If you’re like a lot of B2B marketers, you have this constant niggling anxiety at the back of your mind that no matter what changes or updates you make to your company website, it still isn’t performing like it should.
What’s worse, you don’t know what “performing like it should” is.
What if you could just enter your URL into a field, click your mouse, and instantly get a detailed report of everything that’s great (and not so great) about your website? And also, if that report told you exactly what to do to make your site better? And wouldn’t it also be great if you could have all that for free?
I’ll share with you a bunch of free website auditing tools you can use right now to assess every aspect of your website:
- SEO
- Mobile-friendliness
- Speed
- Security
- Overall performance
- Readability
We use these tools when we onboard new clients, and they’re a key part of our work to help B2B companies master their inbound marketing.
SEO Audits
The world of SEO is wide and deep. If you let yourself, you’ll fall down the rabbit hole and never return. But all you really need is a handy SEO audit tool to make simple yet significant SEO improvements to your site. We’ve shared a list of the best SEO audit tools out there, but to get started you just need Raven Tools.
For on-page SEO, Raven’s Site Auditor can’t be beat. It’ll automatically crawl your site to gather data about key technical on-page SEO areas. It also supports Google’s latest requirements, like page speed and mobile UX.
HubSpot Website Grader
HubSpot’s Website Grader quickly assesses four key indicators of your website’s health:
- Performance–Checks for page size, page requests, redirects, speed, and more
- Mobile–Is your site mobile responsive?
- SEO–Evaluates your on-page SEO against the latest best practices
- Security–Checks for an SSL certificate
Scroll down on the results page to get an explanation of each rating and find doable recommendations for fixing specific issues.
Mobile Friendliness (and AMP)
If you had any remaining doubt that you need to follow mobile-first practices, check out Google’s latest mobile-first move. Google’s accelerated mobile pages (AMP) project makes it possible to load web pages on mobile devices in lightning-fast time. But it’s only available to websites that are participating in the project.
Of course, Google prefers these websites, and the search engine makes it clear which sites are AMP-formatted by displaying a little lightning bolt icon next to the search results on mobile devices. It’s also one of the many factors that goes into Google’s search algorithm. So while it may not be an overwhelming factor in boosting your search rankings, it plays a role.
WordPress and HubSpot are making it possible to automatically create AMP versions of your web pages. (HubSpot’s AMP update is coming in early 2017. Stay tuned!)
You can easily check if your website is using AMP formatting by using Google’s free AMP verifier.
Just want to check if your site is mobile friendly? Use Google’s mobile test. You’ll get results for mobile friendliness, mobile speed, desktop speed. Google also provides some site improvement recommendations in a free report.
Free Website Audits
Raven Tools is also one of the top auditing sites you can find. Raven gives you a custom suite of reports on your company’s website and marketing health. You’ll get deep insight into your PPC, social, and marketing activities, with recommendations for improvement. Data comes from more than 20 sources, including Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Bing, Twitter, and Facebook.
Reading Level
With all of the emphasis on SEO best practices and mobile-friendly design, it’s easy to forget how important readability is. After all, your site is for humans first, not robots. If your content is hard to read, all of your other efforts won’t make much difference.
There are several good online readability tests, but I like the one at webpagefx.com. Just enter your URL and you’ll get results on six readability indices and word count stats. Results are color-coded, so you can immediately know how good your scores are (what’s a 49.1 mean, anyway??). Scroll down for more details on each index.
Get the Results You Want from Your Website
These are the tools we use to assess the strength of our clients’ websites. We take the results and incorporate them into our website strategy to help companies reach greater marketing and sales goals.