RSSWebsite Grader: A Quick Site Audit Tool for Free
April 29th, 2008 by Kyle James 
Website Grader is one of those excellent free resources that I run on sites about once a month. In it its own words:
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
This tool is especially well designed to fit right into a University web developer tool set. Some of the basic measurements reported include:
- Metadata Information
- Age of Site
- Google PageRank
- Indexed Pages
- Last Google Crawl
- Traffic Rank
The report that is compiled is an excellent starting point to make sure that your site rates well for basic search engine optimization practices. The information that returned isn’t overwhelming, but just about right for a quick scan about what’s going on with your site. You can also do a little comparative analysis with direct competitors websites. You could check out a recent report I pulled for Wofford, but I would recommend simply heading on over and running a Website Grader report for your own site. It cost nothing and stores the report in their system sending you an email for quick and easy reference.
You can also pull reports on a regular basis, I recommend monthly, and see site trends. In fact that is one of the best reasons to use a tool like this. The first time you run Website Grader there are going to be problems that stands out that you need to resolve. After making these changes and giving the corrections a little time to be picked up by the search engines you come back in a month and run the report again to see how your changes helped, or didn’t.
The report will also let you compare your site to competition that you choose.
A website is a constantly changing and adapting entity. It is easy to get so locked into what needs to be done on a daily basis that we don’t think about what we could be doing differently or better to keep our sites relevant. Website Grader is one of those tools that can help break that deadlock. It is a simply enough tool that only scrapes the surface, but usually that is all that we have time for and when the deeper scans are required it can be combined with other resources.
It is important to remember this is only a tool and even if your site scores extremely well this doesn’t mean that it’s time to enable cruise control. Michael Gray goes so far as saying on his blog post, Why Website Grader is a Bad Idea:
Back to Website Grader, here’s my problem in a nutshell, there are somethings in SEO that you can automate, there are some things that you can’t and a site audit is at the top of that list. You can use tools to help you gather that data, sift through it, sort, arrange it, and dissect it anyway you want. At the end of the day you need an experienced analyst interpreting that data for you. You don’t want the SEO equivalent of a check engine light. There’s reason site clinics are so popular at search engine conferences, people need to expert advice on how to fix things from time to time.
I agree with the argument Michael is making, but I think using this tool is well worth the knowledge gained as long as you don’t assume you can just relax and not continue to develop a site in the event that you score high. In fact reading through his whole post I’m not sure he’s trashing the tool, just warning users that Website Grader is not an easy button for fixing a site and much more should go into a site audit.
Even sites that score really high have issues that can be further developed. Also keep in mind that a score is computed based on many measurements including traffic and social popularity, meaning you could have a very popular site with lots of visitors and buzz that scores well, but it isn’t optimized for search engines.
I’ve been pulling Website Grader reports since last September and I’ve noticed that the tool has grown and adapted which is another reason to regularly run reports. It isn’t a dead project so as the internet has adapted and new measurements are created to measure a site Website Grader adds them. So go give it a test run and while you are at it visit the rest of the HubSpot site. I highly recommend HubSpot’s Internet Marketing blog. So much of their posts easily translate to Higher Education marketing.
In closing I’ll leave you with a few of my favorite HubSpot posts for Higher Education marketers:
- Customer Service is Marketing Too
- How to Convince a CEO to Enter 21st Century Internet Marketing
- The New Rules of Marketing
- Marketing Metrics: What to Measure in Marketing - Part I and Part II
Posted in Analytics, SEO, Webmaster Tools | 
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April 29th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Great balanced post about WebsiteGrader.
You are very right. People shouldn’t obsess over their scores. There’s some “actionable” advice in the report.
But, to really improve their scores, they need an internet marketing plan that takes their business goals into account.
April 29th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I ran my college’s site through and it provided some interesting information, nothing I didn’t already know. However, I tried to run my Wordpress blog through it and it said it couldn’t grab it - my guess is Bad Behavior must of caught it and blocked it.
April 29th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
yup it’s not a horrible tool it’s that people are lazy and will say “hey I got a 90 … we’re good” and zip off to something else
April 30th, 2008 at 9:21 am
you have a very good blog. this is my first visit to your blog.
April 30th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
It’s plain inaccurate on quite a few points, good for telling you how many Diggs you’ve got that hasn’t reached the home page.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for sharing this resource. I tested it out a few times and I think it is well worthy of a recommendation.
I agree that you don’t want to become overly dependent on such resources, but this can be very valuable when used properly.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Thanks to all for the feedback.
@Mike. Send me a link to your WP blog and I’ll see why it isn’t working.
@graywolf. The people that get higher scores can generally do even more. So, you’re right, it’s dangerous to think a “high” score means there’s not potential for improvement. In fact, I talk to companies with 1,000s of pages and 1,000s of links (two things that affect website grade score significantly) every week who have 90ish scores who have SO much more untapped potential.
@hobo. would appreciate you sending me an email with what is inaccurate, so we can address.
Email is firstinitiallastname at hubspot dot com.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:59 am
I’m just curious what does hubspot do with the data it collects. how many sales guys are waiting to contact the poor sites that are ru n through this tool?
10/10 on a Lead generation tool for hubspot
must feel good following up on the sites that the freelancer is trying to make a living on in a dying economy.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:21 am
@SEOinBlack
We actually work with many SEO firms.
And all of our sales professionals can hold their own with an SEO professional.
Not sure whether you’re jealous of our success or genuinely think that we are doing something wrong?
Just to allay the latter concern…
Website Grader does refer a lot of traffic to HubSpot’s website and blog where someone might opt in to receive information or a call.
We follow up with people who are looking to improve their internet marketing strategy and execution. Not everyone buys, but we do get to help many people. Our main service goes into a lot further depth at guiding our clients towards online marketing success leveraging SEO, blogging, PPC and social media, as well as best practices for lead capture.
Many times, we work with SEO consultants on mutual clients. Consultants bring us clients who want to collaborate on their SEO with their consultant (or if the consultant wants to have better tools and reporting in place) and we sometimes refer clients who need additional help to SEO consultants who have experience using our tools successfully.
We’d be happy to work with you if you are good. You should complete a demo request. We can see if there’s a fit or not.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I’ve created a mini audit tool that can aid in onpage optimisation. Just doing my bit for the SEO crowd.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Great tool.
We have suffered a bit with rankings very recently (it was almost an overnight thing) and the main issue that seemed to jump out at me was not renewing the domain name.
It had a month to go on the clock and I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be the reason our rankings have been suppressed by Google.
Obviously we renewed the domain name today! It will be interesting to see how or if our rankings bounce back as quickly.
Cheers.