You probably come across questions like, “How long will it take for my SEO efforts to work?” “How can I know if all my SEO efforts are working?”, “In what way can I able to know how my website performs?”, “What do I need to track?” and many follow-up questions. If you find yourself constantly asking these questions, the solution is SEO benchmarking.
With SEO benchmarking, you can determine which benchmarks best reflect your goals. With the right benchmarks, you can effectively track the returns you are getting on your SEO campaigns and determine if they are genuinely working or not on your behalf and, ultimately, how they affect your website performance.
In this blog, we will discuss SEO benchmarking in depth, how to get started with it, and the right benchmarks to set.
What is SEO Benchmarking Anyway?
Simply put, SEO benchmarking compares your website’s SEO metrics with those of your leading competitors. At the start of your SEO campaign, you will set SEO benchmarks that allow you to assess your website’s current ranking in your industry. In short, it allows you to map out where your website will be in the next 6 or 12 months, depending on your target goals and date.
Furthermore, SEO benchmarking is vital for setting campaign goals, tracking performance, and assessing what is working so you can make necessary changes and adjustments in your SEO strategy.
Below is an SEO benchmarking process where your website is being tracked and analyzed:
- Internal analysis: An SEO audit of your website to determine its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Direct competition: Analysis of the SEO tactics and strategies of all the websites with which you have direct competition.
- Reference pages: Analyze all websites that are in the first positions in search engines but are not related to your website theme or activities.
Five Steps to Execute SEO Benchmarking
Implementing an SEO benchmarking process requires much planning, time, and dedication. It is not a simple process but rather a complex one. Here are the beginner-friendly steps that you can follow to make your SEO benchmarking process way easier to execute:
1. Define what is to be evaluated
The first step is to define what will be evaluated or measured. Here are some of the key factors that need to be covered during SEO benchmarking:
- Keyword Research: Knowing your competitors’ keywords will help you select the best keywords for your own use. Carefully conducted keyword research can provide more opportunities to position your website successfully.
- Web traffic: It is vital to find out the traffic generated by your competitors’ websites. This helps you determine how popular their website is and compare it to your site.
- Content: When you pay attention to the content of your closest competitors, you can get a lot of insightful information about SEO. For instance, you can find out the topics they cover, how they structure the texts, the Call to Action they are using, where they link their content, and the anchor texts they use, among many others.
2. Analysis of your Construction Website
Ensure you conduct a comprehensive study and analysis of your website to determine how to optimize it for search engines. This step is critical in SEO benchmarking since it will provide enough information about your current competition.
Conducting an internal SEO audit enables you to discover:
- Strengths: These are efforts that you put out and deliver great results. You can keep doing your SEO approach and reap its benefits to your construction business.
- Weaknesses: These elements on your website are not optimized well. These sections have to be reviewed and adjusted if necessary.
- Opportunities: This is where you identify the elements and processes in your website that can help improve its positioning.
- Threats: Your website may have duplicate content, broken links, or key stuffing. These actions pose a threat and need to be fixed immediately so that they do not affect your website’s positioning.
3. Who are my competitors?
The process of SEO benchmarking focuses primarily on analyzing your competitor’s websites. The reason behind this is to compare it to your own. Other than your nearest competitors, other websites that differ from your niche can also be compared with your site.
So, before you begin analyzing different websites, it is important to point out which competitors are more interesting to assess and investigate. Make sure you make a good choice and use the data you obtained from the assessment.
4. Determine the strategy of your competitors
When you get started with your SEO benchmarking, it is essential to organize the process well. This is mainly because the amount of information you are about to handle is massive and may be too overwhelming.
So, ensure you have a good analysis and categorization of all the data you obtained. When you execute this process properly, you can determine tactics other competing websites use and figure out what parts are more interesting to replicate on your website to improve your ranking and positioning in the search results.
5. Monitor your benchmarking process regularly
Search engines are constantly evolving, and new algorithms are emerging. So, it is important to keep track of your benchmarking process and your SEO strategies updated. By keeping up to date, you can have an edge and successfully position your website over time.
Top Benchmarks to Achieve SEO Success
We list the key SEO benchmarks you can focus on to achieve success in your website performance and ranking. One important thing you must know is that all of these benchmarks require tracking and monitoring.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the number of visitors that come to your site via non-paid search engine results. This SEO benchmark will show the number of potential construction clients you are reaching organically. In addition, it will give you information about your website’s popularity and visibility in the search engines.
Using tools to track organic traffic is an incredible help. Tools like Semrush’s Organic Traffic Insights provide a comprehensive breakdown of your site’s organic traffic. The tool also allows you to see the landing pages that received the most traffic and specific keywords that drive more traffic.
2. Keyword rankings
Keyword rankings will show you where your website ranks in the search results for specific keywords. Tracing keyword rankings is important to benchmark your SEO mainly because:
- It allows you to know which keywords to focus on and improve.
- It gives you the idea of whether your website is well-optimized for specific keywords.
- It shows you how well your overall SEO efforts are paying off.
To put it simply, the higher your construction website ranks for relevant keywords, the more people will click through your website and make a visit.
3. Bounce rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. When a visitor lands on your homepage and does not click any other pages before leaving your site, that counts as a bounce.
Bounce rate is an important benchmark to track mainly because it shows how relevant and engaging your website’s content is to visitors. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a very helpful tool for tracking bounce rate. GA4 is free and provides a complete breakdown of your website’s bounce rate, including traffic sources and specific pages.
4. Returning visitors
Returning visitors are users who have visited your site before and have returned for another visit. This benchmark shows the loyalty and consistency of your audience and how effective your construction website is in retaining them.
In other words, if your site has an increasing number of returning visits, your content is engaging, valuable, and relevant to them because they keep coming back for more.
5. Impressions and Clicks
The number of times your website pages have shown up in the search results refers to impressions. The clicks, on the other side, are the number of times a user has clicked on your site’s link from those impressions.
These two SEO benchmarks are important since they show how your website and its pages attract clicks through impressions. Tracking your impressions and clicks will give you valuable information on how to benchmark your site’s SEO performance more easily and effectively.
Set the Right Benchmarks with a Trusted Construction Marketing Agency
SEO benchmarking is an interesting search engine optimization practice you can implement for your construction website, especially when you aim to take the top position in the search results. All the steps and tactics we share with you in this blog, including all the right SEO benchmarks you need to keep track of, will help you get started with your SEO benchmarking.
But if you insist on asking for professional help, we can help you.
As a full-service digital marketing company, ConstructionMarketing.io will be your trusted strategic SEO partner! Our agency excels in digital marketing, particularly SEO, which guarantees higher rankings and drives traffic and growth to your construction business.
As a top SEO service provider, we aim to ensure long-term growth for our customer’s digital presence. Our complete online marketing services include the following:
Contact us today. We love to help you with your SEO strategy.