At Pronto, we pride ourselves on offering improvements. So before a company becomes a Pronto client, we run their old website through a useful tool called Woorank.
Woorank crawls their website and pulls data from various sources looking for common SEO mistakes or other errors that could be affecting the performance of the site. It then gives the website a score from 0-100 based on how well the site is optimized for search.
We recently reran some domains hosting Pronto sites through Woorank to see how our clients’ new websites compare to the websites they had before they signed up for our services. And we found that on average, our clients saw their score increase by almost 15 points after their Pronto website went live.
How does this translate into actual website performance?
It’s important to note that your Woorank score doesn’t have a direct impact on your site’s performance in search results. Rather, it looks at a set of criteria on your website that search engines are likely to consider when determining rankings. So while in theory a higher score should increase the likelihood of appearing in search results, this won’t be the case in every instance.
With that being said, we have done some other research on how websites perform in search results after moving to Pronto, and on average, our clients see a 42% increase in search traffic over their first year with Pronto when we’ve applied some of our optimization techniques.
What this really means is that our ability to get the fundamentals of SEO right (as seen through the increased Woorank scores) can have a large impact on a site’s performance in search results (as seen through the increased organic search traffic).
What are the most common mistakes on “old” websites?
We see a wide range of issues when people ask us to review their old sites. Some of the most common errors are missing sitemap and robots.txt files, poorly formatted URLs, improper keyword usage, missing analytics tracking code and canonicalization issues.
If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. We can help fix all of those issues with your website when you sign up!
Why don’t Pronto websites have even higher Woorank scores?
Woorank is a tool built to work with websites of all shapes and sizes, so it needs to be able to give a score to everything from major websites marketing well-known brands and services, to mom and pop websites created to seek out local custom. Because of this, Woorank includes items like traffic, number of inbound links and number of indexed pages in their scoring system.
However, these are all areas where small business websites are at a disadvantage. Your local SMB is always going to have less traffic, fewer links and fewer pages than a site like the New York Times.
This doesn’t mean Woorank is a bad or unsuitable tool to measure the success of small business websites. It just means we shouldn’t compare the score of a big website to the score of a small website.
After reviewing hundreds of Woorank scores for small business websites, the highest scores tend to be in the low 70s with none going over 75. So with Pronto websites averaging a score of 61.3, we’re already on the higher end of what small businesses can achieve within Woorank’s system.
What if my website scores higher/lower than these averages?
With so many factors and parameters involved in Woorank’s scoring system (and in search engine algorithms), comparing your score to the score of another site doesn’t tell you that much. A better way of using your score is by seeing how it might fluctuate after making updates to your site.
This is particularly useful if you’re planning a major redesign of your site. The initial score can tell you where you stand today and if you run your domain again after completing your redesign, you’ll have a good idea of whether the redesign had a positive effect on your search optimization.
If we haven’t already reviewed your website, request a free website consultation today!
