Healthy competition provides a drive to do better and maintain focus on the goals. The boxing legend Conor McGregor agrees how competition gives him energy and keeps him focused. He is someone who has made his name in the industry with hard work and brutal battles. His journey and his inspiring words also apply to the business world. 

A company performs better and excels with the grind of constantly competing to stay on the top. This hustle pushes everyone to the limit for better performance. Besides, its positive impact can be seen in all walks of the challenges. It is safe to say competition is a great drive to fuel anyone’s work. 

Moreover, it acts like the benchmark element for a company to fight the existing and the new competition. People may feel competition is overrated; however, it provides ample opportunities to prove yourself. It involves picking battles, planning to win, and defending one’s place when needed. 

What Are Some Benchmarking Techniques?

In this article, we’ll glance at some of the best benchmarking techniques to stay one step ahead of your competition. These tactics and tools will prepare you to outperform others in no time.

Competitive Benchmarking

As you know, competition is the external element that keeps a person on his toes. Here are some tools to prepare for the battle to win it. 

Evaluate Your Current Performance

You cannot work on yourself until you understand your strengths and weaknesses. To know this, you may need to evaluate your current performance before glancing at others. It will help you realize how much you may need to work to prepare.
Besides, it will give you time to make a plan after the competitors’ analysis. Make use of all tools on deck so that you do not miss any opportunity. 

Understand the Google Analytics Insights

Google Analytics tool is the primary window to understand the opponent’s website or app. You may begin your analysis here to reach the endpoint of planning and executing it. Google Analytics provides rich data in a simple, understandable form. 

This data isn’t easy to compile humanly, so it is a reliable tool to understand the whole market. In addition, the tool will help you with some of the most significant metrics, including volumes of organic, paid, referral, and direct traffic on an app or website.
Moreover, it provides information about each session duration, the bounce rate of a website, and total page views. You can also learn about the conversion data and common trends over time for all the parameters.

However, you may need to pick the metrics that are relevant to your field of business. You may ignore the ones that are inapplicable to save time and get straight to planning. This will also help you in customizing goals as per your needs. 

Focus on Backlinks

Google may not admit it; however, there is a direct link between high-quality links and the authority of a website. A high number of authoritative links are a significant factor in determining the quality and presence of the search engine. All the search algorithms prioritize these links in proving a website relevant. 

Note that spammy links in high volume will harm the authority of the website and may result in a penalty. Check the high-quality links to determining the competitors’ websites. Also, pay attention to your backlinks and ensure your website is free from spammy links. They may have a detrimental effect on SEO performance. 

You may use webmaster tools such as Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Search Console, and Unamo for analyzing the backlink profiles. However, reliable tools come with a price, so be willing to invest in them or look for an affordable option such as Unamo. 

Check on the Organic Rankings

Try the ranking tools such as Ahrefs, WooRank, Moz, SERPs, Wincher, and SEMrush for checking the organic rankings. Organic rankings are a key factor in understanding website SEO performance. You may refer to more than one tool to establish accuracy. Besides, keep a check on long-tail and money-making keywords of the competitor website. 

PPC and Display ads

Keep a close eye on your click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per action (CPA). These paid channel indicators make sure you stay in the market. In addition, as per Wordstream, they are valuable indicators to benchmark the average performance of any industry. 

Stats on Social media

We know there is a massive buzz around the use of social media when it comes to marketing. These include followers, organic engagement, comments, shares, likes, trends, active follower accounts, and follower vs the following ratio. It is all about the engagement and the social traffic on your company’s social media profiles. 

The engagement may come from paid campaigns and organic growth in the followers over time. However, you may need to focus more on the results if you are using paid influencer or promotional campaigns. 

Monitor the statistics of your social sites with the in-built analytics features. You may employ third-party tools to check these stats and make a note of the important indicators. We suggest using BuzzSumo, Brandwatch, and Mention to track all about the brand value and mentions.

Content Marketing Strategies

The marketing world is constantly changing. Therefore, you may have to alter the content marketing strategies as per the current business trends. Also, you will need important Google Analytics information to check the backlinks and website authority. 

Besides, using BuzzSumo will provide you with information on how the strategies are working in the online world. The tool will highlight the most shared information on a certain topic. There is no sure-shot formula to get the benchmark performance of your content strategies; therefore, a combination of analyzing tools will assist you. 

Track Your Visibility

Make use of all the online monitoring tools mentioned above to see where your brand is visible across social channels. In addition, you may use Google alerts for tracking your website on search engines. 

Work on Quality and Consistency

Maintaining quality and consistency will help you receive organic engagement. Moreover, it will show how dedicated you are to putting efforts to maintain the voice of your brand. Finally, this approach will enable positive feedback that may act as an asset for your brand.  You may use the testing features across different platforms to check the web properties. We suggest using Usability Hub or User Testing for this. 

Benchmarking Tools 

Now that you know about some of the significant tricks to stay ahead of your competitors, here are some tools that you may choose. Learn how these tools will help you develop better strategies. 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for in-depth content analysis. Moreover, it will help you in learning about your competitors’ best and worst-performing activities. You can find out what format they use, social influencers, and who else is sharing their content. This information will provide you with mediums for content strategy planning and getting the right influencers on board.

iSpionage

Find all about your Google AdWords competitors along with their monthly ad budget estimate. You can use this tool to uncover the PPC strategy of your competitor. This, in turn, will help you work on your PPC tactics. You may use WhatRunsWhere and SpyFu for acquiring the same information. 

SimilarWeb

You can learn about the traffic and engagement on your website as well as the competitor’s website. This tool provides an analysis of your online performance vs. your competition. Moreover, you can learn about the other websites that the users visit on a single browsing session. Use this tool with Ahrefs to know more about the competitor’s website backlinks. 

Strategic Benchmarking

Along with the right tools and software, you will need constant monitoring of the collected data. Furthermore, your interpretation of the data will determine the efficacy of the benchmarking process. The data will be crucial in understanding the areas you may need to work on. Besides, they will help in tracking your progress throughout the campaigns.

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