What is a benchmark?
Nowadays, we hear about benchmarks significantly in our careers. Benchmarking is the way that numerous companies study their competitors who are doing very well. In this process, companies discover the strategies and methods they use to improve their activities and become more profitable in a highly competitive world. One way to use a benchmark is an SEO benchmark, which is one of the best ways to discover other websites and their strategies. Some websites are doing great, and most of the keyboards are in the SERP. So, it's evident that people want to improve their SEO by benchmarking.
How can we do an SEO benchmark?
Doing SEO benchmarks can be genuinely time-consuming and complicated. However, the result of the benchmark can be beneficial and boost your website situation. So, benchmarks have some steps, and in this article, we are going to talk about these steps and introduce you to all of the protocols.
- It would help if you defined what should be evaluated
One of the most critical parts of doing benchmarking is that you should have some factors and criteria that are more significant than others, and you should evaluate them. The first measure is usually keyword research. To do this part, you should start with the problematic keyword, and after that, you should define the easy keywords that your competitors are using and have the most promising results in the SERP.
Then, studying website traffic is necessary. You should know your competitors, how much traffic they have, and which of them is more popular. On top of that, the investigation of backlinks is crucial. Backlinks can help elevate your website. When you discover your competitor's backlinks authority, you can make the better one for yourself.
Besides, evaluating your competitor's website content is vital. Your competitor's content, backlinks, and anchor text they are using can be crucial and show how you can boost your website by using this information. - Evaluating your website
One of the most significant parts of the SEO benchmark is that you should have the ability to analyze and evaluate your website and see what your position is in the SERP. On top of that, you should notice if your website is optimized for the search engine or not. By doing this part, you can discover your advantages, disadvantages, opportunities, and threats. Then, evaluation of other websites shows how to be better at optimizing and competing with your competitors. - Who are your competitors?
Before SEO benchmarking and discovering your competitors, you should define which type of website your competitors are. There are multiple websites on the web; just a few of them can be your competitors. You should have the ability to find websites with targets like yours. In order to find your competitors and evaluate them, you can use some popular tools like Ahref, Semrush, or even Google. Google is one of the crucial tools for searching for your competitors, and when you use your target keyword and search in Google, you can see which type of websites your competitors are using when you visit the first page of Google. Besides, you can discover which keywords are better. You can find out about their position. - Analyzing your competitor's SEO
After discovering your real competitors and starting the process of benchmarking, you should have some tools for analyzing the competitor's websites. The first step is to compare your competitors with each other and find out which one of them has the better position and traffic. In this way, finding the most important competitors is easy. Then, evaluating the keywords you want to achieve a position in Google should be taken into account. For every keyword, the position of your competitors can be different, so you should discover every keyword and then see the position of every website. - Define your competitor's strategy
Considering the fact that evaluating and seeing the process of SEO can be genuinely time-consuming and challenging, and there is such extensive data on the internet without any strategy or tactic, you can't do pleasingly in your career. The most influential part of the benchmark is that you should discover your competitors' strategies and techniques. After that, you can employ that strategy to make yourself better and find a position. - You should consider benchmarks for your career all the time
Some individuals think that after benchmarking and discovering your strategy and your competitors, you are done, and then you don't require benchmarking. It is entirely wrong because SEO is a dynamic activity. So, every day, you should be updated and observe your competitors, no matter how tough it is. Sometimes, there's a possibility that you discover a new competitor that you didn't know about, and they can change their strategies. After some months, you should be updated, discover these competitors, and be ready to modify your strategy.