Website Grader is a free SEO tool that assesses the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides an overall score that incorporates factors like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical attributes.
The application is developed by HubSpot, an inbound marketing system helping small or medium sized businesses increase their awareness online through the right channels and convert them into leads and customers for maximum ROI.
The tool offers the option of comparing your website against rival sites to provide an indication of niche performance. As the assessment is divided into six categories, results can be analysed with simplicity.
On-page SEO
The first section explores the website’s content and how constructive it is in relation to optimising its online presence. Measuring aspects such as metadata, images and headers, the grader measures how accessible the website is to search engine crawlers, recommending areas for improvement.
Website Grader offers guidelines on best practice SEO, suggesting that anything over 70 characters in the title page or using more than 10 keywords is too much. However, I would not push too much emphasis on change if you are over these, as this is not always the case.
The tool concludes the section reviewing the readership level. Everyone has a different target audience, so hopefully your content falls within the desired level.
Off-page SEO
The second section looks into information about the ownership of the domain name and the various directories and links that the site has been submitted too.
Revealing the website’s Google page rank, this section is really created to explain how much exposure a website currently receives.
Blogosphere
Next up is analysis of the website’s blog and how productive it is in terms of traffic and social media exposure. If the website doesn’t own a blog then this section becomes irrelevant.
Social Mediasphere
Social sites have very much become an effective strategy for generating more traffic and promoting your services. Website Grader scouts through sites such as Delicious and Digg to see how many articles have been submitted from the analysed website.
Converting qualified visitors to leads
This part of the assessment is judged on whether the site has a RSS feed that influences an increase in traffic and whether it includes a contact form as such to influence visitor conversion.
Competitive intelligence
The final section provides a summary of the websites scores and looks at the position against competing sites. With plenty of feedback received, you should then be in a position to identify areas in need of improvement.
You also have the option to bookmark the report and send them across to clients or colleagues to gather extra opinions and advice.
Why not try this free tool yourself and see where your website ranks…..