How can you use site migrations to improve your competitive benchmarking?

1 Step 1: Define your competitors and goals

Before you start your site migration, you need to have a clear idea of who your competitors are and what your goals are. You can use tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to identify your top organic competitors based on keywords, traffic, and rankings. You also need to define your goals for the site migration, such as improving user experience, increasing conversions, or enhancing security. These goals will help you measure the success of your site migration and your competitive benchmarking.

2 Step 2: Analyze your competitors' sites

Once you have your competitors and goals, you need to analyze their sites and see how they compare to yours. You can use tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Lighthouse to crawl and audit their sites and find out their strengths and weaknesses. You should look at aspects such as site structure, content quality, speed, mobile-friendliness, accessibility, and technical SEO. You should also look at their backlink profiles, social media presence, and online reviews. You can use a spreadsheet or a dashboard to organize and visualize your findings.

3 Step 3: Plan your site migration strategy

Based on your analysis, you can plan your site migration strategy and decide what changes you need to make to your site. You should prioritize the changes that will have the most impact on your goals and your competitive advantage. For example, if your competitors have faster and more secure sites, you might want to switch to HTTPS, optimize your images, and use a CDN. If your competitors have better content and keywords, you might want to update your content strategy, do keyword research, and optimize your meta tags. You should also create a backup of your site, a sitemap, and a redirect plan.

4 Step 4: Monitor and evaluate your site migration

After you launch your site migration, you need to monitor and evaluate its results and see how it affects your SEO performance and your competitive benchmarking. You can use tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, or Moz to track your site's metrics and issues, such as crawl errors, indexation, traffic, rankings, conversions, and bounce rate. You should also compare your site's metrics and features with those of your competitors and see if you have closed the gaps or created new opportunities. You should also collect feedback from your users and stakeholders and make adjustments if needed.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?