SimilarWeb

Similar Web! What good is a profitable website with a lot of traffic if the next porn site is making more money than you and skimming off your potential? Competition might be fair, but it isn’t fun. That’s why you need to reach far and wide with your marketing efforts to try and content for some top spots across search engines. Don’t let your site sink to the bottom of results pages. Fight for what is rightfully yours. Get the inside scoop into what your competitors are doing and try to match them blow by blow by being one step ahead.

The best way to really get some traction going with your competitive analysis is to haul ass over to SimilarWeb and check out their extensive catalog of functionality that’s all crammed neatly into one package. SimilarWeb has been at the forefront of SEO analysis, nipping on the heels of other giants like SEMRush. I feel comfortable calling them professionals. They’ve also been really influential in defining how this type of statistical data is segmented and delivered to end-users. They want to find all the useful data and serve it to you in a way that you can understand. They’ve been perfecting their approach for over a decade.

They’re technically here for you for free, but if you’d like to make maximal use of all of their features, you’ll have to sign up for a subscription. That being said, it’s probably worth it. I say probably, because they won’t allow me to test out their software without paying for it first. I have to go by the performance of their web plugin. Still, I trust that they’re among the best at what they do. They may very well have the best inside scoop, period. Granted, there’s no way for you to actually prove that SimilarWeb is any better than their competitors, but I personally appreciate the work they’ve done in recent years. Their services are available through a neat little browser applet, but I covered that plugin in a separate review. This review is about the big kahuna – their online SEO analysis platform.

The Basic Data

There’s a wealth of information hiding in plain sight on every single website, including your own. All it takes is one simple tool to just show you the data. I’m talking about basic SEO rankings and performance metrics. You don’t have to scrape the web to find the numbers – the data is technically already there. Except, extracting it all manually is going to be a nightmare. Plus, trying to figure out how your site performs on search engines manually is damn near impossible, since the search engines themselves cater to the individual user. You need a third-party tool, even if you just want to figure out your ranking.

Beyond that, you also need to dig into your competitors' basic information because first impressions can be deceiving. You might have a long list of competitors that you look up to and you might even want to take inspiration from their designs and business practices. But, how can you be sure that that’s such a good idea? You need a way to narrow down to the actual business practices that work, instead of assuming that an entire website’s worth of decisions is on point.

Checking out the Competition

Let’s say you’re trying to break into some simple porn tube webmaster practices. You’ve got the domain, you’ve got the hosting and you’re uploading the content as we speak. What’s the next step? Well, you need to figure out what the other porn tubes are doing. I’m not talking about PornHub and XVideos. They’re growing increasingly more popular because they were popular to begin with. You can’t hope to extract valuable data from a monopoly. You need to figure out your personal favorite tube sites owned by aspiring webmasters such as yourself and take notes from their approach. So, head out there and find some tube sites that are doing the same thing you are.

Better yet, let SimilarWeb do that work for you. Hook your website up to their tool and almost instantly, you’ll gain access to a ton of useful data on your competition. You don’t just get a list of the people that are bidding for the same organic keywords. You get a detailed breakdown of their efforts as well. You can see why they’re performing as well as they do and you can learn how to improve your own website as a result of this information.

On top of that, you’ll get an introduction to some fascinating new opportunities that you didn’t even know were available to you. The most interesting feature of SimilarWeb is that it actually recommends affiliate offers to you based on the cooperation of other websites. Granted, you could just go to them manually and click through their ads, one by one, but that would literally take you years to complete. You can shave down that journey to a single click with SimilarWeb.

Skimming from the Top

When you’re not trying to push against your competition, you’ll be trying to cut yourself a slice from the big boys’ cake. I know I said that you couldn’t learn any lessons from monopolies and I stand by that – they’re fueled by billions of dollars and decades of success. What you can do, instead, is try to cut into their share of the internet. There are only so many chronic masturbators to go around. For every person that comes to your site, the monopolies lose out on profit. Except… they’re not going to be trying to knock you out of business. That’s the beauty of trying to cut into their audiences.

SimilarWeb will help you identify the biggest players within a given category so that you can analyze their marketing effect in detail and see where they’re getting their traffic. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that most of PornHub’s traffic comes from people literally Googling the word “porn”. We all know that. I’m not suggesting that you should contend for that keyword. That ship has sailed.

I’m suggesting that you try and skim thousands of keywords from the bottom of the barrel and lead them straight to videos that you name after those specific keywords. Do this shit automatically en masse. Try to nab viewers one by one if you have to. Find unique and interesting perspectives that you wouldn’t be able to conjure up yourself. People get really freaky when they’re Googling for porn. They’ll write in all kinds of descriptive fetish shit. Find those search terms, get some videos that apply and then serve those people said exact content. Match the content to the keywords, instead of the other way around.

Ridiculous Business Model

I call them like I see them – SimilarWeb doesn’t have to be this expensive. It’s not so much the price tag I mind, rather, the way they’ve broken up their products. It’s kind of insulting. They have three different offers, but they’re not broken up into tiers. Instead, they’re three entirely different offers. These are search, affiliate and display marketing. They each cost $167 a month, billed annually and the price itself isn’t that crazy for a tool with this much power and insight. I hate that you have to quite literally choose whether you want to use SimilarWeb for SEO, affiliate marketing or display traffic.

If you want more than one of these, tough shit, you’ll have to purchase two different tiers. If you want to get all three, you might be able to get a discount if you contact their sales department directly. I’m assuming that’s the case since they also have a digital marketing tier that they state supports three users and they haven’t listed the actual features. I’m guessing that’s their scalable enterprise alternative.

The three main tiers only support one user at a time as far as I can tell and they are each targeted at one singular type of analysis. I absolutely hate this. They should consolidate this shit under one platform and mark up their prices if they can’t afford to stay solvent.

Worth A Shot

My advice to you is that you pick whichever of the three offers you need the most and only get one month’s worth of SimilarWeb. Try to use it as much as possible during that time and really squeeze out the potential. Then, measure the performance and figure out whether they’re worth the hassle.

I know they’ve got years of experience and a lot of credentials, but I wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt and sign up for 12 months’ worth of their tools right off the bat. Test them first, sign up for a discounted price later. You don’t want to be stuck with a yearly subscription to a tool that isn’t helping you make more money.