Website Traffic Checker

Analyze website traffic effectively

Analyzing your website traffic is key for any successful digital marketing or SEO campaign. Since driving relevant traffic is the ultimate goal of creating a website, you need to understand who’s visiting your site. 

You can invest time and effort into crafting beautiful, optimized content, but without analyzing its performance and aligning it with what your audience needs, you risk not getting any traffic—resulting in wasted time and resources. 

Avoid this by monitoring and evaluating your site traffic regularly. 

• Enter your website URL into the search box above
•  Get free traffic insights powered by Semrush data

Why it’s important to monitor website traffic

Website traffic analysis provides a clear view of the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts and reveals how your site compares to its competitors. It also gives you insight into which activities may result in the highest ROI, helping guide your content strategy.

For example, you might initially be excited to see that your website is driving decently high traffic every month. But when you look at metrics such as “top pages” and “top organic keywords,” you notice that 90% of your total traffic is just going to your homepage, and you’re only ranking for branded keywords that don’t showcase what your brand is really about. 

This is a great opportunity to create blog posts or landing pages that target non-branded keywords within your niche. By diversifying your content, you can distribute traffic more evenly across your site, signaling to Google that your site is a comprehensive and valuable resource. 

This approach will help you rank for relevant keywords, in turn growing your presence in your industry and driving relevant traffic. It also reduces risk, ensuring that your overall traffic remains stable even if your homepage experiences issues like downtime or a 404 error.

Key metrics to consider

Each metric offers unique insight into the state of your website and the landscape of its niche. Let’s walk through the most important metrics to monitor and analyze.

Monthly organic traffic 

Track your organic traffic (typically measured monthly) and compare it to your competitors’ traffic. The Visits metric indicates the total number of visits over the month, and Unique Visitors tells you how many of those visits came from new, individual sources. 

Your Visits metric should be higher than your Unique Visitors metric since multiple visits from the same person will be counted in Visits, but will only count as one visit in Unique Visitors. 

User interaction metrics

Go one step further and see how your traffic interacts with your website:

• Pages / Visit tells you the average number of your site pages someone views when they land on your site
• Average Visit Duration indicates how long each visitor spends on your site
• Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who visited your site without taking any action or leaving the page in less than 10 seconds

The lower the bounce rate, the better—but remember that average bounce rates vary by industry, so be sure to research your industry’s average bounce rate to know where your site stands. 

Traffic sources

See how much your organic marketing efforts are driving traffic with the Organic Traffic metric and how much your PPC campaigns are driving with the Paid Traffic metric. By comparing how much each source is helping grow your site traffic, you can strategize more effectively.

Incorporating website traffic into your reporting

Website traffic is the core metric for all of your SEO and digital marketing efforts. You can use it to showcase overall site performance, identify trends, and guide decision-making. It should help inform new site content, PPC and/or social media campaigns, and existing site optimizations. 

A good starting point is to come up with a “mix and match” system where you can combine different key metrics to develop a clear picture of your site’s performance. 

For example, maybe you’re targeting the same keyword in your PPC campaign and your organic blog content. Try filtering the traffic source between Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic for that keyword to see which source brings in more traffic. If your PPC campaign is performing better, maybe it’s a sign to increase the budget for that keyword and to revamp your blog content—or target a less competitive keyword in your blog content.

Or maybe you notice that you’re ranking really well for a relevant, highly trafficked keyword. But despite the good ranking, it’s hardly driving traffic to your site. After a SERP analysis, you learn that your content is part of a zero-click search. This means that your content appears in a featured snippet or knowledge panel and users don’t need to click on it to get their answer.

In this case, ranking well isn’t super beneficial. With this insight, you could alter your content to target a related keyword that doesn’t have a featured snippet, increasing your chances of visitors clicking through to your website to get their answers. 

Become a power user with these pro tips

Our free Website Traffic Checker tool is powered by Semrush, which uses proprietary data collected from various sources through its unique algorithms and data processing mechanisms. 

To get the most value from our tool, here are some helpful user tips:

• Explore all metrics and make sure you understand each of them
• “Mix and match” metric data to get clearer insights into user behavior and your site’s performance
• Set benchmarks so you can more accurately measure your site’s performance over time, allowing you to pivot strategies faster if something isn’t working well
• Evaluate traffic sources to know where most of your traffic comes from, where it converts the highest, and how to tailor your content to meet user needs
• Use data for campaigns in your PPC or social media. For example, you could run a PPC campaign focused on the keywords that organically convert the highest for your website.
• Integrate with other SEO tools such as Semrush’s keyword rank checker or backlink checker to compare results and get an even deeper understanding of your site’s performance and user behavior.

We have only just scratched the surface of valuable insights available with Semrush website traffic data,  as well as the multiple applications for your SEO and growth strategies. Check out the range of other powerful tools available.