10 Reasons Your Competitor Gets More Traffic

Have you ever spied on a competitor? Perhaps you’ve checked out their pagerank. Or maybe you just peeked at their Alexa traffic stats. Or, if your are especially envious, you might have even verified their search engine ranking on shared keywords.

Are you irritated that they seem to be getting more traffic than you while putting in less effort? Don’t despair. There is usually an easy explanation. Below, you will find 10 reasons which might explain why your competitor is getting more traffic than you are.

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10 Reasons Why Your Competitor Gets So Much Traffic

1. Age. Is your competitor’s website older than yours? Older websites have a natural advantage. Search engines have had enough time to verify their credibility and fully index them, as well as find inlinks from other websites. Age also gives websites time to build brand awareness.
2. Marketing. How is your competitor advertising their website? Depending on your competitor’s budget, they might be paying handsomely for a marketing genius and the accompanying overpriced marketing campaign. Typical types of campaigns include pay-per-click or banner advertising.
3. SEO. What about search engine optimization? If your competitor’s website is fully optimized, then search engines will generally send more traffic his way.
4. Freshness. Websites that have new or regularly updated content generally receive more traffic from search engines. For this reason, many websites added blogs or other dynamic components. If your competitor has a regularly-updated blog, and you do not, then they have a natural advantage.
5. Strategic Partnerships. Some websites are able to get a lot of traffic from referrals, often from websites that have linked to them. For popular sites, you will notice that there are often strategic partnerships in which related websites help cross-promote each other. If you are able to get similar link buddies for your website, you will benefit from additional traffic.
6. Inbound Links & Pagerank. An additional benefit of getting inbound links is the accumulation of pagerank. Generally speaking, the better the pagerank, the greater the traffic. To get inbound links, some people syndicate articles via RSS feeds, create incentives for linking, submit their websites to directories, or write great content. So where does your competitor get his links? To determine this, do a search in google using the link operator. For example, to find websites which link to Google, you’d search for: link:google.com.
7. Aesthetics. Does your competitor’s website look better than yours? If so, this could be a key reason why you receive less traffic. On the web, content is key, but everyone still pays attention to the frills. So if your website looks like an eyesore, take some time to improve it.
8. Special Incentives. One common way for generating traffic is to create incentives for visitors. Perhaps there is a contest. Maybe there is a special discount for visitors who refer their friends. If you competitor has instituted such a program, maybe you should follow suit.
9. Repeat Visitors. Depending on the type of website, a significant portion of the traffic may come from repeat visitors. So make it easy for users to bookmark your site or subscribe to updates. Perhaps you should start a mailing list and regularly publish a newsletter.
10. Size. Generally speaking, the larger the website the greater the traffic. If your competitor’s website dwarfs your own, perhaps its time to start churning out new content.

Above all, there is one important thing to remember: content is king. So if your content is just as good and fresh as your competitor’s, and you have consistent and effective marketing efforts, you should be able to improve your traffic and potentially match your competitor’s success.

So good luck, and don’t get disheartened. Remember, the grass is always greener on the other side. It may appear that your competitor has an easy time sustaining a high level of traffic, but in actuality, he might be spending lots of time and money on SEO and marketing.