What Should I Do With My GradeMyWebsite Results?
Now that you’ve run your site through our website grader, you may be wondering what to do with the results. Where do you go from here? What’s the first thing you should address?
Rather than set you loose with no guidance, here are a few suggestions that we hope will help you make the most of your results. This advice will give you the ability to use your results to improve your website and strengthen your presence online.
Don’t panic.
If your score is low, or there are plenty of “fair” or “poor” marks on your report, your first reaction may be to panic a little bit. How are you ever going to fix all these issues? Where did these problems come from? How did you not know about them before now?
It’s important to realize right away that no website is perfect. Every site has room for improvement, even the ones that have been around for over a decade, have thousands of daily visitors, and make millions of dollars each year. Getting a score of 100 in the grader is actually really difficult!
So before you start panicking or tearing apart the back-end of your website trying to fix problems, take a few minutes to breathe. When you look over your report again, you may realize that it isn’t that bad. There are probably some good scores on your report, too, so don’t focus only on the negative! After all, a good foundation is the hardest part of building anything, whether it’s a house, business, or website, and you probably have that out of the way.
Identify the areas that need the most improvement.
Now that you’re looking at your results with a level head, try to find the areas of your website that need your attention the most. These will be the elements scored the lowest, with a fair or poor diagnosis.
If your website is relatively new, you may find that many areas are scored this way. To better narrow down your choices, read the suggestions and comments in detail. For example, if your meta description comments are mostly positive, but your title tag comments are most critical, this is how you can break the tie and shift your focus to title tags first.
Learn why your scores are low, and how you can improve them.
With each report we generate, the Suggestions and Comments section offers remarks as to why we gave you the grade, diagnosis, and scores we did. You can read these comments to learn why your score may be low for a particular item.
Once you’ve got a good grasp on why a particular area was scored the way it was, you can start learning ways to improve it. The best place to start is our Resources section, where we offer advice on the specific areas on your report, including traffic, links, keywords, site speed, and more. You can also read articles online to get a better understanding of that particular subject or ask the Internet marketing company you are working with (if you’re already working with one) for help.
Work with your team to create an improvement plan.
Set some time aside to meet with the team involved with the day-to-day operations of your website. Give them a copy of the report, and tell them what you learned about how you can improve the weak areas of your website.
Together, you and your team should be able to come up with a plan to improve your website and raise your scores in the areas where you are the weakest. This plan should identify who is responsible, what each person will be doing, how it will contribute to the improvement, and when it will be done.
Set a time to regroup and run a new report.
Finally, after the improvement plan has concluded, you’ll want to designate a time to regroup and go over everything that has been done to make your website better. Once everything is finished, you can come back to our site and run a new report. (You can run as many reports as you want to – the tool is free!)
In most cases, your new report should reflect the work you have done. However, for some improvements, your changes may not show up immediately. You may want to wait about 30 days after completing any work before returning to our site to run a new report, just to be sure all of your work is accounted for.
Once these initial changes are done and you’ve seen improvements on your report, you can repeat the process again with areas that scored “fair” or “good.” Keep the process going until your score is as high as you can get it!
Hopefully, these suggestions have given you a better idea as to what should be done with your GradeMyWebsite report. By spending some time to identify the areas in need of the most improvement, learning how to achieve the results you want, and working with your team to develop a plan, you’ll be able to get your website’s SEO in the best shape it’s ever been.
Have any questions about your report? Feel free to contact us for help!
*Last updated: 1/21/22
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