logoToday I found a great website tool that is FREE (yes, the best kind!) that helps you get a better understanding of how your website ranks to your competitors’ websites.  Hubspot’s Marketing Grader  [http://marketing.grader.com] will analyze your site plus 2 others for various items.  It lumps the results into sections of the “sales and marketing funnel”.

Top of the Funnel – content is king.

  • Blogging – The tool takes a look at whether or not you have a blog and are using it actively.  It also looks to see how many inbound links to your website exist and if people are tweeting about your site and your blog posts.
  • SEO – In the analysis of your site’s SEO (search engine optimization) it looks for basic items such as 301 pages, alt tags on images, page titles and descriptions (and their uniqueness), and other “authoritative sites” that are linking to your site.
  • Mobile – This is a very nice feature, the tool checks whether or not your site is mobile enabled / friendly.
  • Social – Looks to see if you have facebook and twitter accounts and whether or not you are actively using them.

Middle of the Funnel – Converting traffic into leads

  • Landing Pages that collect visitor information – these are typically contact forms, newsletter signup forms, etc.
  • Blogging – Blog posts contact links to landing pages.  Blog has an email subscription link.  Blog has social media links / icons to promote sharing of content.
  • Social – Do you link to your various social media accounts on your website?  Do you reply back to tweets and posts on social media?  Are others mentioning you in their tweets / posts?

Analytics – Measuring your traffic and site activity

  • Are you measuring your site’s traffic and activity with Google Analytics?

All in all, it’s a great tool that can help you identify where your site and your SEO efforts need work.  Try it out today.

http://marketing.grader.com