Benchmarking :: How Do You Compare

What are your website ratings when compared with your competitors?

Benchmarking is the process through which your business practices, your website or you yourself are rated against other players in your field.

Benchmarking is an important part of creating and improving a website. Benchmarking helps you to set goals for yourself. It motivates you to create the best personal website or business website you can.

Once you have the first draft, you are already set to begin benchmarking (using a comparison survey to evaluate your progress, for instance). So this is how it's done:

1. Search & find competitors: Go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo and run searches on the most popular keywords related to your website.

The goal here is to find other websites that are the cream of the crop, the jewel in the crown, the best of the best in your field. You can also type in your competitors’ names and see what keywords they are using to attract visitors.

2. See what they offer: Examining the industry’s standards will help you figure out how high you need to aim and where can you improve.

3. Do it better! Don’t be the same as your rivals, be better. Explore your competitors’ weaknesses, find inspiration in successful websites from different fields, implement new practices into your own web design process and aspire to bring something fresh and captivating.

Remember that benchmarking is a valuable exercise during all each stage in a website’s development. In order to maintain the highest standard of quality, you must constantly benchmark and update.

As you build and update your website, continue to benchmark. In the online world, the bar is always rising. Make it your goal to be a leader in your online [1] niche.