General Trends Across the Most Popular US Websites by Traffic
Despite a promising October 5% MoM traffic spike, November’s traffic to the top 100 most visited sites in the US is down 1.3% on the previous month. This is unexpected as November brought more lockdowns and featured some of the hottest annual online shopping days – Black Friday and Cyber Monday – which tend to attract higher user counts.
Google is the absolute traffic leader, but when it comes to traffic, you snooze, you lose. In November, our top 10 has seen some shifts: Instagram moved eBay out of its top-10 spot, victoriously breaking into November’s top 10 most popular US websites list.
Apart from the tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter that we’d expect to see among the top 10, the only other sites that attract comparable traffic numbers have to do with adult content.
While retail and news sites upped their visitor counts by an average of 14% and 4% respectively, tech and travel platforms saw some significant hits, with the average traffic loss for tech sites standing at 4.5% and Tripadvisor.com losing 15% of its visitors MoM.
The biggest traffic winner in November is Fedex, which saw a dramatic traffic increase of over 88%, probably thanks to the pre-holiday gifts surge.
It’s Not Just About the Traffic
Although observing position changes through traffic volume can help to analyze global trendsand benchmark your performance against the competition, Semrush’s Traffic Analytics reports also include important metrics to keep watch on:
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Mobile vs. desktop traffic share shows which devices people use to enter a site page. When doing competitive benchmarking, this metric can help to determine whether you need to implement certain steps (e.g. ensure further mobile optimization or come up with additional desktop traffic generation tactics) to strengthen your traffic acquisition strategy to stay in the game.
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Number of pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate reflect the quality of site content. If you spot that your competitor’s website shows better performance, it flags that you have to work on your SEO and content strategy, comparing the structure, content, and design of your site pages against theirs.