Does Your Website Make the Grade?

Best SEO Scoring tools!

By Heather Lutze, Trainer, Consultant & Speaker
Findability Consulting & Speaking
Findability.com

When looking online, I am often reminded of some of my guilty pleasures of TV viewing. I have seen countless web sites in my 13 years of SEO and website design consulting that are The Walking Dead.

They function as a digital brochure but never produce any real customers or prospects. Often times when you build your new site, you think in terms of a web site that features “about us, services, testimonials, contact us”. Sound familiar? Does your site look like this? It’s time to think about web sites as more then just online brochures. You have had geeks and nerds in your life, written checks to get the “web thing” maintained. For a while I heard that social media and blogging would replace web sites. I have seen that this is just not the case. You web site is not dead; it just needs resuscitation in 2014.

Breathe life back into your site with these three steps:

STEP ONE:  SCORE YOUR SITE

Ask yourself, was the web site built originally to be a brochure or did you have plans to get real business from the web site? Rate your web site now on a scale from 1 to 10.  1 meaning you would not let your mother see the site and 10 being a rock star in your business and leads flow in every day.

Your Turn, Circle One: 1   2    3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10

Then write down what your perfect web site would product for your company: ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________

STEP TWO:  HOW DO THE EXPERTS RATE YOUR SITE?

Visit MarketingGrader.com – Run the tool and see which components you are missing.  It will give you a number between 0 – 100.  Remember Google is looking for thought leaders in their niches.  Authorship for Google is one of the single biggest updates in their algorithm since the search engine was launched. Your number matters as it shows your “professorship” in your space. A true experts does blog, has a site, has a social presence, etc. Marketing Grader will give you an idea if you are indeed getting credit for all your activities online.

WRITE DOWN YOUR NUMBER : _____________________

Save the report to your desktop and read carefully what you can add to your marketing mix.

I have a 77 out of 100. So even I have a few more things to tweak on my site.

STEP THREE:
IS YOUR SITE TECHNICALLY CORRECT?

Visit WooRank.com.  We use this tool for our Findability Diagnostic reports. Search Marketing professionals primarily use this tool, but it’s a great way for all business owners to deep dive into the engine of your site. What could possible prevent you from ranking as high as possible and what needs URGENT attention.  Your web professional should see this report and be instructed to “get the red out”.

WRITE YOUR WOORANK.COM RATING HERE:___________________________

Send this report to yourself by printing the page to PDF. The monthly subscription may be worth the money as you move through this process. This report is truly a geeky report that reports back on how a ROBOT, NOT AT HUMAN evaluates your site. Give this report to the webmaster in your life and tell them to address the “red” in the report. Have them walk you through the report for a deeper ownership of your site and the technical aspects that may prevent you from full visibility online to ideal customers.

STEP FOUR:
Check out your web site and check out your current keyword rankings and website trends. Visit http://www.semrush.com.

This tool will let you type in your web site to see any traffic trends, keywords they currently rank for as well as pay per click data and much more.  Run this report for each of your competitors and catalog all the keywords to keep in your keyword list. Now compare and contrast with your online strategy.

Interesting? I hope so, as I am passionate about opening the kimono and showing business owners how they can make their business findable and take back control of their site.

Here are some other ways to work with me and help your business right away: