Website benchmarking

Gathering the essential information needed to plan website improvements

How does your website compare against others? Not just in terms of ‘how it looks’ but also how it performs in search engines, how clearly it communicates, how accessible it is, how well it sells – and even how efficiently enquiries are dealt with.

Labrow Marketing can perform an intensive benchmarking of your website against those of your main competitors and peers. This includes:

• Comparing how the sites perform in search engines for nominated search words and phrases.
• Comparing how ‘search engine friendly’ each site is.
• Comparing the clarity of communications on each site and assessing how successfully the companies’ key messages are presented.
• Mystery shopping of each company, via the sites, to see how professionally and quickly enquiries are dealt with.
• Comparing the quality of design of each site and associated electronic documents.

Expert advice and a clear strategy for website success

The output of the benchmarking process is a detailed written report, presented as part of an interactive workshop (because, let’s face it, while a report is important documentation, nothing beats the immediacy and clarity of face-to-face discussion). Not only does the report highlight issues, it identifies areas of improvement and how these can be implemented. By comparing the site against its competitors, the goal is to define a Web strategy that can result in a comfortable on-line lead – in effect, jumping ahead of competitors.

The benchmarking process has created significant commercial advantages for our clients – providing the insight to act with confidence, taking a website ‘to the next level’. In some cases, this has resulted in a considerable step-change for the organisation’s on-line strategy.

Although some of the issues dealt with are technical in nature, we are highly experienced at communicating these to non-technical people. We are also able to clearly demonstrate the commercial and strategic benefits of implementing change.

We also don’t deal with the website as an isolated entity. We consider how it should best integrate with the business from a sales and marketing perspective (perhaps in terms of processes for following up on-line enquiries) in order to deliver the best end-to-end experience for customers.