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In the world of digital marketing and business, your website is your bread and butter. Its successes, including high conversion rates, will lead to better business opportunities and increased revenue streams. That said, you’re not the only one vying for the top spot. Some are competing with you for traffic, conversions, and authority within your business industry or niche. Comparing your website to a competitor’s site can teach you how to rise above the competition.
“A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.” Baltasar Gracian
The most effective marketing strategies don’t overlook the competition, they benefit by learning from them. Comparing your website to your competitor’s site can provide you with valuable insights into your competitor’s strategies that you can use to enhance your site. Here’s everything you need to know about effective website competition comparison and how to get the most out of it.
Before Getting Started
Don’t make the mistake of rushing into your comparison with no real goals or strategies. Before you get started, be sure that you have answers to the following questions:
- Who is your competition, and are they performing at a similar or higher level to your site?
- What standards do you want to compare? (SEO performance, conversion rate, demographic targeting, etc.)
- What are your site’s strengths and weaknesses?
- How will you test changes that you want to make to your site?
Answering these questions will enable you to form a more efficient and effective comparison strategy. Not only will you better know what to look for, but you’ll also have a thorough understanding of how you will employ changes later on. Once you’ve got your strategy in place, you can begin. Here are the steps that you need to take to compare your website to the competition.
1. Perform a Visual Comparison
The first step is the simplest. Visit your competitor’s site and compare its visual aspects to your own. What similarities and differences do you recognize right off the bat? Is there information or content on a competitive site that you think might be interesting to test?
While it is essential to ensure that the design of your website is unique and distinct, you can see what competitior’s feature on their page and test similar content on your own. An example might be a calculator or chart that does a better job of explaining something than your current site does.
Keep in mind that the messaging on both sites will likely be similar, especially if you are targeting the same demographic and offering similar services.
2. Compare Website SEO Performance
SEO performance is the big dog when it comes to who ranks higher on SERPs. Ranking at the top of SERPs comes with many benefits including organic traffic, which can lead to increased conversions.
While the messaging of both your and your competitor’s sites should be similar, your ranking doesn’t have to be. Comparing SEO performance gives you the opportunity to more effectively target keywords, increase backlinks, and get a detailed view of how your site ranks against your competitors.
Sites like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs (the golden standard of SEO tools!) are the perfect starting point for SEO comparisons. Not only do they allow you to view your website’s SEO performance, but they also enable you to view the competition’s. With this information, you can effectively improve your SEO strategy to increase organic traffic to your site.
3. Test your competitors’ pages
While understanding the right SEO Keywords and looking at competitor’s pages for ideas may provide value, the real test comes from how prospective customers experience your competition’s website. WEVO is the only platform that can provide you with conversion comparison scores and testing insights on competitor pages. You can see what visitors like or dislike on your page as well as those of your competitors and see how all pages compare on WEVO’s conversion benchmarks.
4. Understand Your Visitor’s Expectations and Experience
The real key to conversion improvement is less about your competition and more about how well you exceed your visitors expectations and experience. What does this have to do with the competition?
It means that you have a pulse on your visitors: what their hopes and fears are, how they perceive your web content (does it help or harm?), and how they respond to your brand and offer. By understanding where they are and what they need, you will have a huge head start on your competition (and they will be copying your site)! WEVO’s Exposed Series allows you to see these comparisons in action. The series compares top websites to determine how effective they are in converting their target audience based on the aforementioned conversion driving factors.
5. Test Your Page’s Upgrades with WEVO
Once you’ve succeeded in pulling as much valuable information from your competitor’s site as possible, you can implement changes to improve your site. However, it’s crucial to avoid making changes that will decrease your site’s performance.
The best way to avoid the pitfalls of webpage experimentation is to utilize WEVO’s pre-live testing feature.
Pre-live testing from WEVO can help you ensure that whatever changes you make from the information that you’ve gathered will actually help your website to improve. WEVO ensures that you gain insights into your page’s performance by testing it with your targeted demographic before you publish them.
So whether you’re reducing the amount of content that you’re using on your site or completely rearranging the layout of your site — you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. You can test changes to your site, optimize your designs, and understand why visitors aren’t converting, all with a single service.
Key Takeaways
Comparing your website to the competition gives you the advantage of creating an optimized website that includes what works best for your visitors – no matter whether your idea or your competitor’s. With the data and insights that you learn from your competitor’s site, analyzing SEO performance, seeing visitors’ responses to competitive sites and understanding customer expectations, you can significantly improve your site’s conversion rates.
That’s where WEVO comes in. WEVO’s services make it easy for marketers and business owners to optimize their website for top performance in every aspect. WEVO enables their clients to access curated customer quotes about how your page met (or failed to meet) their expectations. Additionally, their pre-live testing feature makes it possible for your new pages to directly compete with competitor pages that are already published.
Learn more about how WEVO can help your website flourish and easily outpace the competition.
