Analyzing Your Competing Ability As An Evaluation Of Your Website's Performance

When the internet is becoming larger, there is no saying when or where your competitors will come targeting your market. You may have a strong performing website with great amount of leads, but do you really have what it takes to overcome any competition ahead of you?

In terms for your site's performance on the web, it may involves a lot of things. From how the site is designed to how good your SEO and how well is your marketing efforts. In overall, your competitive ability should increase at any moment to keep your business in shape. But is it perfect?

When everything is made to be perfected, you website is certainly not yet perfected. To know which parts of you is vulnerable, you need to evaluate your website's performance to allow you to view your successes and failures in the context of your unique competitive ability.

By knowing this, you could then answer the question: "How good am I compared to my competitors?"

Web performance metrics

Know Your Customers

You may have the most comprehensive data about your customers, but have you managed it well? As a head start, you need to plan a project management to get a competitive analysis about who are your customers, who are giving you the leads, and who are probably liking you.

By having your website online on the internet, you're expecting to see visitors coming from a diverse number of countries and browsers, landing on your website using specific keywords from links scattered on the web.

With the data, you have to know which visitors are leading the pack. For example, if you have most of your visitors from Indonesia, which one of them are using the keywords you're essentially targeting. What web browsers are they using, and whether they're mobile or using desktop web browsers.

Look into your competitors. Are they targeting the same pool of audience? If no, ask yourself the question: "Why don't they?". Is it because "I'm doing it better than them?" or "Am I missing something here?"

Number of Web Traffic

Benchmarking your web traffic will give you an insight about how well you website's performance in overall. It'll help you understand how well you're performing, and how far are your from your goal. No two websites have the same amount of traffic, no matter what industry they're in or what type of website they are or the campaigns they do. Numbers here are realistic measures you can use to compare your effectiveness.

Beside your own web analytics software such as Google Analytics, there are a lot of free services you can use. With them, you can identify your weakness points to patch them accordingly, and your advantage points to boost them up.

The data you need to look in order to get the insight about your web's performance are: monthly visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate and traffic changes.

The number of your website's traffic and the data that comes with it can also be used to identify opportunities for growth and investments.

Sources of Web Traffic

The number of web traffic your website is having is one thing. The next thing is to know where do they come from.

Knowing how your visitors find you and where do they come from can help you understand where to focus your marketing efforts. Besides that, it'll also help you in identifying which of your strategies do work and which don't.

Look for referrals, medium, sources, backlinks and others. See how each of you pages perform and how they interlink with other related pages of yours.

As social media is becoming more common, it's also necessary for you to see how your pages are performing. Do they actually give you sufficient amount of traffic? Do they target potential leads, or are they just wasting your time?

Engaging social influencers and doing intensive link-building strategy are becoming more common to gain more traffic from referrals.

SEO Evaluation

When search engines are still giving you most of your site's traffic, SEO must still be a priority to you. Reviewing how your SEO is performing will give you a good analysis data to compare your site to your competitors'.

The data you'll need to see include a lot of things. What you need is numbers, so take a look at some priority.

Your website's speed comes first. Speed has a big impact on user-experience and conversion. If your website is the type that loads fast, you can expect it to have a high bounce rate and low conversion. Although you have great marketing strategy and social marketing, having a slow loading website will repel just about anyone.

Users want websites and their pages to load as fast as possible. 2 seconds or less for that matter. With analytics tools, you should get to know what caused you website to load slowly, and how your website's loading speed compared to others similar.

As always, you should also make sure to follow best SEO practices that are inline with Google, Bing and other search engines. This will ensure a pleasant and informative experience to your visitors and customers.

The next thing is its effectiveness. To measure how effective your SEO is, you need to differentiate how many of your visitors are coming from search engines, and how many of them are direct visitors or coming through backlinks.

Related: Traffic And Backlinks: Friends With Benefits

To know your search volume, multiply your unique visitors with the percentage of traffic from search.

The next part is keywords. Know how many keywords are driving traffic to your website. Seek for branded keywords and non-branded ones. If your non-branded keywords are performing better, it suggests an effective keywords usage strategy.

Conclusion

Make use of the many web analytics software and tools available, and use them as frequent as you can. But always be aware that your data is indeed expensive, this is the reason why there are so many free things on the web. To limit any of your competitors to peek at your data, try to keep whatever you can out of the public.

When concerning about your website's performance, there are a lot of variables you need to look. Compare them with your competitors to get a glimpse om how you perform against them, and them against you. Since improvement is a must, you should always look into your data to get to know your weaknesses and strong points.

And since the web is growing and you need to embrace the current trend to get closer to your targeted audience, always make sure that your website is updated with the current web design and technologies. Beside making your website appeal better, they'll also make your website safer and a friendlier to first-time visitors.

Further reading: Web Analytics Data You Should Be Tracking To Increase Traffic And Sales