How to Tell if Your Site Doesn’t Suck

I’ve received a fair number of calls over the years from people who say, “Our site sucks. We need a new one.” Usually these people are dissatisifed with the site design, for whatever reason.

But I’ve learned, through analyzing many sites, that often the site doesn’t “suck” at all — or if it does, it’s not due to design, it’s due to poor content that doesn’t generate leads or conversions.

You can easily tell if your site “sucks” or not by using a number of free tools:

Hubspot’s Website Grader — This is a fabulous tool. Simply enter in your URL and the Website Grader will spit back a nifty report grading you on things such as your meta data and whether or not you have an RSS feed. You can run similar reports on your competitors as well.

Yahoo’s Site Explorer — Another great tool that tells you how many inbound links you have. The more *high quality* links you have, the more favorably Google views your site (sucky design or not). You can also run your competitors’ sites through the tool to see how many links they have and who is linking to them.

Google PageRank — I use PageRank to give me a quick and dirty assessment of a site. A PR of “3″ or less tells me the site might have some problems. You can learn your site’s PR by downloading the Google Toolbar and turning the PageRank feature on.

Google Analytics — Google Analytics recently introduced a new “benchmarking” feature. Now you can see how your site stacks up against sites that are similar in nature. Find out how many pages people typically download, if your site is “sticky” or not, and how much traffic sites get in aggregate.

Alexa — Another tool that tells you how your site compares to other sites.

Customer feedback — This is one that’s often overlooked. If you’re a small business, keep track of how people found you by asking when they call, “How did you hear about us?” I even go so far as to ask, “Which search term did you use?”

Also add a “how did you find us?” field to your newsletter subscription form. This is how I learn which online articles generate the most number of subscribers.

If you have an online form people can fill out, keep track of how many of those come in each month.

Listen to customers and prospects when they call. For a long time people would ask me, “What does ‘MarCom’ mean?” I finally spelled it out in my Web copy.

Bottom line — Get some real data on your site and you may just be pleasantly surprised: your site doesn’t suck at all.