When it comes to website assessment, there are a number of different criteria than can be evaluated. With a bit of searching you will find website marketing graders, mobile website graders, SEO graders, Keyword density graders, and those that provide a combination of these. I have long felt that one needs to do periodic assessments of their website’s standing in relation to their competition, so I do think that these can be beneficial.
A word of caution though, it is important not to give too much creedence to the results of any one report since they exist primarily to get you to purchase the services of the company that provides them, and many don’t function properly (on some it noted that my website either did not exist or had a low ranking in the searches so that it didn’t come up, and on one it noted I didn’t have a blog. Clearly these are not true).
I have included some of the more popular of the free online assessment options that you might come across when looking to test your own website’s progress. Of the options for “Website graders” you will see HubSpot’s different grader options coming up the most frequently so I have listed them first.
HubSpot’s Marketing Grader: https://marketing.grader.com/
HubSpot’s grader is geared toward online marketing, with a grade based on their “top of the funnel” (unique content and optimization), “middle of the funnel” (landing pages, conversion forms, email marketing, and social media), and the bottom which they refer to as “Analytics”.
I found this report to be heavily biased toward blog websites and social media, and those with lots of marketing gimmicks. We scored a 76, and the areas that needed improvement were noted as:
Top of the Funnel:
1. Get more people to tweet about your content
2. Get more people to share your content on Facebook
3. Add a meta viewport tag for mobile devices.
Middle of the Funnel:
1. Not using marketing automation software.
2. Visitors don’t revisit often, on average 1.5 times per month
3. visitors don’t stay on our website for very long periods of time and they don’t visit many pages.
We actually have a mobile website, but since our primary website is not mobile, the meta viewport tag isn’t needed, so this grading is irrelevant; and since we track our visitors with Analytics, we can say that the HubSpot results data is not completely correct since visitors typically visit several pages and stay for an extended period of time. Furthermore, since we don’t provide “entertainment”, but a service, it is unlikely that anyone would continually revisit our website. I noted this since a marketing grader needs to be individualized per the industry. A service’s business will never achieve the type of traffic, Facebook mentions or Tweets that an entertainment website would. The important thing to take from this is that all websites should provide content that has value, and content that is fun and engages where possible, so as to encourage repeat traffic.
Finally, HubSpot noted that 0 out of our last 5 blog posts included links to a landing page with a form. This would be important if our purpose was to get someone to contact us or purchase something from the blog, but it isn’t; it’s a free resource. We do have a contact us page link, and a newsletter signup form on every blog page. I note these discrepancies only to again stress that marketing graders are by nature biased; they report only what the company who designed the grader deems as important as a “general benchmark”, which is in all honesty an attempt to get one to pay for their services. Our grade of HubSpot “marketing grader” is 76, wherein with their previous “website grader” we scored a 96.
HubSpot also has some new graders, and the one which interested me was their “search grader”, for which they describe it as: “NEW! See which keywords your website is ranking for and how you’re doing on SEO’.” The direct link to it is: https://grader.com/
Ok, so we tested this one, and they provided keyword phrases one would likely enter in a search to find you, one’s ranking based upon these phrases, and the cost-per-click value of the phrase. Again, not completely correct with regard to ranking, but what is valuable is the “monthly searches” total column value associated with each phrase. This is a good indicator of what you should be optimizing for, something that one could also find by using Google’s AdWords tool.
Mobile Grader: https://www.mobilegrader.com
Mobile Grader provides a score based upon your website’s suitability for mobile. It then looks at the speed of the mobile pages load time, looks to see if you have Flash (this will lower your ranking), if your code is optimized, and no hover states are used. What’s even cooler, is that they provided a graph of the type of files included, and a mobile phone emulator to show you how your mobile website looks online. I highly recommend this grader.
Grade My SEO
http://www.grademyseo.com/
Grade My SEO isn’t an attractive website, but their grader does provide some good information. What they offer is results on keyword density in the page “titles”, “description”, and “page content”.
WooRank
https://www.woorank.com/
WooRank is one of the free for occasional use options (once a week), and I included them here because they provide a great deal of content, all which seemed spot-on and relevant. This is a very good website grading option which covers everything, though this is one website which couldn’t find our blog? Recommended.
The Reaction Engine
https://www.reactionengine.com/
The Reaction engine provides information about a keyphrase that is entered, most importantly, how and where the keywords entered are provided for in your content. This is a pretty good grader for keyword density, but I would be careful on how you interpret the other data.
SEO Workers
http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
SEO Workers provides a nice collection of grades on a website. These include title tag, description tag, keywords tag, keywords/key phrases, URLs found, and more. Recommended.
