Organic search is one of the most important channels for driving traffic, leads, and conversions to your website. But how do you measure and compare your organic search performance against your competitors, your industry, and your goals? In this article, we will show you some of the key metrics, tools, and methods to compare your SEO results and optimize your strategy.
Before you start comparing your organic search performance, it is important to define what you want to compare and why. Depending on your objectives, you may want to assess various aspects of your SEO, such as keyword rankings, traffic volume and quality, conversion rate and value, and domain authority and backlinks. Keyword rankings can show how well your website ranks for relevant keywords. Traffic volume and quality can demonstrate how many visitors your website receives from organic search and how engaged they are with your content. Conversion rate and value can indicate how many of your organic visitors take the desired actions on your website, such as signing up or buying. Lastly, domain authority and backlinks can measure how authoritative and trustworthy your website is in the eyes of search engines and users.
Upper management often needs to know how well our SEO is doing compared to our main competitors. If you have used a third-party tool such as SimilarWeb Pro, Ahrefs, Semrush and others, you will know that they can only estimate the traffic to your website. They don't have access to Google Search Console. If you find that one of these tools estimates close to your actual data, you might want to use that tool to compare visibility in search engines. Enterprise tools such as BrightEdge offer a metric called Share of Voice, which uses your keywords to check the visibility of market competitors against your site.
To compare your organic search performance, you must use reliable and accurate tools and data sources that can provide the metrics and insights you require. Popular and useful tools for SEO comparison include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Moz. Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics tool that can help monitor and analyze organic traffic, conversions, and user behavior on your website. Google Search Console is the official tool from Google that can help optimize your website's performance, visibility, and issues in Google's search results. The keyword research tool from Google, Keyword Planner, can find and compare keywords based on their search volume, competition, and bid estimates. SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO tool that can analyze and compare your website's keyword rankings, traffic, backlinks, domain authority, etc., with your competitors' and industry benchmarks. Moz is another comprehensive SEO tool that can measure and compare your website's domain authority, backlinks, keyword rankings, etc., with those of your competitors' and industry benchmarks.
One of the simplest and most effective ways to compare your organic search performance is to compare it with your own past performance. This can help you identify trends, patterns, and changes in your SEO results over time. To compare your performance over time, you can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to create custom reports and dashboards that show how your organic traffic, conversions, and rankings have changed over different time periods, such as month-over-month, year-over-year, or before and after a major update or change. You can also use tools like SEMrush and Moz to track and compare your domain authority, backlinks, and keyword rankings over time.
Another important way to compare your organic search performance is to compare it with your competitors. This can help you understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the competitive landscape and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. To compare your performance with your competitors, you can use tools like SEMrush and Moz to conduct a competitive analysis that shows how your website compares with your competitors' websites in terms of keyword rankings, traffic, backlinks, domain authority, and more. You can also use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find and compare keywords that your competitors are ranking for or bidding on, and identify gaps or opportunities for your own keyword strategy.
Finally, you can also compare your organic search performance with your industry as a whole. This can help you benchmark your SEO results against the average or best practices in your niche or sector and identify areas for improvement or differentiation. To compare your performance with your industry, you can use tools like SEMrush and Moz to access industry reports and data that show how your website compares with the industry average or top performers in terms of keyword rankings, traffic, backlinks, domain authority, and more. You can also use tools like Google Trends to explore and compare the search demand and interest for topics, keywords, and queries related to your industry over time and across regions.
It's important to take third-party tools with a pinch of salt, and if you're looking at your competitor's traffic through a third-party tool, you need to use your traffic data from the same tool. It likely won't match your Google Analytics, Clarity, or Adobe, but you're at least comparing "like for like"