Automatic website graders have their pros and cons. When we last looked at a set of website graders, we found that accuracy was a key issue. It was great to be able to get basic data like domain age and indexed pages faster than when we looked it all up by hand, but they were certainly no match for human analysis.
We’re big fans of Neil Patel, though, so we had to try out his Quicksprout Website Analyzer.
If you’re familiar with Patel’s style, you won’t be surprised to see that the tool is very user friendly — and very much a promotional tool. You’ll see plenty of banners and pop ups and whatnot as you work through the analysis. You also won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a lot of data available.
First step: enter your URL. You can also enter the URLs of up to three competing websites if you like. We did. We put in the URLs of several of our friends here in the local web design community.
After a couple of sales pop ups you’ll have three reports: Website Analyzer, Social Media Analysis, and Competitor Analysis if you compared yourself with other websites.
The Website Analyzer looks at things like speed, the length of your headings, and the number of backlinks identified. Quicksprout will give you a nice list of technical issues, prioritized by their importance to search engines.
The Social Media Analysis report lets you know which platforms show most sharing for you (Hi, G+!) and which pages are most often shared.
The Competitor Analysis report gives quick comparisons on all the points listed above among all the sites you’ve listed. You can check any site, of course, but we thought you might like to see how Amazon scored:
You can share your email address and get a PDF and Excel files listing the suggestions for improvement. The suggestions come from a machine, but it’s a good machine and the suggestions make more sense than most of the ones we’ve tried. We’re not going to go through and make sure all our headings are 15 characters or more, but we have to admit we’ve got some meta descriptions that need work.
The tool is fun to use. We didn’t get many surprises, but you might end up with a long list of things that need changing. WooRank still provides more data, but Quicksprout has cuter infographics and is less tech-heavy. It’s not going to take the place of human judgement, but it could certainly be a good way to benchmark your website and see how you progress as time passes.
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