Top 3 In-house Web Traffic Analytics for Marketing in 2024

Website traffic analytics is an established method in many businesses’ marketing toolkit. After Google Analytics’ launch in 2005, there has been a boom in using this free tool for web analytics (See Figure 1). However, over time businesses realized that tracking web traffic is not enough to optimize their position for web searches and increase their website traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) collected more attention in recent years since there are more and more new tools and methods for businesses to leverage. As a business leader using Google Analytics, you may be wondering whether SEO optimization services worth the money you’d spent on them. You may wonder whether there are quick wins to try in-house and improve your SEO, but do not know where to start.

In this article, we will explain top 3 website traffic analytics methods you can apply in-house in order to improve your SEO and increase your website traffic.

1. Leverage free resources to watch your competition

If Google Analytics was an open platform for all websites to see each other’s data, a marketer’s life would be a lot easier. Thankfully, there are some free websites that will give you overall snapshots of how your traffic is going against your competitor.

For example, Similarweb’s free tier enables you to look at the general traffic of any website worldwide or in a specific country for a specified time range. In Figure 2, we compared the two fashion e-retailers’ website traffic. In more detailed sections, Similarweb will show the number of people visited each website or how many pages on average a person views on these websites. You can use this tool for monthly benchmarks between your platform and your main competitors without paying for any external service.

Moreover, you can also see which keywords your competitors are investing for digital marketing and which keywords lead your potential customers to choose another website over yours, which you may need to address in your content or product portfolio. In Figure 3, we see that users of this fashion website looks specifically for that website, rather than searching for “second hand” which is the specialization of this retailer. These insights will help you developing your marketing strategy for new or existing customers, as well as finding strategic keywords that may be less competitive.

2. Keep your content up to date and relevant

Search engines’ optimal goal is to find the most relevant information for their user. So better and to-the-point your content is, better your chance to maximize your traffic. They key to quality and relevant content, especially considering how fast the internet changes trends, is to find keywords and topics that are trending on the social media and used by your competitor websites.

SEO optimization platforms or marketing agencies that work with you will determine keywords for their clients that are similar to you and scrape content about it online to serve all their clients. If you want to incorporate this ability directly into your decision-making process, you can use web scraping tools to analyze the content on relevant platforms online and gather the keywords you need to focus on. Below are a only a few source you can collect with web scraping that can help improving the traffic your website gets:

• Competitors’ e-commerce listings to detect features, options and catch-phrases that they use to stay more relevant for potential consumers’ web searches.
• Social media posts to find new concepts and trends that relevant influencers in your product type mention in order to keep your website content up to date and add new content to catch new trends.
• Top URL results of web searches that you want to appear on, in order to see who you are competing against and be aware when there is new competition in the market.

3. Track the references to your website

Since search engines exist, there is one ultimate tool that boosts your website traffic: backlinks. Backlinks are when other credible websites give a reference to yours through a URL. In other words, if the web trusts your opinion, then search engines boost your website too.

SEO optimization tools scrape a big part of the whole web to create a web content database and search for backlinks for their several clients. However, even if you don’t use such a service, you can still target a strategic set of websites to track backlinks to your website.

For example, if you launched a specific promotion campaign on your website shop, you can scan the top influencer and consumer blogs, coupon deal websites and social media posts mentioning your brand and see how many of them provided a link to your website as well. If you don’t appear in any of these channels as much, then you will need to invest in building marketing relationships with them more. Especially for businesses that have seasonality and occasional campaigns rather than a continuous need to monitor the website, web scraping can be less costly and a lot more insightful than an external SEO optimization platform.

Further reading

For more on the latest technology trends in marketing, check out our research in:

• Top 8 Marketing Automation Trends for 2023 (with case studies)
• Digital Transformation in Marketing: Top Trends & Technologies
• Marketing Automation: Benefits, Trends & Challenges

If you believe that your business may benefit from a web scraping solution, check our list of web crawlers to find the best vendor for you. And check our analytics platforms to derive relevant business insights from all types of enterprise data.

For guidance to choose the right tool, reach out to us:

This article was drafted by former AIMultiple industry analyst Bengüsu Özcan.