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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am the partnership manager at HubSpot.
I've been here for a little over a year.
I've heard a bunch of negative stuff about website grader and a bunch of positive stuff. I've seen people that have really improved their traffic and leads generated by following the free advice website grader provides.
I've seen web designers and seo consultants lose business because Website Grader demonstrated that they weren't that good. And some have been very vocal about it.
Website Grader is not perfect and probably never will be, as it relies on gathering data from around the web automatically without human checking. But we are constantly trying to improve it. We do recognize that dmoz is almost impossible to get into, but SEO consultants still think it's important for SEO. We have not perfected how we detect a blog - we simply look for the word "blog" and try to confirm by finding an RSS feed. That doesn't always work, obviously. Scores sometimes fluctuate even though people don't change much on their site, as we are constantly changing the factors that go into the score, as an effort to improve it.
As far as it being self serving, HubSpot has certainly benefited from the exposure that we've received. I believe it's deserved as the tool has helped many people learn the basics of how and how not to build websites.
As far as Primal Media and your challenge, you've beaten us to it. We've thrown around having competitions, but haven't had the bandwidth to pull it off. Kudos to you for fully groking the value out of the report and using it to construct a solid site for your clients.
It seems as though you may have implemented our more advanced software for a client too. And it looks like you probably understand that online marketing simply begins when the site is launched. If that's the case and you'd like to talk about our new partnership program designed for web design and marketing firms, please email me. We're looking for good partners.
It is nice to get a higher score, but there's no point in looking at WG more than once a week or so. Also, google doesn't like massive changes in sites, it would rather see incremental improvements as I understand it. So make a few tweaks and improve gradually and both WG and google will like it. I have tried rhinoseo and they did come up with some useful stuff that WG didn't stress, so I use both.
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