An SEO benchmark is a study that helps website owners plan their SEO actions based on what top-ranking websites are doing. This competitive study allows webmasters to see how they are doing compared to their competitors and how they can improve.
SEO benchmarks can be done by businesses of all sizes, startups, small businesses and large enterprises.
Why are SEO benchmarks so important?
The SEO benchmark is carried out before implementing an SEO strategy to define the actions necessary to achieve the desired objectives. It is, in fact, analyzing the optimization and SEO strategy of competitors.
In reality, SEO competitors are not the competitors in the field. On search engines, the rules are dictated by them. It is the one who does better than the others who is best ranked. This is why it is necessary to study what your competitors are doing on search engines.
The optimizations implemented by your competitors will serve as references in your SEO work. This may concern the choice of keywords, the degree of on-site optimization and the level of notoriety (off-site optimization).
How to carry out an SEO benchmark?
Before you begin, you need to identify your competitors on search engines. To do this, perform a Google search with the keyword that you consider most related to your field of activity. The sites that position themselves on the first page will be part of your SEO competitors.
For a more in-depth analysis, it is necessary to use a SEO tool which will provide more details such as the number of keywords on which a site is positioned, the authority of the latter, the number and quality of its backlinks, the level of difficulty and the search volume of each keyword, etc. .
You can also analyze each site in depth to identify parameters like:
- The number of pages
- The quality of the internal network
- Loading speed
- The frequency of publishing new pages (or blog posts)
- The best performing pages
- …
This way, you will be able to identify your competitors’ strengths, what has worked for them, and what you can do to beat them.
Competitive analysis as a starting point for your SEO strategy
To rank higher than your competitors, you need to do better in terms of SEO optimizations. This is why you should use thecompetitive analysis as a starting point for your SEO strategy.
You must therefore identify the points on which you must concentrate as a priority as well as long-term objectives. This ranking is carried out according to the difficulty of the task, therefore depending on the level of optimization implemented by your competitors.
Conclusion
In the world of SEO, everything is relative. For your natural SEO strategy to hold up, you must take the competition into consideration. It is through the SEO benchmark that you must go through to properly build your SEO action plan.
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