How your site is doing relative to your competitors?
Curious how your site is doing relative to your competitors, and looking for benchmark metrics to improve upon? Heres a roundup of free (and freemium) tools that can help you track traffic, SEO, social sentiment, business ratings and site speed performance.
Competitive Benchmarks
Google Benchmarking
Google Analytics offers an opt-in benchmarking service where you can see how other opted-in sites of similar size and topic area perform in terms of traffic and bounce rates. This can answer the common question is our bounce rate too high relative to birds-of-a-feather, but the data quality depends on how many sites have opted-in, and how good Google is at determining which sites fall in your industry.
Coremetrics Benchmarks
Personally, I prefer Coremetrics benchmark data. Though the data is only collected from Coremetrics customers (and may be a smaller sample than Google), its free to access even if youre not a customer. (You must opt-in to share your data in order to view Googles benchmarks).
Coremetrics also offers you more information, including average order value, conversion rate and items per sale. The reports are updated each quarter and can be downloaded from their US website and the UK website.
Google Trends
Compete.coms free version is much like Google Trends for Websites reporting traffic trends for multiple sites.
These are quick and easy tools to gauge your volume and popularity against competitors, but also useful for media buying. Some sites boast X visitors per month when really they had a peak one month which does not represent current traffic. I also like to compare seasonality. If others in the industry all rose or fell during the quarter, its less of a concern for the business owner.
The paid version of Compete is pretty killer, you can see data on traffic sources, demographics, traffic loss/gain, paid search and keyword referrals if youre serious about CI (competitive intelligence). Wouldnt it be helpful to know if conversion and traffic was falling across the board because of the economy, seasonality or world events?
Backlinks
Ive used a lot of backlink checking tools in my day, but Open Site Explorer takes the cake. Rather than pull data through search engine APIs, SEOmoz has built its own web crawlers, indexed the web themselves and developed their own MozRank system of judging a sites authority. Open Site Explorer allows you access to their data to see not just backlinks, but their follow / nofollow / 301 status. You can also see backlinks ranked by authority (MozRank), so you get the best data first). You can also compare sites side-by-side to see who has the more valuable links.
Why should you care about backlinks? Knowing the high authority sites that link to your competition shows you who to target first with your own link building campaign. Many of the top links are blogs and news sites, so work with your PR team to acquire your own exposure and links.
For serious SEO, paying customers can run unlimited reports, see up to 1000 backlinks and more metrics than the freebies (as well as access to the other goodies the Mozeratti have built).
Social Sentiment
Using natural language processing, sentiment apps can scour the Net and social networks for mentions of any keyword (e.g. your brand) and spit out a rating or percentage of positive, neutral and negative comments. While its not foolproof (misunderstanding not bad as bad for example), it does help you and your social media team identify potentially negative situations that could be rectified by reaching out to the user.
I find this app doesnt always get it right, but it allows you to correct boo-boos and re-classify comments as positive, neutral or negative manually and update your score. (As you can see, some are marked negative which are really neutral).
You can also save searches for later, and scope searches between a certain time frame.
Dont limit yourself to just Twitter, search anything with Socialmention video, microblogs, blogs, news, Q&A and more. It also provides more data and export tools.
Aside from the fact youll never remember how to spell this domain, this tool has the nicest UI. This is nice if youre only interested in one type of sentiment. But it lacks the features of the other two its Twitter-only, and you cant correct mentions or export data.
Though theres not much you can do to benchmark or improve sentiment you can have the best quality service and product but there will alway sbe someone to complain gathering feedback helps point out areas of your business to improve, and identify opportunities to satisfy an unhappy customer.
Paid for social media monitoring suites that include sentiment tracking like Radian6, Trackur and UberVu may be worth looking into.
Business Ratings
Did you Google Product Search aggregates business ratings from review sites like BizRate, ePinions and Yahoo? Well, now you know. Check out your site by heading to Google Products and searching the following, replacing google.com with your domain.
I love how it breaks down to areas of your business like shipping, customer service and ordering process. Use this qualitative data in addition to customer surveys.
Site performance
By now we know that page load speed is critical to conversion, customer satisfaction and even search engine rankings. But how you doin?
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