SEO Benchmarking: What Every Digital Marketer Should Know

SEO benchmarking is an essential process for every digital marketer to understand. It allows you to measure, compare and analyse your website’s performance as it relates to search engine optimisation (SEO).

By understanding the changes made within your site and their impact on search engine results, you can better refine your SEO strategy over time.

Benchmarking also enables marketers to identify areas of improvement and take action on those opportunities. With the right approach, SEO benchmarking can be a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal, helping you climb Google’s first page.

What is SEO Benchmarking?

SEO benchmarking is the process of measuring, analysing and comparing your website’s performance to that of your competitors when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO). It allows you to quickly identify areas where your site is underperforming compared to other top-ranking websites and take action on those opportunities.

By understanding how changes within your site affect its rankings and visibility, you can refine your SEO strategy over time to improve your website’s overall performance.

Need clarification? Digital Estate has a wide range of guides and resources to explain the entire SEO process.

SEO Benchmarking – Most Important Steps to Monitor Industry Metrics

SEO benchmarking is a crucial part of the search engine optimization process. Here are the key steps for successful SEO benchmarking:

1. Measuring a Benchmark

Measuring a benchmark is the first step in SEO benchmarking. It involves collecting key metrics such as search engine rankings, organic traffic, and keyword visibility. Establishing a baseline of your website’s performance by tracking key metrics such as search engine rankings, organic traffic, and conversion rates.

You can also track things like average session duration, bounce rate, and conversion rate to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

2. Internal Analysis

Internal analysis is an integral part of SEO benchmarking. It involves analysing your website’s structure, code, technical SEO elements, and content to identify any potential areas that could be causing affecting your website’s performance. You can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to optimize the user experience of different web pages.

The internal analysis report can include poor internal link structure, duplicate content or slow page speeds. By studying these factors, you can focus on the KPIs that actually matter and make adjustments to ensure that your website meets all the requirements for optimal search engine optimisation.

3. Competitive Research

Once you have collected your data, you can compare it to other competitors or industry standards to identify areas where your website may be underperforming. With the right approach, you can use this data to create an effective SEO strategy that will help improve your website’s overall performance in the long run.

Analyzing competitors’ websites to identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities to differentiate your website and gain an advantage. SEMrush is an excellent tool for competitor research when benchmarking.

By doing this, you can identify opportunities for improvement, such as uncovering trends in keyword usage or content strategies. With good Competitive Analysis, you can strategise what works for you and use it to create a strong SEO campaign. 

Utilising the right analysis can increase the chances of better rankings and more traffic to your website.

4. Comparing Performance to Competitors:

Regarding SEO comparison, it’s important to look at factors such as keyword usage, content quality, internal links, page speed, and backlinks (referring domains). This can help you determine which of your competitors are performing better than yours and why.

Some steps to consider when comparing competitors include:

• Analyzing keyword rankings
• Examining backlink profile
• Evaluating domain authority
• Assessing social media engagement
• Monitoring organic traffic
• Comparing average page load time
• Investigating content strategy
• Assessing lead generation strategies

By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into your website’s performance and develop a plan to help achieve your online marketing goals.

Once you understand the strategies that work best for your competitors, you can implement them into your marketing system and improve your overall SEO benchmark against your competitors.

If you would like help with a competitive analysis, We can help! We complete SEO benchmarking as part of our onboarding with all our SEO services.

What is Competitive Market Research?

Competitive market research is researching your competition to gain insights into their business strategies, products and services, pricing, target audience and positioning. 

This type of research allows you to identify areas where your own business can improve its strategy or differentiate itself from others in the field.

What Is a Competitive Market Analysis?

A competitive market analysis is a detailed review of the current competitive landscape for your industry. With a competitive market analysis, you can identify areas where you can improve your own strategy or differentiate yourself from others in the field and stand out on search engine result pages.

When performing a competitive market analysis, it’s important to consider the SEO comparison factors discussed in step 4. By doing this, you can better understand the competition and make informed decisions on how to improve your website’s SEO performance. A thorough competitive market analysis will help you gain an edge in the search engine results pages.

Why Do a Competitive Analysis for SEO Performance?

Conducting a competitive analysis is essential to running a successful business because it helps you identify areas for improvement. A competitive analysis allows you to change your marketing strategy and product offerings to help you stand out from the crowd.

By performing competitive analysis, you can identify how much of a threat your competitors pose and formulate plans to deal with them. In short, competitive analysis gives you valuable information that can be used to create better strategies and improve your bottom line.

How to Do a Competitive Analysis for the Right Keywords

1. Identify Your Competitors: Before you can start your competitive analysis, you need to first identify who your competitors are. Look at other companies in the same industry and determine which offers similar products or services.

2. Research Their Offerings:Once you’ve identified your competitors, research their offerings and note down their features and pricing structures. You should also consider any potential customer testimonials, marketing content, and reviews they may have gathered.

3. Compare Prices & Features:After researching your competitors’ offerings, compare their prices and features to yours. Make sure you accurately understand what each competitor is offering so that you can compare them fairly.

4. Identify Potential Opportunities:Once you have compared the different competitors’ products/services and pricing structures, take note of any areas where there may be unmet demand in the market or any potential opportunities for improvement that could benefit your business.

5. Develop Your Strategy:Using the information from the competitive analysis, develop strategies for improving your own business model or marketing efforts to gain an edge over the competition. 

This could include: 

• Tweaking your prices.
• Revamping your product/service offerings
• Changing your marketing strategy by creating more targeted campaigns or campaigns tailored to specific customer segments.

Competitive Analysis Example

This competitive analysis example compares two companies, Company A and Company B.

Company A: Their main product is a cloud storage service that offers automatic backups, team collaboration tools, and file sharing. The monthly subscription cost is $10 per user, and they also provide an annual plan that reduces the price to $8 per user.

Company B: Their primary offering is a similar cloud storage service with the same features as Company A’s but at a lower price. They charge $7 for their monthly subscription and offer an annual plan for $5 per user.

When compared side by side, it can be seen that Company B has the advantage in terms of pricing structure with its significantly lower user fees.

However, when considering customer reviews, Company A has overwhelmingly positive feedback from users compared to Company B, suggesting that their product may be of higher quality despite its higher cost. 

Therefore, businesses looking for high-quality features might be better served using Company A over Company B despite its additional cost.

10 Best Competitor Analysis Tools to Benchmark Your SEO

 Here are some top SEO tools to benchmark SEO performance and perform competitor analysis:

1. SEMrush: This tool helps you gain insight into your competitors’ search engine optimisation and advertising campaigns, providing a comprehensive overview of their website performance, including Core Web Vitals.
2. SimilarWeb: This competitor analysis tool allows you to monitor competitors’ traffic sources and understand how they engage users online.
3. Ahrefs:This tool gives you an in-depth view of your competitors’ backlink profiles so that you can identify opportunities to get ahead of them in terms of SEO rankings. You’ll find a ready-to-use template with the necessary metrics to measure to benchmark your SEO performance.
4. Google Trends: With this tool, you can compare the search results of different keywords and phrases to see which ones are most popular among users so that you can stay up-to-date with the latest trends in your industry.
5. SpyFu: Using this powerful competitor analysis tool, you can quickly uncover data points about your competitor’s keyword usage, average keyword position, PPC campaigns, organic visibility, and more so that you can stay informed on their activities in order to outrank them for important keywords.
6. Screaming Frog: With this tool, you can monitor the performance of your website and its competitors in terms of traffic, bounce rate, and other key metrics. You’ll see quick improvement in organic search traffic and will rank higher overall by improving these KPIs.
7. BuiltWith: This competitor analysis tool allows you to get a comprehensive overview of your competitors’ technology stack so that you can identify gaps in your own product and bridge them quickly.
8. Moz Keyword Explorer: This tool helps you compare your website’s keywords to those of your competitors, revealing important insights into their keyword optimisation strategy so that you can refine yours accordingly.
9. Buzzsumo: Use this tool to analyse the content trends of your competitors so that you can assess their content strategy and adjust yours accordingly.
10. Ubersuggest: With this tool, you can gain detailed insight into your competitors’ SEO practices and uncover untapped long-tail keywords that could be advantageous for your own SEO efforts. It’s one of the most economical SEO tools in the market to improve your SEO campaign performance.

Daunted by the prospect of managing your SEO and trying to figure out where to start? Consider outsourcing the SEO process to the professionals at Digital Estate. We can do the SEO work for you, freeing up more of your valuable time.