An essential part of developing your digital strategy is competitive benchmarking. Benchmarking provides visibility into how your overall strategy is performing compared to your competitors and helps you uncover blind spots and discover new growth opportunities.
Benchmarking is measuring key metrics by comparing them to a point of reference - such as an industry average, an immediate competitive set, or best-in-class competitors. Who and what you benchmark against varies based on your business objectives.
Use competitive benchmarking to answer key business questions, such as:
| How do my website's traffic, reach, and engagement metrics compare to my best-in-class competitors? |
| How does my site rank in specific industry markets or geographic regions? |
| How am I performing in search and across marketing channels compared to my immediate competitive set? |
With Similarweb's competitive research tools and insights, you can quickly view your position, measure and monitor your performance, and discover growth opportunities.
Read on to:
- Find your website ranking to understand your current standing
- Compare traffic volume by channel to discover trends and opportunities
- Get a baseline for online engagement to understand the quality of traffic
- Measure keyword performance and improve your SEO strategy
Mrs. Meyer's is an earth-friendly cleaning solutions company. They want to benchmark the performance of their website against competitors in order to evaluate their growth potential.
An excellent place to start benchmarking is to understand how your site ranks against the competition.
Similarweb calculates website ranking based on several criteria -- including monthly unique visitors and pageviews -- that represent a site's position among engaged audiences. In other words, ranking is based on quality traffic, not just quantity.
Want to know how your website ranks globally, by country, and by category? Let's see.
- In the Website Research module, enter your website in the Website Analysis section.
- On the Website Performance page, click +Compare to add up to four competitor sites.
- To refine your analysis, use the time, geography, and traffic type filters located in the upper right of the page.
The Website Performance page gives you a birds-eye-view of the performance of the analyzed site(s) across a variety of performance metrics.
Rank insights show how the analyzed site(s) rank globally, within the lead country, and across the industry.
Tip
Look at the website's overall rank and rank position among the competitive set. Hover your cursor over a domain to see a description of the company and its total visits from last month.
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SimilarStory Use Case:
How does Mrs. Meyer's website stack up against the competition? How does their online traffic and engagement metrics rank within one country compared to worldwide?
Looking across the ranking insights, Mrs. Meyer's finds that their website ranks well among the analyzed competitive set.
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Tip
Sometimes, industries are broader than you need or do not include a company you want to include in your competitive set. Create your own custom industry with the Custom Industry Builder.
Now, let's look at the marketing channels that are driving traffic to your website, and see how that volume of traffic across channels compares to your competitors' traffic distribution.
- Under Website Research, go to Website Analysis.
- On the Website Performance page, click +Compare to add up to four competitor sites.
- To refine your analysis, use the Time, Geography, and Traffic Type filters located in the upper right of the page.
- Navigate to the Marketing Channels page.
The Channel overview graph breaks down the traffic volume by channel for each website. If you look at only Desktop traffic, you can include industry averages in your analysis by selecting an industry from the Benchmark to an Industry filter.
Tip
Compare how the group of competitors stacks up against each other by channel and hover your cursor over the bar graphs to view the percentage (or number) breakdown of traffic for each site.
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SimilarStory Use Case:
What marketing channel is driving the most traffic across the competitive landscape? How does Mrs Meyer's traffic from each channel compare to the competition? And, are there opportunities to adjust the strategy to garner more traffic from an underperforming channel?
When comparing to Seventh Generation and Simple Green, we see that Mrs. Meyers 37.52% of its traffic directly, which could signify high brand awareness or loyalty! However, we see that Seventh Generation receives more of their traffic from paid search, indicating investment on their end to steer more visits to their site.
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Tip
For analyses with a timeframe under three months, look at Marketing Channel Trends. These automated insight cards highlight new channels, traffic jumps, and traffic drops for you.
Finding traffic volume is only one part of the equation. Next up is analyzing traffic quality. You can measure the quality of traffic by looking at how engaged visitors are once they arrive at a website.
- Under Website Research, go to Website Analysis.
- Click +Compare to add up to four competitor sites.
- To refine your analysis, use the time, geography , and traffic type filters.
The Engagement table provides insight into the engagement of visitors to the analyzed websites. Here you can see who leads the way in several valuable indicators of how well the sites are performing, beyond sheer traffic volume.
Tip
When analyzing this data, think through points of correlation. For instance, compare visit duration to pages per visit to bounce rate. Consider the drivers of engagement and how your company can improve based on the benchmark averages of the competition.
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SimilarStory Use Case:
Are your visitors returning to your site, spending time and visiting multiple pages, or bouncing after just one visit?
Mrs. Meyer's performs very well in the engagement categories with a high volume of monthly visits and unique visitors and visit duration, and pages per visit. In fact, they win across all the metrics for the selected time frame and geo.
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Finally, let's take a look at benchmarking your search traffic.
Search traffic is the traffic that gets to your site through a search engine. Benchmarking both organic and paid search traffic can help you uncover unique opportunities that you may be missing out on. We'll analyze the share of organic vs. paid search traffic across your competitive set and investigate how are your keywords performing relative to competitors.
We'll do this in two steps: benchmark search traffic share and discover traffic drivers.
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Follow the same steps above to set up a report in Website Analysis, then navigate to the Search > Overview page. Click +Compare to add up to four competitor sites. Here you can gauge your search share across the competitive set. Then scroll down the Overview page and click Explore search keywords.
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This will take you to the Keywords report under the Search Intelligence module. Here you can analyze keyword gaps to identify keywords that your competitors are successfully targeting in their keyword strategy, that you are not. (Also known as Keyword Losses.)
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Under the Keywords report, select the Losses button. Also select non-branded terms. (You may have to click into Include/Exclude Keywords/Lists button to remove additional branded terms.) This will show you the terms that are driving traffic to competitor sites and not your own site.
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Discover traffic drivers
Once you have a sense of search traffic share, look at the drivers of that traffic: keywords.
Which keywords are sending traffic to your competitors? Which keywords should you optimize for or invest in.
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SimilarStory Use Case:
What keywords are bringing people to Seventh Generation and/or Simple Green while driving little to no traffic to Mrs Meyers?
The orange in the screenshot above represents Seventh Generation's portion of search traffic. We see how they get traffic for diaper searches, something that Mrs. Meyers isn't involved in. However what about that number 7 result; thymol? That's a natural ingredient that is actually driving more clicks to Seventh Generation. If that is something that is bringing interest to their products, perhaps it is something that Mrs. Meyers would want to look into.
We also see question queries about how to clean thing driving traffic to Simple Green, but not Mrs. Meyers. Seeing searches like this are great for market research, highlighting what consumers are asking about. It is especially if you're looking to beef up your own blog or other content.
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For more information on how to improve your SEO strategy, click here.
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