How Good is your Website?

So you have a website for your salon -- good for you! Many of your future clients are going to find their next salon online so it's important to have an online presence. But how effective is your website at bringing in those new guests?

Well, a company called Hubspot can help you figure that out (and it's free!). Go to website.grader.com and enter your domain name. If you like, you can also enter the domain names of a couple of competitors. The tool will grade the marketing aspects of your site.

You are given three separate scores, and an overall grade. The separate scores are for the Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Analytics.

If you think of your website as a big funnel, the top represents all the people who are finding you online and the bottom of the funnel represents those who become customers. To be the most successful, you want as many people as possible going into your funnel, then you want to convert as many as possible to clients. Analytics refers to measuring your success (and failures) so you can tweak what you are doing for better results.

Using my company as an example (www.fritzssalon.com) we scored 71 overall (out of 100). Our components are 67%, 33% and 50% for top, middle and analytics. Clearly we have the most work to do in the middle of our funnel, although there is room for improvement everywhere. The Hubspot Tool gives you a complete report with recommendations on how to improve in each area. I've made an appointment with my web designer to review the recommendations and implement as many as possible.

Huge thanks go out to Chris Murphy, a coach with Strategies and owner of MaximumFX salon in Austin, Texas. Chris taught a class on getting found online back in February. He is the person who introduced me to this tool. At that time our website scored a lowly 37. We implemented many of the ideas in the Hubspot report, as well as many of Chris's recommendations from the course and have almost doubled our score in 9 months!

Try it yourself now! Get your score and share it in the comments section.