As a B2B communications professional, one thing you need to understand about top management is that they are very competitive. While they may not understand B2B content marketing or SEO, they know they want to be No. 1 in searches on Google. One way to persuade top management that they need to invest in content is to compare your website vs. your competition. A free tool from HubSpot call the Website Grader makes the job easy.
The Website Grader can be used to evaluate your site, as well as your competition, to see how you rank on important criteria such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It takes just a few minutes and all you need to do is type in your domain name and that of your competition.
I recently used this tool to help explain to a client why they were no longer listed on page one of Google and what they needed to do about it. The client was just about ready to spend money to hire an SEO expert, perhaps using up her limited budget for content.
While my client’s overall website score was as good or better than the competition (86 out of a possible 100), the competitive analysis was revealing. One competitor had more than 60 inbound links, while my client’s site had 30. Because inbound links are Google’s way of recognizing a site’s authority; this is probably a big reason why the search engine rankings have fallen.
Another area that was lacking was blogging. I had already planted the seed that the current blog was underutilized, and was an area of opportunity. I proposed developing a content strategy based on the needs of the company’s target market; increasing the frequency of blog posts; and adding WordPress Plug-ins to optimize content and help users share it via social media channels. I am confident seeing a blog score of 41 next to the competition’s 86 will help the client to recognize the importance of blogging better and more frequently than the competition.
In my experience, top management and business owners prefer quantitative analysis to theory. If you can demonstrate how your website performs relative to the competition and have a strategy to outperform the competition, I think they will be more receptive to your request for content support. Thanks to HubSpot for this great tool.
What other tools have you found to be effective in evaluating website performance? We’d love to hear about them.