photo of a pink flower

Get your not provided keywords with SimilarWeb

This all started one day when I was looking for a site like Compete or Quantcast that could tell me estimated unique visitors for a client’s competitors (and maybe demographic information). I not only found Similiar Web, but I also discovered a way to recover (previously hidden) not provided keywords for my client’s site and for its competitors.

This tool has quickly become the swiss army knife for me of competitor analysis, and here’s why:
By putting in domain you can see:

  • audience interests
  • average pageviews per month
  • time on page
  • subdomain data
  • the site’s most popular pages
  • top traffic sources (including referral sources and display advertising). All major social networks are included in SimilarWeb Social Insights – even those popular globally (like VK.com).
  • bouncerate
  • what other sites that person visited during the same browsing session.

Check out the sites that were listed when I looked up this url: womensissues.about.com:

Similar Web screenshot - other sites visitedHere are the “Not Provided” Keywords:

Yes. You read that correctly. Simiar Web can gather the keywords from the browser before Google has a chance to encrypt them. Here’s what that looks like for womensissues.about.com:

Similar Web Screenshot - Not Provided Keywords

It even displays the social traffic referrals:

Similar Web Social Traffic Referrals screenshot

Here are the semantically similar sites (based on their database):

Similar Web -similar sites screenshot

Here are the organic and paid search competitors for womensissues.about.com:

Similar Web - Organic and Paid Search Competitors

It also provides data around the top sites in particular content categories. 

Here are the category leaders in the “Women’s Interest” category:

Similar Web Category Leaders screenshot

I’m sure you’re now wondering, “Yes, but how big is its survey size and can I export the data to Excel?” Don’t worry…

  1. It pulls its data from 60 million users/mo from all major browsers with different plugins, extensions and add-ons. That’s in comparison to Alexa’s 2.5-3 millon/month. They have at least 1% of the population in 54 countries from around the world. (In addition to their Chrome plugin, they also have a web crawler that crawls 1 billion pages/month).
  2. You can adjust the date range from 1 month to 12 months (or a custom range). While it’s data is great, at the moment it’s only desktop data (no mobile search queries).
  3. All the data is downloadable to CSV (love that!)

I think all SEO should check out this tool (and I’m not getting paid to say that). Find out more on their Similar Web blog.


Posted

in

by

Comments

One response to “Get your not provided keywords with SimilarWeb”

  1. Jim Robinson Avatar

    This is great and I’m looking forward to using it. Thanks for sharing, Katherine!