The Website Grader Challenge
A few months ago, a mathematical marketing company came to us with a challenge: create a brand spanking new website + get a score of 90 or above using Website Grader = win a nice bonus.
We accepted.
How it Works
Website Grader is a free SEO tool put out by Hubspot that measures the marketing effectiveness and visibility of your website.
Just plug in your URL and it will generate a grade for your site based on six key areas:
-
On-page SEO – metadata, keywords, images, readability
-
Off-page SEO – domain info, page rank, indexed pages, traffic rank, inbound links, directory listings
-
Blogosphere – do you have a blog? how does it ranks on Technorati? recent blog articles
-
Social Mediasphere – measures del.icio.us bookmarks and Digg submissions
-
Converting Qualified Visitors – do you have an rss feed and a conversion form?
-
Competitive Intelligence – track your rank and compare your score against your competitors
It’s a quick assessment tool that also offers some basic advice on how a website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Measuring Up
Like the 47% of Americans that Google themselves, we immediately did a vanity check to see our score. We scored a respectable 91, meaning our site’s better than 91% of the sites Website Grader has analyzed. Not too shabby, but definitely room to improve.
The brand new website we created for the mathematical marketing company? It scored an 82 right out of the gate. We want a 90.
So we tweaked and checked. And did some research. All in the name of winning a nice bonus and gaining some bragging rights.
Working the System
What we found is that some things just matter more for Hubspot’s Website Grader. And if you want to get a good grade from the teacher, you have to work the system.
So stick around. We’ll share our findings on how to improve your Website Grader score and also give updates on the challenge.
- Aug 13, 2008 by Cheri
- |
Subscribe
Digg
Delicious- |
4 comments
This is Primal Speak, a blog by Primal Media about web design, SEO, Drupal CMS and marketing trends.
Comments
No doubt, Hubspot's Website Grader is definitely "a corporate self-serving marketing tool."
And I agree, some of the metrics they use to compute the score are flawed: we've seen the grader fail to "see" blogs that exist, and after years of trying we have yet to get our listing posted to DMOZ Directory, one of the off-page SEO factors they rank. Even just a few months ago the results were all over the place.
But it really is a great tool to get a snapshot of how well a website is doing from a marketing perspective.
We like it because it gives our clients, who often can't "read" code, a way to verify some of the technical factors of SEO. And the simple tips and advice for increasing a site's effectiveness are a great place to start.
Add a comment