How do the e-commerce sites for Canada's world-class banks measure up for search engine friendliness, web traffic and overall marketing effectiveness?

According to hoovers.com, the Royal Bank of Canada is the Great White North’s largest bank with 70,000 employees while generating US$43.3 billion in revenues during 2007.

In second place is the Bank of Nova Scotia (47,000 employees, $27.7 billion) followed by TD Canada Trust (52,000 employees, $26.5 billion), the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (40,500 employees, $24.4 billion) and the Bank of Montreal (43,600 employees, $21.8 billion).

Employing 17,000 workers and generating $4.5 billion last year, National Bank is smaller.

Biggest Online Web Scores

Yet interactive report cards from HubSpot’s Website Grader show that bigger doesn’t necessarily translate into the strongest online Web presence.

HubSpot's Website Grader applies a proprietary blend of over 50 factors to evaluate hundreds of thousands of websites. Sites are scored based on comparative criteria such as search engine friendliness, website structure, online traffic and site performance.

Highest Website Grade

Based on HubSpot’s calculations, the website for Bank of Montreal (Canada’s fifth largest bank) won the highest grade for marketing effectiveness. A score of 98 means that BMO’s site is scores higher than 98% of sites evaluated by HubSpot.

1. Bank of Montreal (BMO) … 98 (out of 100)
2. TD Canada Trust … 95
3. Royal Bank of Canada … 91
4. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) … 90
5. National Bank of Canada … 88
6. Bank of Nova Scotia … 79

In contrast, web pages for Canada’s second-largest bank finished dead last with a mediocre grade of 79.

Google Page Rank

The website for the smaller BMO also scored an impressive 7 on the much coveted Google page rankings. A page rank of 7 is what a leading online magazine like Suite101.com commands with 7 million monthly visitors.

1. BMO … 7 (out of 10)
2. TD Canada Trust … 6
3. Royal Bank of Canada … 6
4. CIBC … 6
5. Bank of Nova Scotia … 6
6. National Bank of Canada … 5

Web Traffic Rank

Canada’s second-largest bank, TD Canada Trust, has a website that wins a rank of 1,472 on Alexa. The latter is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet like Nielsen determines television show ratings.

1. TD Canada Trust … 1,472 (top 0.01% of all websites)
2. CIBC … 3,840 (top 0.01%)
3. BMO … 4,480 (top 0.02%)
4. Bank of Nova Scotia … 4,608 (top 0.02%)
5. Royal Bank of Canada … 11,332 (top 0.04%)
6. National Bank of Canada … 92,279(top 0.32%)

Somewhat surprising is the fact that the website for Canada’s leader Royal Bank earns the second-lowest rank for online traffic.

Most Inbound Links

However, Royal Bank does score well on the number of inbound links from other sites. Provided that these links come from authoritative resources on the Internet, the Royal Bank website should rank higher in search engines.

1. Royal Bank of Canada … 165,642 inbound links
2. Bank of Nova Scotia … 52,903
3. TD Canada Trust … 50,992
4. BMO … 43,547
5. CIBC … 35,930
6. National Bank of Canada … 19,944

Banking Search Engine Keywords

Ironically, Royal’s home site has no keywords at all. Keywords that match online consumer searches would improve the number of visits from potential bank customers.

Of the six banks evaluated, only CIBC and the National Bank included keywords in the HTML code for their home pages. Keywords for the National Bank site include the bank’s name, abbreviations as well as terms like bank Canada, loans, RRSP, travel insurance and business plan.