How to Decode Your Website Marketing Assessment

In the realm of inbound marketing, your website plays the role of a “virtual salesperson”, helping you attract more leads and close more sales. As with any other sales tool, it is absolutely necessary for you to evaluate the performance of your website to ensure that you’re utilizing it to its full potential. This sounds relatively simple at first, but in order to get the most out of your analysis, you’ll need to know what specific areas and features of your website are functioning at optimal levels versus the ones that need improvement. This is where a website marketing assessment or grader can definitely come in handy. 

So what exactly is a website marketing assessment? It’s basically a “report card” for your website, offering you a detailed analysis of the structure and usability of your web pages. The grader will also provide you with specific tips, ideas and strategies to help you determine what changes you can make to your site right now in order to increase its user-friendliness and functionality. If you’ve never had a website marketing assessment done on your site, sifting through all the data that the average assessment provides can seem like an overwhelming task. Below are some key points that will help you decode your website marketing assessment.

Blogging

Most website graders will check to see if you have established a blog for your website, as blogging is one of the staples of solid inbound marketing practice. You will also be scored on whether or not you have successfully established an RSS feed for your blog; this prepares you for the syndication and widespread distribution of your content.

Social Media

A business with a website and no social media presence is at a major disadvantage. Your assessment will check to see if you have established a presence on all the major social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), and it will also include some statistics that measure the freshness and reach of your posts, status updates and tweets. You’ll also be scored on whether or not you have social buttons on your site, so your content can be easily shared and redistributed.

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most critical factors to take into consideration if you want your website to rank highly in the major search engines. A website marketing grader will thoroughly scan the HTML code on your pages and then present you with several “tweaks” you can make in order to increase the search engine friendliness of your site. It can be something as simple as adding Alt tags to your images, or something more involved such as increasing the amount of authority links pointing to your page. A typical assessment will provide you with suggestions to help you optimize your pages so that they appear clean and extremely readable to search engines. This will do wonders for your search engine visibility.

Lead Generation

Every inbound marketer knows that leads are the lifeblood of your business. A website marketing grader will inspect your site to ensure that it contains prominent landing pages with forms that can capture the contact information of your leads. Interior page analysis is performed to determine exactly how many landing pages you have on your site (quick hint: the more the better), and your site will also be analyzed to ensure that you have marketing automation tools (opt-in email forms, etc.) in place on your homepage. In addition, if you don’t have some type of analytics tool installed on your site (Google Analytics, StatCounter, etc.), the grader will detect this deficiency in your code and alert you so that you can begin actively measuring every aspect of your site’s performance.

Mobile

As the world becomes increasingly dependent upon smartphones for quick and easy internet access, it’s critical for your website to be optimized for performance on mobile devices. A website marketing grader will analyze how your site appears on various smartphones, checking the code of your web pages to see if you have included @media queries (or a mobile stylesheet), meta viewport tags, etc., in order to make your site compatible with a wide range of mobile devices. Eighty-seven percent of smartphone users regularly access the Internet by way of their phones; this makes your site’s performance on mobile devices simply too important to ignore. A website marketing assessment will provide you with the vital feedback and best practices you need to get your website in tip-top shape for optimal performance on mobile devices.

As the landscape of inbound marketing continues to change, an honest and thorough assessment of your website is absolutely indispensable if you want to maintain a competitive edge. By utilizing a website marketing grader, you’ll position yourself to make the needed adjustments to your site so that you can garner more traffic, leads and ultimately sales for your business.