Chris Blackwell’s Domain

WebsiteGrader.com is a new web tool that grades your website based on the marketing effectiveness of your site. I’ve been playing with the site over the last couple of days and it seems to do a pretty good job on grading websites and informing websites owners on what they need to change. The web tool is made by HubSpot, who I am sure are using it as a promotional tool for their business. I can’t say I blame them and I believe that tools like this are a great way to promote your business.

Positives

The site is very well laid out and doesn’t waste your time with too many options or clicks. As soon as you get to the home screen you are presented with a form that has you put in your website URL. There are three optional fields that follow and that can help improve your report quality. Entering keywords will provide the basis of your site report and on how well your site ranks for the listed terms. The second field allows you to put in the competitors website so your report will display a competitive analysis of your competitors sites. The final field is for putting in your email address if you want to receive updates and/or have the report emailed to you.

The report itself is extremely well laid out and easy to read. The report is broken down into On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Blog Analysis, Social Networking popularity, and your competitive analysis. The sub-sections are broken down very well. The report lists number of header tags, duplicates of H1 tags as warnings, image alt tag analysis, Google PageRank, and so much more than I could go into here.

Negatives

The site seems to be slow to update it’s grades of a website. One site I tested scored a 83% and the Website Grader made some recommendations to improve. I made the recommendations and went back to the Website Grader page to try out the new changes. The changes did not appear on the resubmissions which leads me to believe that the website indexes the sites that have been “graded” and takes a while to refresh them. This is a problem for people who are trying to tweak their site on the fly and I hope HubSpot will fix this problem shortly.

Conclusion

Website Grader is an excellent tool for anyone who has created a website and needs to check how their site appeals to a search engine. The site is tailored more towards beginners to intermediate users. I would love to see this service expanded into a professional offering with more features and advanced reporting. Overall I think this is a great initial launch and I have to congratulate HubSpot on a job well done.