A few weeks ago, we received a concerned call from one of our clients. Apparently, they had been solicited by another company that offers similar online marketing services to Three Deep, and they were directly questioning the work we had done for them. The solicitors did a great job of undermining our efforts by simply putting the URL through a free service called Website Grader, printing a screen shot, and clicking send.
Frankly, they made a compelling argument; the grade the site received was not great by any means, and was a definite cause for concern at a surface level. Nobody wants to receive a poor grade. At the same time, I was equally concerned with the implications of these results, because I personally built much of the site, entered content, and did a quality job of making the site search friendly for the their local market and the services they offer.
It looks bad, but it's not really THAT bad
I have spent many hours with this client over the past several years, working hard to make sure they were happy and that we were meeting their objectives. So when the work that we had done on this website came into scrutiny, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Were we not properly servicing this client? How much work will it take to fix?
Rather than dwell on the poor score we received, I spent the next 45 minutes skimming through the criteria that this site used to grade SEO scores (honestly, I feel the criteria is very out of date and I don’t agree with much of it). I then found the elements of the site receiving poor grades (90% of the grade comes from home page only) – “fixed” it – and reran the grading program.
Voila! In no time I had increased the score by 51%! Now the site was no longer a laughing stock, but actually a leader among its sitegrader peers.
But what exactly changed on the site during those 45 minutes to actually make this site better for SEO?
Continue Reading Automated SEO Services like Website Grader – Thoughts →
