Website Audit Tool On Your Website

[Tim Colling]

I'm thinking about adding a tool to my own website that would offer a "free website analysis" to visitors coming to my site. Something like woorank.com or mysiteauditor.com.

Does anyone else here already do that, or do you have any suggestions about whether it's a good thing to do, and if so, which third-party tool(s) to use in order to implement the idea?

Thanks!

 

[mborgelt]

I think it's a great idea to establish yourself as a resource to the community. It definitely keeps users coming back as well so if you develop great content consistently it's a double-whammy.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Tim, we incorporated a tool into our website at PbS. We use it as the 1st point of engagement on our site because it intrigues people?s curiosity. It?s based off a custom algorithm of Moz data and Google Pagespeed insights data.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Colan,

Is that a custom developed (in-house) tool you're using or is it a subscription from a 3rd party?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Eric, it's in-house.

 

[Conor Treacy]

We had a Site Audit tool on our website for a while and what we found was two things;

1) Generally the results for the end user aren't all that great
2) It wasn't a great sales lead as the people using the free tool weren't looking at purchasing anything either.

We swapped back to our offer of submitting a contact form to get a free website audit and that produces solid results for leads.

Now Yext searching for citations was useful to clients, but after a while we noticed it was the same set of IPs using the tool over and over again. Could it have been another SEO company just using the tool since they stumbled on it? Maybe - but it didn't really produce conversions.

Great distractions and tools to offer on the website, but in terms of conversions, we didn't find it of much use.

 

[JoyHawkins]

My favorite Local SEO tool is still the G+ Wizard from Bright Local because it looks at things like categories and reviews on GMB listings whereas most tools skip this part b/c they are geared more for traditional SEO.

I would say some things a good tool should include would include:

- Site Speed stuff
- Canonical issues (https vs http, www vs non www)
- Categories on GMB
- # of reviews
- Age of GMB listing
- # of views on GMB listing
- Backlinks (number and authority)
- Title tag containing keyword searched
- GMB linking to the same URL that's ranking highest organically

I'm sure I'll think of more. Some more complicated things that no tool currently does well that would be really sweet if someone built:

- Duplicate finder for GMB (I am extremely skeptical this can be automated and be accurate)
- Semantic Keyword Finder (does your content include other related keywords to your target keyword that your competitors list?) Moz came out with a tool that kind of does this but not to the scale that I'd like to see it, and it requires a Moz Pro subscription

 

[JoyHawkins]

oh, and I totally agree with Conor's points. I think the stuff I described might be more geared for what would be useful to those of us in the Local SEO world

 

[Over The Top SEO]

Hey Tim,

This topic is on the rise to be honest,
We were testing it for the past year on our website with the actual scanner and one with a link for an outside link to test it on a new window outside of our website.

Look, the bottom line result we had were pretty conclusive, when people come to our website we want to make sure their needs are met without many distractions, and even though the scanners are somewhat alright and useful its still very far from being the main reason they come to your website in the first place, unless that is your main service (website analysis), So we left the option for our clients/visitors to decide weather they want to do it or not and not force it on them in the call to action or pop-ups.

As of now we still offer it on our website header (very small line) that takes you to our in-house tool which is getting us somewhat alright results in terms of lead generation but its there for general info for the visitors to have instead of raping them into filling up some sort of a form.

P.S: @Joy Hawkins
I think that would be a very interesting tool to develop with all of the features you have mentioned I might actually do that plus a few addons.
[HR][/HR]
Guy Sheetrit
CEO at Over The Top SEO
(323) 375-0707
Skype: OverTheTopSEO

 

[Yourname]

We had a Site Audit tool on our website for a while and what we found was two things;

1) Generally the results for the end user aren't all that great
2) It wasn't a great sales lead as the people using the free tool weren't looking at purchasing anything either.

We swapped back to our offer of submitting a contact form to get a free website audit and that produces solid results for leads.

Now Yext searching for citations was useful to clients, but after a while we noticed it was the same set of IPs using the tool over and over again. Could it have been another SEO company just using the tool since they stumbled on it? Maybe - but it didn't really produce conversions.

Great distractions and tools to offer on the website, but in terms of conversions, we didn't find it of much use.

Conor, maybe did you have them in a nurture track?
I ask because we used an in-house tool for about 6 months but kept nurturing these leads for a good 2-3 months and in the end, it turned to work out well.

We stopped using it temporarily because the back-end sales process fell thru due to an unfavourable exit. But once that's fixed, we may put it back.

 

[JoyHawkins]

By in-house tool you mean one that I can't buy anywhere? 😉. I am currently looking for a good CRM that has awesome lead nurturing capabilities.

 

[Yourname]

By in-house tool you mean one that I can't buy anywhere? 😉. I am currently looking for a good CRM that has awesome lead nurturing capabilities.

Haha, yes something like that. Pretty much like what Colan did.
Except ours used the BrightLocal APIs.

Regarding the CRM, it doesn't really have to be one till it becomes an engaged lead really. You can start off by using an automated sequence for the audit requests. I know we put each lead in a different bucket of emails depending on how good their audit turned out (or not).

So, say someone's audit returned very bad results and there's lots of optimization required, they go in a "High Chance" bucket that has a series of 7-10 emails (I forget the exact cadence)

If the audit returned great results, then they go in a "Low Chance" bucket that has a series of say 5 emails over the next 90 days. It's not aggressive by any means, and also doesn't piss off the lead. The CTAs are also not as prominent like the ones in "High Chance" buckets.

We used two tools during that period, Pardot and AutoPilotHQ (which I think has a CRM component) - anyway, when a lead hit prime status (always opens emails, clicks CTAs or reads blogs or asks to get an ebook), it would push the lead information into the CRM (which was/is SalesForce) along with auto-creating a task for a sales guy to reach out to the lead.

At one point we experimented with using SalesForce for the nurturing component but it was a big fail (cumbersome setup).

However, I recently realized you can automate this process (to run a tight ship) by using email tools like Yesware and once you get the hang of it, get the big tools in. There's another great tool that does great email cadence as well, it's called outreach.io

Hope this helps!

 

[BrendanT]

We use mysiteauditor, 95% of the stuff that goes through it is completely garbage from a sales perspective but it's generated about 3 new clients and by the end of the year $10k from it so not bad for ~500$ spend on it....it's good as a lead magnet type thing, pretty ordinary as an audit tool but it does filter a lot of crap

 

[DanLeibson]

- Duplicate finder for GMB (I am extremely skeptical this can be automated and be accurate)

Looking forward to proving you wrong Joy

 

[JoyHawkins]

Dan, I would LOVE you too. Would make my life easier

 

[Over The Top SEO]

@Joy
Me and my team are already working on it 🤑

 

[DanLeibson]

Dan, I would LOVE you too. Would make my life easier

It's a feature in a bigger product I am working on and has a pretty great application for agencies. Just wrapped up beta testing, so when we are closer to launch I will reach out and let you check it out.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

It's a feature in a bigger product I am working on and has a pretty great application for agencies. Just wrapped up beta testing, so when we are closer to launch I will reach out and let you check it out.

I would love to be a part of this as well, Dan.

 

[Tim Colling]

I would love to be a part of this as well, Dan.

So would I!