Do Website Graders Really Work?
Posted on | February 20, 2012 | No Comments
When I first started out with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I would sometimes come across a ‘website grader’ that purported to have all the answers. Plug in your url, and it will tell you exactly what you need to do to rank well in search engine results. There are still many of these tools out there, some intending to be more helpful, and others really just designed to suck you in and sell you their SEO tools or services. Can you really trust a website grader?
I regularly use a couple of website graders that offer good insight into the health of a website. For me, it’s often a first step when researching a new or potential client’s existing website, but I dig in deeper from there. I don’t recommend counting on one tool for 100% of your guidance, but online graders can be a good starting point. The more you understand about online marketing and search engine optimization, the better the context you have to process the information it gives you. Blindly following automated suggestions without a greater context of understanding can result in misplaced priorities or even negative consequences. The following website graders are generally trustworthy, but it’s always a good idea to use more than one tool and combine that information with human guidance as well.
Woorank
Woorank offers a comprehensive overview of your website health either through their website or the Chrome extension. They analyse your site in 12 categories, and pinpoint the top five recommendations. They recently upgraded their service and one of the big additions relates to mobile optimization. They even provide screenshots of how your site looks on a smart phone and an iPad.
As an SEO professional, I don’t know if I always agree with the priorities given, but it does a good job overall as far as automated tools go. It puts a big emphasis on DMOZ listings, for instance, which has been losing importance in recent years, and is so arbitrary. Some sites get submitted and never even reviewed for years, while others may get added right away. That being said, submitting your site only takes a few minutes, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to try. Registering your domain for a number of years in the future is also a relatively minor and somewhat controversial recommendation – some people say two years, while others say it will only help if you do ten. Some people say it doesn’t matter at all. Again, if you plan to keep your domain name a long time, it certainly won’t hurt to register it for 10 years in advance, and it might just help. (If you do this, keep your eye on the pricing, as some domain registry services actually increase the annual price when you tack on years!)
One weakness I’ve noticed with online graders is that, while they try to analyze your social activity, they’re not always good at detecting your accounts correctly. I’m not sure how their algorithms pick up social sites – sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t. I have one site where the Twitter username matches the domain name, is linked to from the site, and links back to the site from Twitter, yet Woorank thought they didn’t have a Twitter account. On other sites, they pick up the social media accounts just fine. This can lead to an inaccurate analysis in the ‘Social Monitoring’ section.
Grader from Hubspot
You can also try out Hubspot’s free website graders – one for Marketing, one for Search, one for Twitter, and one for Books. The Hubspot Grader that’s most comparable to Woorank, and most comprehensive, is the Marketing Grader. I find it’s a little more thorough in some areas, and the tool allows you to compare your site to a competitor’s. It breaks down your marketing system and gives you three top recommendations in each of three key areas – the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and analytics. Grader doesn’t go into some of the more technical aspects that Woorank includes, such as pageload time, microformats, or code validity.
One nice improvement at Marketing Grader compared to Woorank is the ability to correct it’s auto-detection of your social media accounts. Before it runs your analysis, a box pops up with the accounts it thinks you have. You’re given the opportunity to say it, “Looks good,” or to fix it. This allows the tool to more accurately analyze your social interaction. It goes into quite a bit of detail on how you market your business and build relationships. It tells you, for instance, how often you link back to your own site, if you link to a landing page with a conversion form, and how often you reply to other people’s tweets.
Hubspot’s Search Grader will give you your top-ranked keywords, which are included in Woorank’s comprehensive report. You would expect Twitter Grader to go into more detail regarding your Twitter interactions, but, aside from a numeric grade and a reprint of your Twitter stats, it seems to offer very little. There is actually more detail regarding your Twitter interactions in Marketing Grader’s social section. Book Grader is intended to specifically help you market your book online, but it doesn’t seem to be very well developed yet – it gives some basic Amazon stats with no real recommendations.
In Conclusion
While website graders have come a long way and can provide some useful information, it’s important to remember they are just one tool of many used to evaluate your website. The graders here will most likely help you if you follow their recommendations, but no automated tool can take the place of a seasoned professional to digest the information and prioritize recommendations for your particular situation.
One other point to take into consideration is that most free tools, especially complex well-developed ones, need to be monetized in some way. You will see plenty of ads or links selling you SEO services, domain name registration services, or social media services. Basically, anything they recommend you do, they’ll also offer a way to help you get it done, and that’s how they make their money. While most free graders are probably built with the intention of selling their own services, these two tools genuinely try to offer accurate, useful information at the same time.
Do you want a complete human website evaluation? We manually test every page on your site for usability, look directly into your website code, and analyse our findings together with information from tools such as these. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about our Comprehensive Website Analysis.
Tags: online marketing > search engine optimization > SEO > social media > social media klout > twitter marketing > website audit > website evaluation > website grader
Add Video to Your Website
Posted on | September 8, 2011 | 11 Comments
You see video everywhere. You’ve been told you should do it. Maybe you’ve even seen the stats that show how much better video converts. But it’s really overwhelming, too.
Let’s say you’ve taken that important big step and created your first video. Now you’re ready to add it to your website, but how? Sure, you could upload it to YouTube, grab the embed code, and paste it in your site editor, but is that the best option? Afterall, this is your video. Not only will YouTube include their logo, but they’ll link to other videos at the end. Maybe even your competitors’ videos. And, they could take it down at any time. You just never know.
I’m not saying to not upload your video to YouTube. You should do that, too. Create your own channel, upload your video, link your profile to your site. All that is great for getting exposure and coming up in search. But here are some other solutions to display video on your own website.
First, you should consider where you will host your video. While you could host the video file directly through your website hosting, video files are big, and if you get a lot of hits, it could slow down your site. The best solution is Amazon S3 hosting. They provide massive amounts of storage for top companies around the world – yet you only pay pennies to get started. If your video goes viral, you’ll be charged for the bandwidth you use at really low rates.
Then, you’ll need to choose a video player. That’s what makes Amazon S3 tricky. They only host your video – they don’t play it. Some of popular video players I’ve worked with include Flowplayer and JW Player. Flowplayer is one of the few players that allows use on commercial sites without purchasing a license. You do still need to show the logo, but it’s relatively unobstrusive. This is a good solution if you’re just getting started and may not be creating many videos. If you’re going to be using video a lot, there are a multitude of paid solutions out there.
Here are a few video players to consider:
JW Player currently costs $89 for a lifetime license. They offer lots of customization possibilities, as well as add-ons such as Google Analytics. Traditionally, you’ve been able to do more with JW Player then most players, however, other services seem to be catching up. You do need to pay for some of the add-ons, and get your hands wet with the code to use them as well. JW Player has been a long-time leader in the industry and was one of the first to support HTML5, which allows your videos to work on the iPhone or iPad. If you set it up correctly, your site will be able to determine what device a visitor is using and serve up the video so they can view it.
FlowPlayer also has a one-time fee per license, which allows you to remove their logo from your video player. They have a ‘Pimp Your Player’ service on their site to customize the look, but you’ll still need to get into the code on your website a bit to embed the player once you create it. All features are included for the one-time fee of $95. The feature set may not be quite as extensive as what would be available if you purchased all the JW Player add-ons, but they’ve been making lots of improvements and adding new features regularly. They also utilize a content delivery network where they will convert and serve your video for you. This helps your video display in the right format for any device.
EZS3 doesn’t look quite as fancy when you visit their site, but it makes everything super simple – anybody can use it. This is a good option if you’ll be using lots of video, but it does include an on-going monthly fee around $20/month, so it can get pricey if you’re not taking advantage of it on a regular basis.
Easy Video Player 2 is designed especially for marketers who want to have an opt-in box or other call to action show up right in the video box at the end of the video. It includes software that you need to purchase at $127 to easily customize your player and options, plus the commercial license for $77.
Vidly is probably the easiest way to bring everything together. You upload your video in any format, they convert it into the necessary formats, they host it, they provide the player, and you’re done. Earlier on I believe it was fairly costly, but it seems they’ve adjusted their pricing formulas to be more in line with how Amazon charges – based on video hosting space you use combined with bandwith. You’ll be charged a monthly fee depending on how much you’re using them, but the fees are fairly reasonable and it might just be worth the simplicity for you.
Putting It All Together
While many video players have free versions, be sure to read the terms of service about using them on a commercial site. If the site is for your business, it’s commercial, and you aren’t allowed to use most of these without purchasing a license. If you’re non-profit, a public school, or displaying video on a personal website, your options are wide open.
Before you choose a video player, you may also want to take into consideration what platform your website is built in. If you’re using WordPress or a CMS such as Joomla or Drupal, take a look at what plugins are available to help you embed your video. The plugin will take care of the embedding part for you – purchase your video player license then manage everything through the plugin instead of pasting (and editing) code. If your website platform doesn’t have an easy-to-use plugin, you might want to consider one of the players that requires less work with the embed code, such as EZS3 or Vid.ly. Otherwise, you may need to have your web developer help out.
Are you using video on your website? What system do you use? If you have another solution that’s worked well, please comment below to share your favorite method to embed video on your website.
Tags: embedding video > Flowplayer > JW Player > video > video marketing > video player for website > website video
Make the Most of Your Groupon Marketing
Posted on | June 28, 2011 | 19 Comments
Daily deals are the latest trend in internet marketing. You’ve probably heard of them, and may be on a couple of lists yourself. I receive daily emails from Groupon, Living Social, and BtoB City, a new daily deal site for businesses. I saw a terrific example last weekend of how one business is on track to make the most of their Groupon marketing.
You may have guessed from the incredible deals that these are usually loss-leaders for businesses. The business offers their product or service for a loss to get you in the door. The business often takes even more of a loss than you may think – the product or service will be offered around 50% off the normal price. In addition to that, the business pays the list operator (Groupon, Living Social, etc.), about half of what they take in, so they’re really looking at getting only 25% of the normal rate. On the other hand, there’s usually no up-front fee, so you look at it as your marketing budget. That’s what you pay to get someone in the door. But the key is to keep them coming back.
On Saturday, our local Groupon deal was for Tricks Gymnastics. They have dance and gymnastics classes for kids. While the dance classes are mostly filled with girls and my boys don’t like anything they consider, “girly,” they still love to bounce on trampolines, dive into the foam pit and climb the ropes. We were actually going to a birthday party there that same afternoon for one of my six year-old’s best friends. I was ready to buy the deal right away for my son – four weeks of gymnastics classes for only $25! I went over to their website to make sure one of the classes would be a good fit for him. Here’s what I saw:
Look at that! They had a message right there, on the home page, just for me, a Groupon
customer. It showed me they cared, they were ready to provide me awesome service, and they knew just what questions I might have. I was impressed. I clicked through, read the class descriptions, then went back to purchase my Groupon. When we went to the birthday party that afternoon, we stayed after to see the class schedule and to decide when we’d start. The staff person was super helpful and even checked the ages of the other boys enrolled to help my older son decide if he’d like to join in.
As great as they’ve been so far, this is still part of the first step – getting us in the
door. My thought when I purchased one month of classes was that this would be something fun for my son to do over the summer. We’re not really planning to keep going after that. Their job is to convince us otherwise. That’s what will make it worth it for them – a new customer paying their regular monthly rates ($72/month for the classes my son will be taking).
What’s the next step? How can they convince us to enroll long-term? For starters, they need to provide an awesome program that my son loves and begs to go back to. They need to make me feel like he’s getting something valuable out of it. Maybe they’ll even come up with a follow-up offer, like a lesser discount if we commit to three months. From what I’ve seen so far, I think they’ve got it all planned out. I think they went into this with a strategy, and you should too.
Have you ever tried offering a coupon through Groupon, Living Social, or another daily deal site? How did it work out for you? Do you have any creative ideas on how to get the most out of daily deal marketing?
Please comment below and join the conversation!
Tags: daily deals > Groupon > loss leader > marketing > Tricks Gymnastics
