In actual life, no one wants to be stuck in traffic, but if you’re a webmaster, traffic is everything you want.

In web parlance, traffic refers to the volume or amount of visitors a website receives or searching a particular keyword.

Traffic is the lifeblood of websites. It is the singular most important goal of all SEO efforts – to drive traffic to our sites. But how do we know how much traffic we are getting? How are we comparing to competition in terms of traffic volume?

No, you don’t have to do some manual counting to determine just exactly how much traffic your site is pulling in. Leave it to website traffic estimator tools to fetch you the right numbers.

Benefits of Web Traffic Estimators

Physical store owners know upfront how many people enter their store in a day, and how many of those are buyers vs. window shoppers. It’s a different story with website owners: We can’t “see” our customers. Fortunately, there are website traffic estimators to give us some form we can grasp.

What a web traffic estimator does is track and record activities in your website. This way, you come to know how many people come to your website on any given day and what keywords they used to reach your website. Based on what you know, you can then make the appropriate steps to improve your site’s performance if you find the numbers disappointing.

Using web traffic estimator tools, you are able to get a better picture of your PPC. You learn, too, which keywords get more targeted traffic, and this information is crucial to any SEO campaign. This is how it works: If keyword A does not get enough Mobile traffic, it may not be worth your optimization campaign. If keyword B is driving hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site each month, then you focus your marketing efforts on that keyword.

Choosing a Web Traffic Estimator

Nowadays, you’ll find a good number of free and paid web traffic estimator tools. When it comes to selecting a tool, money for me is a secondary consideration. What’s more important is that it provides me crucial site information that includes:

1. A traffic estimate by visitors. Some tools provide hits, but hits are unreliable when it comes to determining your site’s traffic pull. Hits are number of files downloaded. Hits are based on the number of downloads (image, text, animation files) a site gets. One visitor might have 12 or 50 downloads, so that’s 12 or 50 hits for you and yet only one site visitor. Hence, hits are an inaccurate yardstick of measure for how well your site is performing.
2. Demographic information. It helps if you know who your primary audience is.
3. Referring search engines and websites. This is crucial for your link building efforts.
4. Some website traffic estimator tools also track number of web pages viewed by a visitor and how long the visitor stayed on each page.

As the name implies, web traffic estimator tools provide only an estimate of your site traffic. While not accurate descriptions, they are the closest, most reliable figures you can get on site-related statistics.