How are your website and marketing performing?
Understanding how your website is performing can help you improve your marketing. One question I am often asked is how to determine your website’s “ranking” in the search engines.
Here are a couple of really good free tools to help you measure search engine ranking, as well as the success of your website and social media. While these tools don’t replace the work of a professional, they are a good first step that provide useful information on how you’re website is performing. Each report will give some steps you can take to improve. Simply enter your website URL and it will create a report.
HubSpot Marketing Grader – Evaluating Your Website and Social Media Performance
The Marketing Grader will evaluate your site and create a report on how your site is performing based on specific marketing criteria. You can compare your site to two other competitor sites. It evaluates your content, page optimization, lead generation activities and social media.
The report provides actions you can take to make improvements.
How Does Your Website Rank in the Search Engines?
Before I share the free rank checking tools, there are a couple of things you must understand about how search engine rank is determined. Search engine rank is based on individual pages, not entire websites. If a web page is relevant to a particular keyword, the more likely it is to rank for it. The more ranking pages your website has the better. Keywords are the words or phrases that prospective visitors type into the search engine box.
Can’t I just type my website into Google to see where I rank?
Search engines take into account a lot of things for results that are displayed. For example, if you search for a local business, chances are it will rank higher for you than for users in another area. Search engines also take into account your previous searches, social media mentions by friends and other factors. True ranking can only be determined by using a search engine tool, and it’s why the results you see in the search engine may not correspond with those found by those tools.
Search Engine Grader
The Search Engine Grader tool provides a list of the top ten keywords your site ranks for, what the position in the SERP (search engine results page) those keywords are at, and what page on your site ranks for that term. In the example below for the Mashable site, you can see that for the “facebook” keyword, the ranking page shows up at #7 on the search engine results page.
Woo Rank Website Review
The WooRank tool gives you a bit more comprehensive overview of your website’s performance. It evaluates your site in 12 categories, and gives you the top five recommendations for improvement. It will show your site’s top five keywords and where they rank, traffic estimates, how well your site is optimized and social media performance.
Woo Rank will let you run one free report a week, and will provide you with a PDF of that report.
All of the tools are free to use. If you’re new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and are interested in learning more, there is a great beginners guide at SEO MOZ that will explain SEO in greater detail. Seniors Ignite also has free guide to SEO optimized images.
