SEO benchmarking can help you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current internet marketing campaign, but there are other things that you will need to consider aside from the statistical information that a benchmark will provide. You will want to look at why you are doing the SEO in the first place, and how close you are to reaching your goals. You should also consider how much you are investing into the SEO itself, along with your website maintenance costs, and whether or not the return thus far is what you have expected. What SEO benchmarking can tell you is one part of the story, but that part is very important when you are attempting to determine efficiency.

While the self-reflective properties of SEO benchmarking are fairly obvious, what you may not consider is how you should be using these results when making comparisons with your competitors. For some companies, taking the results of SEO benchmarking directly against the competition may make it seem as though they are completely out of their depth, and for the most part they may be. What you need to consider when making these comparisons is that there is a lot more to your marketing than the numbers that you will see in SEO benchmarking, and that you may not know just how much your competition has invested into their SEO, as opposed to the returns that they are seeing. Review these comparisons for the sake of your own business and your competitiveness, but never lose sight of your individuality as a business entity.

The SEO benchmarking reports will tell you a great deal about the amount of traffic that you are receiving and the sources of that traffic, but it will not tell you what your next move should be precisely. For example, if SEO benchmarking is telling you that your main sources of traffic are coming from a part of the country that you are not targeting, than that could be a sign of a huge lack of accuracy in your optimization. Likewise, if you are receiving traffic from websites or link networks that are considered to be the minor interest of your campaign, you may be misfiring as well. Your SEO benchmarking can reveal a lot about the traffic that you receive, but it is up to you to use that information properly.