SEO and Content Marketing Benchmarks for HR Tech Websites
How does your site stack up against 860 top competitors?
How are your HR Tech SEO and Content Marketing campaigns performing?
You may already know that it can be daunting to answer that questions.. but not anymore!
We analyzed 860 HR Tech websites, in depth. And used over 4,250 data points to build you a free benchmarking tool.
By the end of this article you’ll know:
How your site’s SEO stacks up against the other 860 HR tech websites (you can filter down into companies you're on a level playing field with)
Specific actions you can take to boost your rankings
If you're a HR Tech Founder or Marketer strap in. You’re going to get an incredible amount of value from this. There’s no resource like it on the internet.
I’m going to show you how to use the tool in this article. But the video version is below if you prefer that…
How We Created The Tool
We analyzed 860 HR tech websites. Here’s what we looked at…
Employee headcount (LinkedIn)
Company funding (Crunchbase)
Domain rating (Ahrefs)
Organic traffic (Ahrefs)
Employee headcount and company funding are pretty self explanatory.
The metrics related to your SEO efforts are domain rating and organic traffic.
Here’s what they mean…
Domain rating definition
Your site's potential to rank for competitive keywords.
It's a scale from one to 100, and the higher you are on that scale, the more power you have to rank in search engines.
A website with 0 DR will NOT rank for anything.
A website with 100 DR will rank page 1 for the most competitive keywords. Every piece of content is a surefire “win” right out the gate.
Organic Traffic definition
Your non-paid traffic from search engines every month.
It’s essentially the “free traffic” Google sends to your site.
Splitting The Data
We split the domain rating and organic traffic metrics into quartiles.
Domain rating quartiles
Zero - 14
15 - 35
36 - 57
Over 57
Organic traffic quartiles (monthly organic sessions)
Zero
1 - 375
376 - 7,600
Over 7,600
This gave us an even distribution for the entire 860 website data set.
You can benchmark based on any metric. But we believe you’ll get the most value from this if you benchmark based on your domain rating.
Why?
You can see whether you’re leveraging your domain “juice” (DR) into traffic effectively.
It stands to reason that websites with a high domain rating should have high organic traffic.
Our tool will quickly show you if you are underperforming or overperforming vs your competition.
This will help you understand which content and promotional strategies will be most suitable.
Now let's look at 4 examples:
Low DR
Low/Medium DR
Medium/High DR
High DR
Before we begin you need to find your company's domain rating.
Type the name of your company into the search bar.
For example: lever.co.
If you did that, you’d see that lever.co has a domain rating of 90.
Once you know your DR, you can skip to the section that is most applicable to you.
Example 1 (Low DR: 0 - 14)
The majority of these companies have no funding or very little funding. And for the most part they have between one and 10 employee headcounts.
But here’s the most interesting part…
64% (139) of the websites we've analyzed have absolutely no organic traffic at this level.
76 sites have between one and 375 organic sessions
4 websites have somewhere between 376 and 7,600 organic sessions per month
Companies at the bottom of this scale will have to use a different marketing strategy to those at the top.
For example, let’s say your company has 7,600 organic sessions.
Congratulations! That is really impressive.
That means you have almost no websites linking to your site. But you’re still able to drive a chunk of traffic.
In my best estimate that means you have a lot of brand awareness i.e. there are a lot of people searching for your brand name. Because at this level, you're not going to get very much traction with content in organic search.
Recommendation:
If you’re at the bottom of the organic traffic scale: Use a Digital PR campaign to raise awareness and authority. With a higher DR score you'll be able to better compete for organic traffic, leads and revenue in this space.
If you’re at the top of the organic traffic scale: You should start publishing long form blog posts. So you can start ranking for non-brand keywords as well.
Example 2 (Low / Medium Domain Rating: 15 - 35)
The majority of sites (95.3%) have between one and 7,600 sessions.
Your company should have at least the median organic traffic of 86.5.
But ideally I’d want to be in this space. Between 376 and 7,600 sessions per month…
There’s A LOT of room for improvement if you have 0 or under 375 organic sessions per month.
But even if you have under 7,600, there's still room to improve and get to a more elite level.
Recommendation:
Take a look at the better performers in your quartile.
Plug them into the SEO software of your choice.
Try to pick apart their content strategy.
Example 3 (Medium / High Domain Rating: 36 - 57)
The median level of traffic for this group is 1,500 organic sessions.
But interestingly most (70%) of websites have between 376 and 7,600 plus sessions per month.
So you definitely want to have between 1,500 and 7,600 organic sessions.
At this level, your website has probably been around for about a year. You can see the majority of these companies are funded and also have a high headcount.
Recommendation:
For websites below 1,500 organic sessions: Revisit your content strategy. You are probably making a fatal error in regards to the type of content you’re putting out.
For websites above 1,500 organic sessions: Some of the elite sites in our dataset are probably still outcompeting you. A few adjustments will help you decrease the gap and edge-out those top competitors. For example, increasing your time on page or utilizing video more.
Example 4 (High Domain Rating: Over 57)
At this point the majority of companies are well funded. And have a higher company headcount.
At this level, you should be getting at least 7,600 sessions per month.
But ideally you're getting more than 34k organic sessions per month.
Recommendation:
For websites below 7,600 organic sessions: Revisit your content strategy. You are probably making a fatal error in regards to the type of content you’re putting out.
For websites with 7,600 - 34,000 organic sessions: Publish content more frequently. Accelerate your content calendar. So you can start climbing the rankings faster.
For websites that are getting more than 34k sessions per month:
Focus on 5-10 websites that are getting more organic traffic than you (especially from non-brand keywords)
Use the top pages feature on AHrefs
Pick out 5-10 of their top performing content pieces (that you haven’t published articles on already i.e. content gaps)
Create a competing content piece. But make it better so it has a higher chance of ranking first!
You Can Benchmark Based On Any Metric!
Now you’ve seen 4 examples of how you can benchmark based on domain rating.
But you can also benchmark based on these other variables:
Organic traffic
Headcount
Company funding
For example, if you’re getting 1- 375 organic sessions per month, you can see roughly what your domain rating should be.
If your domain rating is lower than the average for this group, then it's possible that you should be promoting your website differently. For example by taking a different approach to link building.
To filter by company headcount or funding you need to use the sliding scales.
For example, there are 62 websites with 2.8 - 27 million dollars in funding.
You can also filter for a headcount. For example 11 to 50. That gives us 30 websites that are similar to yours based on this variable.
Anytime you’d like to reset just press the reset button in the top right hand corner of the tool.
Special Offer - Free Organic Traffic Projection
Our dashboard is great for getting a top level look at roughly where your organic traffic should be.
But it’s certainly not the be-all-end-all in terms of benchmarking.
At JourneyEngine we help HR Tech companies land more customers from organic traffic.
I want to prove that to you, in just a few minutes.
Our engineering team built a tool that accurately forecasts the results of an SEO campaign (before you spend any money or time on it).
I filmed a quick video running through it
I'd love to run this analysis on your website, free of charge.
However, the tool can't function without a few data inputs which I'd need to get from you.
To take me up on this offer send an email to justin@journeyengine.com. Make the subject line “I want a free traffic projection”.
We will promptly reply with next steps.
