Almost a year ago, I took a spin through HubSpot’s Website Grader – a free online tool that rates your website against a whole raft of search engine optimization (SEO)-related factors. Since then, it has stood as one of the better free tools around for analyzing your website.

The other day I received an email from Sam Babal asking me to take a look at his new tool, ReviewMyWeb. I have to say, I’m quite impressed.

ReviewMyWeb lets you plug in your website’s URL, along with up to two others, and emails you a report looking at factors including traffic, backlinks, metadata and keyword data, and indexed pages.

To give the tool a test run, I plugged-in my site along with two other popular Canadian PR blogs, Joseph Thornley’s ProPR and Dave Jones’ PR Works. I won’t run through all of the results in general here, but I will focus on a few that are worth mentioning.

Overall Results

The first thing ReviewMyWeb does is give you a big-picture assessment of how your site is doing. In my case, I’m losing-out on backlinks and blog coverage (aka number of indexed pages). Neither of these surprise me – those two guys have been blogging for way longer than me so that’s understandable. It’s also handy – you can see at a glance how you’re doing and where you’re falling down.

Traffic Comparison

The traffic rank comparison is one area that I found confusing until I got my head around it. It seems that lower scores are better, but no-where does it explain that to you. I’m guessing the site uses Alexa Rankings to generate its traffic report, which would generate the screwy ‘high is bad’ numbers. The graph, though, flips things around again – high is once again good. An explanation of the meanings of these two metrics would be helpful.

Inbound Links

Backlinks is one of the two areas where I’m getting toasted according to this analysis, so it’s worth examining. The difference in the three search engines used is very interesting – for one thing, Yahoo finds more than 10 times as many links as Google does, while Ask.com puts my site way out in front. As with most things online nowadays though, “in Google we trust,” right?

Indexed Pages

The interesting thing to note here is that, once again, each of the search engines is showing drastically different results (although I have the same number of pages according to Google and Yahoo!). It really does raise the question, which one should you trust?

Final Analysis

There are plenty of other metrics there in graphical format; the final analysis, though, is the most useful part of a ReviewMyWeb report. This section summarizes your strengths and weaknesses, and provides pointers towards improving each of them.

According to this analysis, :

• This site ranks above the others under Google’s PageRank formula;
• I’m slightly underperforming the others in terms of backlinks;
• I’m outperforming the other sites in terms of indexed pages;
• My site uses keywords well within its code;
• I’m generating “less buzz in various web communities” in comparison to the other sites.

Conclusion

Overall, ReviewMyWeb is a useful tool, and it can help to shine a light on where you’re doing well and where you aren’t. Unfortunately, though, it is let down at the moment by two flaws:

• Lack of explanation of how some of the metrics are calculated (traffic and web community buzz being good examples – it doesn’t name these communities).
• Lack of real, practical tips for improving on your weaknesses.

The main difference between Website Grader and ReviewMyWeb is its practical focus. HubSpot‘s tool digs deep on the content on your site, and gives some useful recommendations. ReviewMyWeb simply tells you to get more links from other sites (for example). Still, ReviewMyWeb has the edge I like being able to benchmark myself against similar sites, I find the tool easy to use and,

Despite the points I’ve highlighted here, I do find this to be a useful tool. There’s room for improvement but ReviewMyWeb is still worth checking out. Let’s face it, the price is right.

Take a look and let me know, what do you think? Useful? Not? What could be improved?