Editorial Staff
Have you ever experienced drop in your page ranking? Does other websites suddenly outrank your first position on Google? Or maybe, you felt that your ranking is stuck below your competitors?
In such case, this is the time for you to do competitive analysis or what we called as benchmarking SEO.
It is not necessarily that your site is not performing or your SEO strategy doesn’t work. Maybe, your competitors are just doing better than you.
In this module, you’ll learn how to do benchmark SEO and start to do competitive analysis to optimize your SEO effort.
What is Benchmarking SEO?
Benchmarking SEO is all about analysis of the competitor site, discover their strategy and profile, and do a comparison within our own site.
With benchmarking, you’ll be able to identify the real factors why your competitor can show up for a good ranking while you’re not.
The idea is then to replicate your competitor strategy and perform better than they do, so that you finally can outrank your competitor.
Climbing Up in Ranking With Benchmarking SEO
In the SERP ranking, all of the webmaster are fighting to win the keyword, while the more keyword they can get ranked for, the more successful their SEO KPI.
However, there are no fixed formula on getting into #1 ranking. Each keyword have all different difficulties to climb up the ladder.
Some keywords might just require you to create a medium content with 20 backlinks in order to win them. Some might require you to create 5,000 word count content with 1,000 backlinks to win them.
But what determine all of these different level of difficulties? competition!
This is why benchmarking SEO is crucial to do if you want a clear path in your SEO journey.
Start Benchmarking
Benchmarking SEO is all about comparing your page against competitor’s page.
Therefore, before starting any of the following steps, we expect you to have the completed version of your existing page that you want to optimize rather than starting from scratch.
Ensure that the existing page has followed the keyword strategy, on-page, off-page, and technical SEO checklist before do the benchmarking SEO.
Now, if you’re in this condition, let’s get started.
Step 1: Set a Benchmark Planning
First, you’ll need to determine who to benchmark.
Pick any keyword that is already in your list to win, and check out your position on the SERP.
Let’s put it into an illustration: now that you’re currently in the 6th position of a keyword.
Benchmarking for the top competitor (position #1) is going to save you time rather than benchmarking all the competitors that ahead of yours (In this case, position 1,2,3,4 and 5).
The reason is, once you do better than position 1, you’ll definitely are better off than 2,3,4, and 5.
However, if you want to do a competitive analysis with the number one, there is probably a lot to gain. But if you want a clear path on how your rankings will go up step by step, then you can benchmark on all the competitors above you.
Step 2: Comparison
From this step onwards, you’ll start to do the competitive comparison of your page against your competitor’s.
Now, open both your page and your competitor’s page and start analyzing.
UX Comparison
A great UX makes visitors longer on a site, more page views, and lower bounce rate.
Visit both your page and your competitor’s page and put yourself in the reader point of view.
Start asking this question:
- Do you provide better content than your competitor?
- Does your content explain more in depth than your competitor?
- Does your page look more professional and trustworthy?
- Does your page provide clearer heading that is meaningful to answer the query?
- Is your share button is visible and user friendly?
- Is your page have lighter and lesser ads that can possibly disturb the readers when reading your content until the end?
Technical Comparison
Apart from the content, technical comparison is also important when doing the competitive analysis.
Ask yourself this question:
- Is your page load faster than your competitor’s?
- Have you implemented HTTPS?
- Is your page responsive for mobile user?
- Is your site’s structure better than your competitor’s?
Backlink Comparison
Last but not least, if you think that all the factors above seems reasonably the same with your competitors, there is only one reason left why your competitor still outrank you: they have stronger backlinks.
Check out how many unique backlinks are referring to your competitor’s page and how powerful they are.
Analyze what kind of page that link to them and compare it to yours.
Step 3: Optimization
The tighter the competition of the keyword, the more effort you need to do in order to beat your competitor.
In some extremely high competition, you’ll find your competitor’s are completely perfect in every aspect and better than yours.
In one of our case, we fought against a competitor that have 5,000 words high quality content length with 2,000 backlinks from the top authority sites.
Do better than them is the only way to outrank them on Google. However, there is a price to pay in order to be on the top!
