SEO Strategy3 min

SEO Benchmarking: Know Where You Stand Before You Try to Move

You can't measure progress if you don't know your starting point. Here's how to benchmark your SEO properly.

Quick question.

What's your current organic traffic?

How many keywords do you rank for in the top 10?

What's your average page speed?

If you hesitated on any of those, you have a benchmarking problem.

Why benchmarks matter

You can't celebrate progress if you don't know where you started.

You can't identify problems if you don't know what "normal" looks like.

You can't set realistic goals if you don't know your current reality.

Benchmarks are the foundation of every successful SEO strategy.

What to benchmark

Performance benchmarks

  • Total organic traffic (monthly)
  • Organic traffic by page type
  • Number of ranking keywords (top 3, top 10, top 50)
  • Organic conversion rate
  • Revenue from organic search

    • Technical benchmarks

  • Page speed (Core Web Vitals scores -- measure at PageSpeed Insights)
  • Crawl errors
  • Indexation ratio (indexed pages / total pages)
  • Mobile usability score

    • Content benchmarks

  • Total pages on the site
  • Average content length
  • Content freshness (when pages were last updated)

    • Authority benchmarks

  • Total referring domains
  • Quality of referring domains
  • Link velocity (new links per month)

    • Record everything

    Take a snapshot today. Store it somewhere you'll find it in 3 months. Then measure again.

    The delta is your progress. Or your wake-up call.

    Start measuring, start executing

    SEO Checkup gives you 113 tasks with progress tracking. Your completion rate is itself a benchmark.

    Free. No credit card. 30 seconds.

    Know where you are. Then move forward. Once you have your benchmarks, run a proper SEO audit to identify what to fix first.

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