Bench-marking your website is an essential development step which allows you to gauge where your website stands in relation to other competitor sites. This will invariably offer you insight into which areas you are doing particularly well in, and others where you must improve. It’ an incredibly valuable marketing tool which is often overlooked, though today we’re going to highlight the importance of bench-marking and how it can greatly benefit you and your business.
Recommended bench-marking areas:
There are a number of key factors that you’ll need to look out for when benchmarking. For example, there’s no good simply benchmarking for design & aesthetics. Certainly, looking at other attractive websites with exceptional functionality might give you some great ideas for improving your website and making it more user-friendly, but there’s so much more to a websites’ success than mere aesthetics.
- Site performance
- Marketing performance
- Financial performance
- Search performance
- Usability
These are the key areas that you should benchmark. However, it really depends on the industry that you’re in and what you would like to achieve. But what do they mean? How can they improve the way that your business operates?
Site performance
Site performance measures a number of different variables, from page load time, bounce rate (how long people spend on your website before leaving), your overall clicks to conversion rates (how many people are buying), cart abandonment rates (the percentage of people who abandon their shopping carts at the last hurdle), and much more.
By studying other competitor websites that are outperforming you, you can gather invaluable information that can help you to boost your site performance. Little things like optimising the content on your product pages, relocating or re-sizing the “add to cart” button, and reducing page load times, can make a significant difference to how well your website performs.
Marketing performance
Marketing performance is arguably the most important of all, as it dictates how many people are visiting your website and where they are coming from. So, what is it that your competitors are doing that you aren’t? Which methods have you implemented into your marketing strategy and are they working for you?
Look at social media optimisation, SEO, Google Ad’s, retargeting, email marketing and more. What are you doing to promote and advertise your website? Which area are your competitors excelling in? By benchmarking your website, you’ll be able to identify where you need to seriously improve, and what you may already be doing right.
Financial performance
Financial performance is arguably the most important of all, given how money is quite literally what makes the business world go around. If we’re not earning, we can’t sustain our business for long, so why else benchmark if not to improve the financial performance of your website?
Important areas to look at:
- profit per employee
- average dollar per transaction
- same-channel sales
- product margins
- shipping
- inventory turns
- cost of customer acquisition
- returns
- sales per category & item
Look at websites which are performing well in all of these areas and see how yours compares. Following that, you should try to refine your website in ways that can help to improve financial performance.
Search Performance
Search performance indicates where you stand on a SERP (Google search results page). Which are the top performing keywords in your industry and where you stand in relation to your competitors? Look at the strongest in your field, analyse their website and study the type of content that they associate their brand with. This will give you good insight into what you can do in order to bolster your search performance and to start climbing the rankings.
If you’d like to learn more about our SEO services and how they can help you to increase your online presence, then please feel free to browse through our website.
Usability
Usability is valuable aspect of a website’s overall performance, as it dictates how easy it is for visitors to navigate your website. Look at the top performers and explore their website. View it as though you were a customer, add various products to your cart and see how easy it is to get from A to B. By benchmarking, you will be able to get some invaluable ideas that you can then implement into your website in order to bolster performance and improve the overall user experience.
Conclusion
Benchmarking is essential if you are serious about taking your business to the next level. They say that you should never compare yourself with others, but in business that couldn’t be further from the truth. All you should do is compare your business to others in order to become the very best that you can be. By doing so, you will learn new and innovative ways of attracting business and making life easier for those existing customers that you’d like to hold onto.
Naturally, there is an awful lot of work involved with benchmarking and strategising new ideas. If this is something that you are interested in, then we will gladly assist you. Simply contact us today and we can take a look at your website and build a campaign together that will help you gain a competitive edge.