Have you benchmarked your website against your competitors yet?

We thought we would compare the online traffic of some of the world’s top management consultants, accounting / audit firms and consumer research companies. These include the likes of Accenture, Bain, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Frost & Sullivan, McKinsey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Synovate and TNS, to list a few examples.

There are many sites such as Alexa, Compete, comScore, Hitwise and Nielsen Online that claim to provide reliable benchmarks of site statistics.

So we thought we would conduct a (free) trial on Compete’s site comparison tool. On its website, Compete says it has a diverse panel of over 2 million U.S. Internet users.

While the figures shown in the three charts here may not be 100% accurate, they provide good representative benchmarks nonetheless.

We found that companies that regularly update their websites and that adapted their websites according to their online visitor behavior clearly outperformed their peers, in terms of unique visitors.

What are some of their secrets?

Manifesto conducted an extensive review and came up with these suggestions on how to engage your online traffic and increase the time spent on each page:

1. Include lots of interesting information but ensure that the page layout is still kept clean and clear. With more information, you need to balance the use of colours and graphics.
2. Feature elegantly designed buttons that encourage visitors to click onto other links in to your site.
3. Upload new high-quality thought leadership to your website often, do so every week if possible. See our entry on Web 2.0 Marketing of Thought Leadership.
4. Feature 3rd party opinion pieces by business leaders.
5. Make sure you cover important topics by talking about them in several different ways, so as to increase the chances of saying the right things to your target visitors and attracting more eyeballs.
6. List your content by as many categories as possible. You can categorise by special topics, highly recommended, hot topics for the week etc.
7. Feature user-friendly columns that list hyperlinks to the most popular items on your website, upfront.
8. Consider offering a ‘shopping cart’ for visitors to collect items of interest, free-of-charge or paid, under their own personalised account.
9. Customise the links to other pages of your website on each page.
10. Encourage visitors to join your community. One way is to enable them to participate in forums and comment on your blogs.
11. List web 2.0 options as part of the main index so that visitors can go directly to blogs, RSS feeds etc.
12. Provide as many ‘Share’ options as possible. See our other entry on Top Social Media Tools Adopted by B2B Companies.
13. Prompt visitors to download a feed from your website to their smart phones. See our entry on Good html Practices for Different Formats.
    
14. Feature video interviews on various popular topics. See our entry on Creating Great Videos for SEO.
15. And lastly, if you have the budget to do so, create your own app (make sure it has popular features) that can be downloaded from your website!

For more tips and suggestions, or advice on how to spruce up your website, please do not hesitate to contact Manifesto.

About siteanalytics.com by Compete.
Compete’s clickstream data are collected from a 2,000,000 member panel of US Internet users (about a 1% sample), using diverse sources. Using a rigorous statistical normalization methodology, Compete creates precise projections of the behavior of the entire US Internet browser population on monthly and weekly basis. In addition, Compete provides daily estimates of share of consumer attention garnered by the top Internet sites and the velocity of change of this attention. Compete is the only commercial web analytics provider to make its data freely available online for all Internet users.