Growth Hacking Toolbox: How does Google see my website?
Growth Hacking is about focusing on the things that will bring your business more traffic, more leads and more customers. One the key ways of ‘getting found’ is through search. Which means you need to ask yourself ‘How does Google see my website?’
Today, Google effectively is search in much of the world. So business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers need to care how Google sees their website because that affects how Google ranks it.
Luckily, there are free tools available that help you understand what the Google spiders see when they visit your site. You can find out:
- whether it’s been set-up optimally for search engines
- how popular Google feels your site is and how connected it is to other sites on the web
- what the most prominent keywords are
- how well the content has been written for user experience
- what the opportunities for improvement are
- how well set-up your site is for mobile browsers
- whether there are any code errors or broken links in the site
5 great – free – tools for Growth Hacking
There are many, many tools available. Here are 5 that will not only get you started and benchmark your site but prove to be indispensable in the long term.
Google Webmaster Tools
Most of the time Google doesn’t like to help the outside world understand what factors contribute to search ranking. However, it provide some essential tools for assessing your website. Google Webmaster Tools effectively explains the fundamental aspects of SEO. Connect and validate your site in order to see which keywords Google sees when it crawls your site. You can also see the keywords of searches that your site appears for and your site’s average position and click-through rate for each one. This can give you a hitlist for which keywords to improve your pages for and what new content to add.
WooRank
WooRank offers an extensive review of the health of your website. It gives you an overall score and an detailed checklist of things you might need to address. It even labels your ‘top priority’ issues. It’s very visual and incredibly detailed.
Hubspot Marketing Grader
This tool from the inbound marketing pioneers provides a dashboard for the key aspects of inbound marketing. Hubspot’s Grader offers comparative assessment of your blogging, social media, SEO, lead generation and marketing automation set-up and mobile-friendliness. Its sweetspot is around blogging frequency and the use of landing pages, key elements of inbound.
Clarity Grader
A great tool for checking up on your content writing. Clarity Grader is a stickler for short sentences, readability and the active voice. It feels like being nagged but your content is going to be better for it. Clarity Grader offers overall scores to use as benchmarks. You also have the option to drill down into individual pages and problem areas.
W3C Validator
This tool is really focused. And it’s certainly not the prettiest tool out there. However, it has a proper look at your site’s code. The W3C Validator helps you make sure your site is W3C compliant and, therefore, renders properly on the wider range of devices.
