SPY ON YOURSELF:
GRADING TOOLS
Spy on your own website to establish a baseline.
YOUR WEBSITE: _____________________________________________________
marketing.grader.com
This tool will give you a wide perspective of your current
website. It gives you a quick assessment if you are doing the
key attributes that search engine expects of an authority web
presence. Remember that search engines covet search results.
They only want to put the best of the best under keyword
EXTRA CREDIT: Check out wordle.net or tagul.com
These word cloud tools are nothing special particularly; there
are a million of them online. However, if you use them
correctly, they can tell you how search engines interpret your
site and what keyword phrase is most relevant. Copy and
paste all your homepage content into wordle.net and run the
tool. The biggest word on the word cloud is the most
repeated keyword on the page. Search engines want to rank
the pages that are most relevant by keyword phrase. Circle the
biggest keyword on the page, the second biggest, and so
forth. Now you can see how search engines interpret what
your homepage is about. If the biggest word on the page is
your name, you may want to consider what phrases other
than your name would be helpful for your homepage to rank
under. And yes, you can also do this on a competitor site.
searches. Are you blogging, socially engaged and leadgenerating? Now run your score. Once you write your score
down, scroll down the page for detailed recommendations on
how to improve your score.
YOUR SCORE: _______________________________________________________
woorank.com
My secret weapon. This site offers a real “nerd” moment as it
gives you a free 15-page SEO report on all the improvements
that you can you can fix on your site for better findability.
Run this report, save it to a PDF and share it with your
marketing or digital team. Walk through the report and see
how much of the “red” you can get out of the report. If you
manage your site yourself, review the document and make the
changes recommended.
YOUR SCORE: _______________________________________________________
SPY ON YOUR COMPETITORS:
WHAT ARE THEY UP TO?
COMPETITOR # 1: _____________________________________________ .COM
COMPETITOR # 2: _____________________________________________ .COM
semrush.com
This is a great tool to see exactly what keywords you and
your competitors currently rank under in search engines. Go
ahead and run a report for your website. You will get a treasure trove of data on yourself including keyword positions on
a search result page, searches per month and any trending
for that phrase. Warning: This tool will let you run a single
report before asking for your credit card. You can pull it up in
different browsers to run more than one report. You are going
to love this tool though as there are tons of great insights in
an easy-to-understand format.
ispionage.com
This tool is free and you can run as many reports as you like.
I have used this tool for years for competitive analysis. You
can put a competitor domain name into their tool and it will
40 PULSE
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June 2015