Understanding how well your website is performing and how it compares to your competitors is very useful data to have.
As a webmaster there are many questions that you need to ask yourself in today’s complex and competitive online space and with so many free tools on the market it’s easier than ever for you to answer some of them.
Over the past couple of years of running my own websites and helping other people with theirs I have tried lots of different tools to help me “grade” my sites against others. Below are a list of 10 tools I turn to frequently when auditing websites.
1. Alexa
Alexa – is a free online service to check the traffic and statistics of your blog/website and compare the results with your competitors.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics – is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed information and reports about the visitors to your website. If you run an e-commerce site you can setup your GA account to measure sales conversions, so you can understand which pages and keywords are or are not performing well.
3. Whoishostingthis.com
Whoishostingthis.com – quickly discover which web hosting company any web site uses. This can be very useful when you are comparing your site speed against your competitors.
4. Builtwith.com
Builtwith.com – gives you a fairly detailed rundown of the technology behind a site. It’s also a useful benchmarking tool to compare your site against others in your space.
5. GTMetrix
GTMetrix – is a free tool that analyses your page’s speed performance. Using Page Speed and YSlow, GTmetrix generates scores for your pages and offers a number of tips for you to speed up your site. You can also compare the speed of your competitors sites against your own too.
6. Niche Watch
Niche Watch – will take top sites ranked for a given search term that you enter and return the following information for each one in the form of a table:
- Google rankings;
- Google PR of a domain and a page (both currently broken);
- key phrase occurrences on web page;
- rankings for allinanchor: Google rank;
- rankings for allintitle: Google rank
7. Pear Analytics
Pear Analytics – checks your website against a number of technical problems such as broken links on pages, Title tags are in place and not duplicated and there is a sitemap in place.
8. Mozbar
Mozbar – This toolbar from Moz lets you see metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority for every page you visit, analyze links as you browse, expose page elements, and access other SEO tools.
9. Mobilegrader.com
Mobilegrader.com – simply enter your URL to see how your website performs on smart-phones. A free, personalized report will instantly be generated and also emailed to you. This can be useful if you are considering optimizing your site for mobile devices.
10. Marketing Grader
Marketing Grader – is a free tool from Hub Spot that analyzes your website and provides actionable insights to improve your marketing.
[divider style=”thin”]
Author:
This article was written by Adam Clarke. He’s a freelance tech writer who writes about WordPress and internet marketing on a number of other sites. Adam is passionate about technical SEO and helping people make money online. You can read more from Adam on his Google+ Page.
