Benchmark SEO: How to Analyze Your Competitors and Outrank Them

SEO has become a game-changer for websites.

You know, understanding and tracking the right SEO metrics can make all the difference in boosting your online presence and staying ahead of the pack. It’s like having a secret weapon!

With SEO benchmarking, you can measure how well your site stacks up against competitors and industry standards, giving you a clear picture of where you stand.

Exciting, right?

But wait, it gets better!

Armed with this knowledge, you can make smarter decisions to optimise your site, provide better user experiences, and boost your search engine rankings.

So, let’s get started:

What is Benchmarking SEO?

SEO benchmarking is a process to analyse website’s SEO metrics and current performance and then compare these results with those of the competitors. By studying key indicators such as organic search traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, domain authority, and user engagement, we can gain valuable insights into how our website stacks up against the competition.

The goal of benchmarking is to assess the effectiveness of an SEO strategy and identify areas for improvement by comparing the website’s performance to that of competitors or industry standards. By setting baseline measurements and regularly tracking progress, we can make informed decisions and optimise our SEO efforts to stay competitive in the dynamic digital landscape.

Importance of SEO benchmarking?

Benchmark SEO can provide valuable insights into how well your website is performing in the online landscape, offering a clearer understanding of the competition and industry standards. Let’s understand the benefits in detail:

• Performance Evaluation: Benchmarking allows you to assess how well your website’s SEO strategies and tactics are performing compared to competitors or industry standards. It helps identify areas of strength and weakness, guiding you on where to focus your efforts for maximum impact.
• Competitive Analysis: By comparing your SEO performance to that of your competitors, you gain insights into their strategies and tactics. Understanding what works well for them can inspire new ideas and innovative approaches to improve your own SEO efforts.
• Goal Setting: SEO benchmarking helps set realistic and achievable goals for your website. Instead of arbitrary targets, you base your objectives on data-driven insights, making it easier to measure progress and success.
• Strategy Improvement: With benchmarking data in hand, you can fine-tune your SEO strategy. You can optimise for keywords where you lag, enhance content quality, strengthen your backlink profile, and improve technical SEO aspects to gain a competitive edge.
• Adaptation to Algorithm Changes: Search engine algorithms constantly evolve. Benchmarking helps you adapt quickly to algorithm updates. If you notice your competitors’ rankings fluctuating after an update, you can investigate their strategies and make appropriate adjustments.
• Resource Allocation: Benchmarking helps allocate resources effectively. Instead of spreading efforts across all SEO aspects, you can prioritise those areas where you underperform compared to competitors, maximising the return on investment.
• Performance Tracking: Regular benchmarking allows you to track your SEO performance over time. It provides a long-term perspective on your website’s progress and helps you stay on track with your SEO objectives.

When to use SEO Benchmarking?

SEO benchmarking should be used when you want to assess and improve your website’s search engine optimisation performance. It is beneficial when you need to understand how well your website ranks against competitors and industry standards. Also, it is a valuable practice that should be utilised for SEO strategy of a new website.

Here are three scenarios when using it is particularly beneficial:

SEO Strategy Development

When you are formulating or revising your SEO strategy, benchmarking can provide a solid foundation for decision-making. By analysing the performance of your website and comparing it to competitors or industry leaders, you can identify gaps and opportunities.

Website Redesign or Relaunch

If you are looking for a good SEO marketing plan,benchmarking the SEO becomes essential. Before making changes, benchmark SEO performance to create a baseline. This way, you can measure the impact of the redesign on important SEO metrics such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates.

Ongoing Performance Tracking

SEO is an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and adjustments. Regular benchmarking helps you track your website’s progress over time. By comparing your performance against past data, you can assess the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and identify trends or patterns that need attention.

 How Do You Benchmark SEO Performance?

Benchmarking SEO is a complex yet crucial process that requires dedication and time. It involves analysing various factors and aspects to obtain valuable insights that can be used to improve web positioning and overall SEO strategy.

To benchmark SEO performance, start by defining the key metrics you want to measure, such as organic search traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, and user engagement. Next, analyse your website’s current performance and gather relevant data using SEO tools.

Once you have a clear understanding of your website’s metrics, compare them with your competitors and industry standards to identify areas for improvement. Regularly track and monitor these metrics over time to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO strategies and make data-driven decisions to enhance your website’s search engine visibility and overall performance.

The whole process of benchmarking SEO can be explained as:

Define What to Measure

The first step in benchmark SEO is to define what aspects you want to measure or evaluate. The more comprehensive your evaluation, the better the quality of information and analysis you can gather. Common areas to cover in an SEO benchmarking process include:

• Conduct a Comprehensive Website Audit: Begin by conducting a thorough website audit to assess your website’s on-page elements, technical SEO, and overall performance. This audit will provide valuable insights into areas that need improvement and help you understand how search engines perceive your site.
• Analyse the website: Start by identifying key aspects of your website’s SEO that align with your objectives. This may include tracking organic search traffic to gauge overall visibility, monitoring keyword rankings to assess search engine performance, analysing backlink profiles to evaluate domain authority, and measuring user engagement through metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate. By selecting and focusing on the most relevant KPIs, you can gain valuable insights into your website’s SEO health and make data-driven decisions to improve its online presence and user experience.
• Keyword Research: Analysing the keywords your competitors use to rank well allows you to select better keywords for your website, discover positioning opportunities, and identify difficult-to-rank keywords.
• Web Traffic Study: Understanding the traffic generated by your competitors’ sites helps you assess their popularity and compare it to your own website’s performance.
• Backlink Analysis: Analysing the links pointing to your competitors’ websites helps determine their domain authority and discover potential sources for quality backlinks.
• Content Study: A comprehensive analysis of your competitors’ content provides valuable insights into topics, content structure, call-to-action placement, internal linking strategies, anchor text usage, and content length.

Analyse Your Own Website

Before comparing your website to your competitors, conduct an in-depth internal SEO audit to understand how well your site is optimised for search engines. This self-analysis serves as a baseline for comparison and helps identify strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.

• Strengths: Identify the aspects of your website that are performing well and determine how to do SEO maintenance and enhance those strengths.
• Weaknesses: Uncover areas that require improvement, such as poorly optimised pages, slow loading times, or inadequate keyword targeting.
• Threats: Analyse potential threats to your website’s SEO, such as duplicate content, keyword stuffing, or broken links.
• Opportunities: Discover elements or processes that can help improve web positioning, such as under-optimised pages with significant traffic potential.

Identify Competitors

Selecting the right competitors for analysis is crucial in the SEO benchmarking process. Tools like TrueRanker can help you identify your main SEO competitors by analysing shared keywords in your sector.

Perform Competitor Analysis

To efficiently study your competitors’ websites, use specific competitor analysis SEO tools and automation to collect data. Compare their positions in search results with your own for various keywords and analyse the keywords they use to gain insights into their strategies.

• Google Positions: Analyse and compare the positions of your competitors’ websites and specific URLs with your own.
• Keyword Usage: Investigate the keywords they target and how well they rank for them. This analysis helps identify areas where you are competing or missing out on potential keyword opportunities.
• Backlink Profiles: Examine the backlink profiles of your competitors to understand their domain authority and discover potential link-building opportunities.
• Content Strategies: Study the types of content they produce, how they structure their articles, the calls-to-action used, and their internal linking strategies.

Identify Competitor Strategies

Once you have organised the data obtained from the competitor analysis, identify the strategies and techniques used by your competitors. This information will help you determine which tactics to replicate or improve upon to enhance your web positioning.

Regular Updates

Benchmark SEO should be an ongoing process. The online landscape is dynamic, and competitors’ strategies evolve. Regularly updating your benchmarking efforts ensures you remain competitive and adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.

Top 15 SEO Benchmark Metrics To Consider

A well-rounded understanding of SEO benchmark metrics can lead to more effective digital strategies and improved online success. Some of the important metrics include:

Average Session Duration

This metric represents the average amount of time users spend on your website during a single visit or session. It is a key indicator of user engagement and content relevance. A longer average session duration indicates that users find your content valuable and are more likely to explore multiple pages or interact with your site.

To measure average session duration SEO benchmarking, you can use various web analytics tools such as Google Analytics. The tool tracks the time users spend on your site and calculates the average duration by dividing the total duration of all sessions by the number of sessions recorded within a specific period.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page, without interacting further. A high bounce rate could signify that users did not find what they were looking for or were dissatisfied with the content.

Google Analytics and other web analytics tools can measure bounce rate. It is calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the total number of entrances (i.e., the number of times users entered your site on that specific page) and multiplying by 100 to get the percentage.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors represent the count of individual users who visit your website within a specific timeframe. It provides insights into the number of distinct individuals interacting with your site for SEO benchmarking.

You can measure unique visitors using cookies or unique user IDs that identify and track individual visitors. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics use this data to count unique visitors over a specified period.

Returning Visitors

This metric indicates the number of users who return to your website after their initial visit. Returning visitors signify user loyalty and interest in your content or products.

By using cookies or user accounts, you can identify repeat visitors and measure the number of users who visit your site multiple times.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic represents the volume of visitors who arrive at your website through search engine results, excluding any traffic from paid advertisements. Organic traffic as an SEO benchmark is crucial as it reflects the effectiveness of your website’s search engine optimisation efforts.

Web analytics tools like Google Analytics differentiate organic traffic from other sources, providing data on the number of visitors who found your site through organic search results.

Average Page Load Time

The average page load time is the average duration it takes for a page on your website to load completely in a user’s web browser. Faster page load times are critical for a positive user experience and better search engine rankings.

You can measure average page load time using website speed testing tools or by accessing data from Google Analytics’ Site Speed reports.

Total Clicks

Total clicks refer to the overall number of clicks received on various elements or links throughout your website. It helps assess user engagement and the effectiveness of your site’s call-to-action buttons or links with respect to benchmark SEO.

Click-tracking tools or analytics platforms can measure total clicks by recording and analysing user interactions with clickable elements.

Average Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate measures the percentage of users who click on a specific link or element, such as an ad or a call-to-action button. A higher CTR indicates that users find the content or offer appealing.

To measure the SEO CTR benchmark, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions (the total number of times the link or element was shown) and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

Average Keyword Position

Average keyword position indicates the average ranking position of your targeted keywords in search engine results. Higher rankings increase visibility and drive more organic traffic.

SEO reporting tools can measure average keyword position by analysing search engine rankings for each targeted keyword and calculating the average position.

Average Time On Page

The average time on page measures how long users spend on a specific page of your website. It provides insights into user engagement with your content.

To benchmark your SEO, you can use web analytics tools track the time users spend on individual pages and calculate the average time on page by adding up the total time spent and dividing it by the number of pageviews.

Page Value

Page value is a metric that assigns a monetary value to each page based on its contribution to conversions or revenue generation. These metrics of SEO benchmarking help prioritise content and identify high-performing pages.

Page value is calculated by dividing the total revenue generated by a specific page by the number of unique pageviews it received.

Number of Indexed Pages

The number of indexed pages represents the total count of pages from your website that search engines have crawled, indexed, and included in their search results.

Search engine webmaster tools or simple searches using “site:domain.com” queries can provide information on the number of indexed pages.

Number of Backlinks

Backlinks are external links pointing to your website from other domains. Backlink metrics are crucial for SEO benchmarking, as search engines consider them a vote of confidence in your content or website.

Off-page SEO tools like Google Search Console can provide data on the number of external links pointing to your site.

Domain Authority

Domain authority is an overall measure of your website’s credibility and trustworthiness. It is based on various factors, including the number and quality of backlinks.

SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMrush provide domain authority scores based on their proprietary algorithms and data.

Page Authority

Page authority measures the authority and ranking potential of individual pages on your website. Pages with high authority are more likely to rank well in search engine results.

Mozbar can be used to calculate page authority. They use similar factors as domain authority, but they focus on evaluating individual pages.

How to Decide Which SEO KPIs to Track? 

When determining which SEO KPIs to track, it is essential to align them with your specific business goals. Consider metrics that reflect your objectives, such as organic search traffic, keyword rankings, backlink quality, conversion rate, and user engagement indicators like bounce rate.

Utilize industry benchmarks and SEO tools to monitor and measure these KPIs regularly. Set specific targets and adjust your strategy as needed to optimize your website’s performance and achieve your SEO goals effectively.

Tools to do an SEO Benchmarking

To track and measure SEO performance effectively, you can use a combination of various SEO benchmark tools. Here are some main tools you’ll want to set up:

• Google Analytics: A powerful and free web analytics tool provided by Google that offers in-depth insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion data. It helps you track organic search traffic, bounce rate, average session duration, and more.
• Google Search Console: This free tool from Google allows you to monitor and maintain your website’s presence in Google Search results. It provides data on keyword rankings, click-through rates, indexed pages, and more.
• SEMrush: An all-in-one SEO tool that offers keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink auditing, rank tracking, and more. SEMrush provides valuable metrics such as organic search traffic, average keyword position, and domain authority.
• Moz: Moz is a popular SEO software suite that includes tools for keyword research, link building, rank tracking, and website audits. Moz’s domain authority metric is widely used to gauge website credibility and build SEO benchmark reports.
• Ahrefs: A comprehensive SEO tool that provides features like backlink analysis, keyword research, content explorer, and rank tracking. Ahrefs offers valuable insights into backlinks, organic traffic, and keyword rankings.
• Google PageSpeed Insights: This tool evaluates your website’s performance and provides suggestions to improve page load times, which is a crucial factor for SEO benchmark.
• Google Trends: Provides insights into keyword popularity and search trends over time, helping you discover trending topics and optimise your content.
• MySiteAuditor: It is a powerful and reliable SEO audit tool known for its comprehensive reports and analysis. It meticulously checks on-page SEO elements like meta tags, headings, URLs, and images.

How SEO Benchmarks Differ by Industry?

SEO benchmarks can vary across industries. In e-commerce, focus on organic traffic and conversion rates. Technology websites aim for strong domain authority and backlinks. Health and wellness sites track keyword rankings and engagement metrics. Finance sectors prioritise trust and credibility, measured by organic traffic and user behavior. Travel sites strive for high organic traffic and booking conversions.

Local businesses concentrate on local search visibility, Google My Business optimisation, and online reviews. Specific benchmarks depend on a website’s unique circumstances, target audience, and location. Regularly updating SEO benchmarks by industry ensures businesses stay competitive and adapt their SEO strategies for optimal performance.

Conclusion

Understanding and optimising SEO metrics are essential for a successful online presence. By SEO benchmarking your website’s performance against industry standards and competitors, you can set realistic goals and allocate resources effectively.

Utilising a range of powerful SEO benchmark tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Moz empowers you to track organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, and user engagement. Regularly monitoring and analysing these metrics enable data-driven decision-making, leading to improved website visibility, higher search engine rankings, and enhanced user experiences

FAQs

How often should I conduct SEO benchmarking for my website?

The frequency of SEO benchmarking depends on various factors, such as the industry, the competitive landscape, and your SEO goals. It’s best to conduct benchmarking at least once every quarter to keep track of your progress and adapt your strategies accordingly.

How can SEO benchmarking lead to improved online success?

SEO benchmarking empowers you to identify your website’s strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors. With this knowledge, you implement data-driven changes and optimise your site, you’ll likely see improvements in search engine rankings, increased organic traffic, and higher conversion rates.

How can SEO benchmarking help me identify areas for optimisation?

By comparing your website’s key SEO metrics with those of competitors, you can pinpoint areas where your performance lags behind or excels. This analysis reveals opportunities for improvement, such as optimising content, building quality backlinks, or enhancing user experience.

Can SEO benchmarking lead to better decision-making and increased ROI?

Absolutely! By analysing benchmarking data, you gain valuable insights into your website’s strengths and weaknesses. Armed with this knowledge, you can make informed decisions, allocate resources more effectively, and implement targeted SEO strategies.

How do I choose the right competitors for SEO benchmarking?

Selecting the right competitors for benchmarking is crucial. Look for websites with similar target audiences, products, or services. SEO benchmarking tools can help identify your main SEO competitors based on keyword overlap and search visibility, ensuring a relevant and insightful comparison.