Understanding Website Benchmarking For Competitive Analysis A Guide

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Image source: Search Engine Journal

The term was first used in Land Surveying. They use Benchmarking to ensure a consistent level from surveyor to surveyor.

Benchmarking or putting elevation marking from the sea level to other heights would be calculated and registered.

It acts like a target that you need to achieve by looking at the competitor’s work and improving your flaws by comparison.

This Technique allows the user to see where his website is standing by comparing the other competitor’s website and find the good and evil on his website by analysis.

This competitor analysis lets you improve your website performance and the computer’s information and your website’s ups and downs.

Benchmarking is the tool to measure your progress, or you can say that it’s a Comparison analysis tool.

There are many metrics, for example, DNS time response, time to byte first and contentful paint and list continue, etc.

You need to understand which matrices are essential that you should focus on the most.

A number that you’ll be able to compare to future results to understand if your

This is a reference number that you should consider and use to compare that number with the future results to determine whether your website is boosting up or degrading. This whole process is known as website performance benchmarking.

Why Benchmark, Your Website very important?

Benchmarking lets, you get the website performance insights to take action easily after comparing the competitor side.

This analysis allows you to compare and show you a bigger and better picture of your progress or downfall by comparing it with your competitors so that you can easily focus on your weak areas and pay more attention to those.

What Metrics To Benchmark

The matrices provide the performance insight of, for example, two websites of the same category with the same things and interests and let you compare where they both stand.

To begin the process considers the following basic metrics:

  • Time to First Byte:

This metric tells the performance of your server, like how fast it responds with the beginning package.

  • First Contentful Paint

These metrics tell about the hero section of your website. It also talks about the visibility and the loading of that section at any time.

  • Page size

This metric tells you all about the size of all files like CSS, javascript, images, HTML, etc.

  • Time To Interactive

This metric tells you about the time the site takes to respond to the user query or request when inputs.

  • Page speed and load time

This matric talks about where every single resource is fully loaded and can respond to user input.

  • Number of requests

Your every action is a request for the server. The more requests to load a file image or script or something else, the server will get busy, and all these actions need a separate time. More claims mean more server time.

You can start benchmarking and begin the process by following these basic beginner’s metrics and solve all the performance-related issues by comparing with your competitors. There are a lot more metrics, but these are the basic ones.

Start by analyzing where your website is standing now, and right down the first value you see and, with time, visit and compare that value and understand and maintain your progress.

More tools for website benchmarking

There are many tools available for the benchmarking of your website.

Seo services providing companies suggest First, analyze the benchmarks and arrange them according to your relative importance and compare them with a goal you want your website to achieve.

List of some famously used tools providing information about the website:

  • SUPR-Q (The Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire)
  • Website Grader
  • Keyword Researcher Pro
  • Pingdom Website Speed Test
  • Google Analytics
  • Moz Pro
  • SUS(System Usability Scale)
  • WordStream Tools
  • Google PageSpeed Tools
  • Alexa
  • Quantcast Measure

Website Benchmarking Best Practices to Follow

You can follow these practices given below to perform benchmark analysis:

  • Comparison with other web pages that are similar to your webpage.
  • Check it on different platforms and test it on multiple locations.
  • Benchmarking against your website competitors, not of the average website.
  • Dig more in-depth about the user experience
  • Check what your website do when you are not watching
  • Monitor the third-party APIs but trust after verification.

Website Benchmarking Some Examples

The benchmarking Strategy tells you where your website is standing by comparing it with your competitor website and improving your website performance.

You can use benchmarking for all those parts of your website and the website’s data that can be measurable.

Tha includes Benchmarking for the following purposes:

  • Benchmarking to compare site performance
  • Benchmarking to compare usability
  • Benchmarking to compare marketing performance
  • Benchmarking to compare the financial performance
  • Benchmarking to compare search performance

Conclusion:

Benchmarking depends upon the type of business and the needs related to that business. What to choose as a metric measure depends on the nature of the website.

The number of benchmarks to need your website to achieve it may vary for your website.