Engineering Website Traffic Summary - 2022
per SEMRush.com
Smorgasbord / Kirt's Cogitations™ #345

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As a rule, I do not spend much time wondering what other engineering websites are doing or what their visitor traffic might be. Instead, I spend my time creating a format and content that caters to the needs of RF Cafe visitors - engineers, technicians, students, hobbyists, researchers, etc. I do not use pop-up windows for ads, announcements, cookie warnings, or anything else. I have never betrayed the trust of visitors by selling or trading their IP addresses, e-mail addresses, or any sort of statistical data (although I've had many offers). Doing so is rewarded with a good flow of website traffic, and occasionally some really interesting contacts from people offering unique content for posting, requesting information, relating personal experiences, pointing out errors. Fortunately, hateful comments have been few (e.g., one guy who writes about once a year to call me names because I claim that memristors have been realized in labs).

Recently, SEMRush was mentioned on an engineering news website I was visiting. SEMRush collects statistical data on millions of websites, including traffic, search keywords, competitive websites, backlinks, referring domains, paid advertising, and more. It is sort of like Google Analytics applied to other people's websites. Admittedly, I do not know the method behind SEMRush's data collection, but it seems reasonable to assume there is no motivation to prefer one random website over another. Therefore, the visitor statistics presented here are most likely unbiased and fair.

I selected a few of the most popular electrical / electronics engineering websites for comparison to RFCafe.com. The graphs are screen captures from the SEMRush webpage. The results were a bit surprising in some instances, but expected in others. For reference, RF Cafe gets an average of 29,539 "organic traffic" (not exactly sure what that means)/month. By comparison, the IEEE website has 2,879,641/month (97x more). The ARRL website sees 146,616/month (49x). Microwave Journal is at 5,916/month (1/5th). Microwaves & RF shows 9,366/month (1/3rd). Two what might be considered competitor websites, everythingRF and Microwaves101, are at 164,110/month (5x) and 24,750/month (7/8ths), respectively.

What does all that mean? Danged if I know, but there it is. If you are interested in such things, plug your website address into the SEMRush page to see what you get (or to verify that I did not fudge any of the graphs - which I didn't). Maybe you have a better resource for exploring such statistics.

Here is RFCafe.com website traffic statistics directly from my Hostek.com server for July 1 through November 14, 2022.