to guess traffic and stuff. It's a free tool that you can use as well. That is SEMRush.com. I think SEM stands for search engine marketing, so SEMRush.com. I use this tool for a lot of different things. I love to look at it and look at my own website's information on it. It tells me very quickly certain keywords that I'm ranking for, search volumes, URLs. It gives me some quick information about organic search, paid traffic search. In a similar way to Alexa, it's a great way to compare websites versus one another, but I want to give you one more tool. Again, this tool, SEM Rush gives you some organic search traffic data, but it's not completely accurate. I don't know necessarily why it's not.

The only true way to know exactly what the website traffic is that a site gets is to ask the owner. Now obviously more than likely they're not going to tell you exactly what those numbers are, but maybe some will. Maybe some have reports depending on the niche where they actually share that information similar to how I do sometimes on my own website or with my income reports. I have one more website that I want to share with you that does a good job and makes it actually really easy for you to compare people and websites versus each other. It's SimilarWeb.com. If you go to SimilarWeb.com you can type in a website there. There's actually a button that you can then push that says plus add competitors. That allows you to really just in one screen see all the different websites against each other. Even though again the traffic number are going to be off although I find that this one is a little bit more accurate than the other ones, at least with my own websites, the nice thing is you can get to easily compare the websites versus one another which is really nice.

There's some other cool graphs that are really cool here. For example, the top referring sites you can see, how people come to your website and the last part, where they end up going and then some of the. . . it’s like Google Analytics but a little bit more intuitive in terms of how it looks, a lot more information about social media and all that kind of stuff too. Check it out. I think everybody should go there and check it out. It's free to use at least for the first couple tries. SimilarWeb.com is where to go. Corey, I hope that helps you a little bit. Sorry I can't give you a clear cut answer besides go and ask the person, which like I said isn't usually going to work out very well. You can use these websites that I mentioned earlier to compare sites against one another and you're own. There you go. Thanks, Corey. Appreciate it. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here in the show.

For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much.

As always, I want to finish off with a quote. Today's quote is from somebody unknown, but it's a great quote, and that is, “Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect.”

It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections. Nobody is perfect. Stop trying to be perfect. Just keep going. Cheers, take care. I'll see you next week in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.