If you are a small business, and you decide to grade your website, you should grade your website at regular intervals. SEO benchmarking is a great way to develop a grading rubric. Once you determine what your SEO plan is capable of achieving, consider goals you want your website to meet or exceed. Know who you want to outsource to for your SEO grader, what site metrics indicate that your SEO benchmarking is working, and what metrics indicate you need a change in SEO benchmarking.

The first part of any SEO benchmarking strategy is to set simple benchmarks. This may sound silly, but an SEO benchmarking strategy often fails to show you the big picture of your business. Your website traffic may be up, but is your click through rate keeping up? Proper SEO benchmarking can show you this, whereas improper SEO benchmarking may hide deadly flaws in your online marketing strategy.

Once you have a clear idea of SEO benchmarking, identify different scenarios based on the performance of your website. It’s easy enough if your web grader software shows that website hits or click through rate is meeting or exceeding benchmarks. What happens if your goals fall short of SEO benchmarking? If that is the case, it is important to determine an alternate marketing plan beforehand.

Finally, if you decide to change your SEO benchmarking, make sure you have a clear reason why you are changing it. Good benchmarks can change, and are ultimately suggestions. They are suggestions. They are subject to change based on what is best for your business at the time.

SEO benchmarking can be a great way to ensure your website hits performance goals. If you can objectively grade your website and compare your performance to your benchmarks, you have the tools to manipulate site traffic. In fact, SEO benchmarking, if done right, can help you exceed your performance targets, and maybe open possibilities that did not exist before.