What Is SEO Score and How Can I Use It to Improve My Website? (2024)

SEO is consistently a major driver of growth and customer acquisition for e-commerce stores and websites. Effective SEO involves much more than simply adding the right keywords to a webpage. SEO touches every part of a website. That’s why a basic understanding of search engine optimization best practices important for everyone. Aside from making sure your search engine optimization is effective, it’s also important to make sure you consistently check your SEO score and know what to look for. Your SEO score can provide a lot of insight into your website and find what you need to improve on in order to grow. In this article, you will learn what an SEO score is, how it is measured, and the best score checkers to use.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business and search engines such as Google or Bing. The better visibility pages have in search results, the more likely you are to gain attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business. Search engines such as Google and Bing then use bots to crawl pages on the web, from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Then, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals. This helps them determine the order the pages should appear in the search results for a given query. Unlike paid searches, you can’t pay search engines to gain higher organic search rankings, which means SEO experts have to put in the work.

SEO and Marketing

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct so many searches every year, often with the intent to find information about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

What Is an SEO Score?

An SEO score is a measure of how well the technical aspects and user-facing elements of your website contribute to search engine optimization. Scores are on a scale up to 100. They are based on four areas that affect crawlability and ranking performance: content, technical, user experience, and mobile. A high SEO score means that your website meets the quality standards for good search engine optimization. A low score indicates technical and user experience issues. Although Google’s algorithm doesn’t take your SEO score into consideration when indexing and ranking your website, a good SEO score is linked to higher ranking and search engine visibility. Optimizing the four areas of SEO scoring will benefit your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERP).

What Is a Good SEO Score?

A good SEO score is between 80-100. A score in this range indicates that your website is meeting the top quality standards for search engine optimization in the areas of technical SEO, content, user experience, and mobile usability.

SEO Scoring Factors

As we mentioned, your website’s final SEO score is determined by its performance in the following four categories.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is an important part of SEO scoring because it affects how well your site can be accessed, crawled, and indexed by search engine web crawlers like Googlebot. If a site has severe technical issues, then it will not rank high on the SERPs no matter how good you make your content, user experience, or mobile usability. Technical SEO problems can be a major roadblock to increasing organic traffic from Google, Yahoo, or Bing. They often go unnoticed until you use an SEO score checker or an audit tool to measure your site’s performance. It’s important to make these types of checks and analyses part of your routine website maintenance process. Doing so will allow you to increase your SEO score in the following areas:

• Search engine friendly URLs
• Website architecture
• Page speed
• Server response
• Indexability
• Broken links

Content

The quality of your website’s content is another important factor in your overall SEO score. Search engine algorithms consider how well your content uses on-page SEO optimization, the structure of the page, how pages are linked together, and if it’s meeting the needs of your visitors through the measurements of various on-site metrics. Websites with good SEO, relevant information, and visitor engagement are typically ranked higher by Google. The following areas are the make up of the SEO score for website content:

• Meta titles and descriptions for every web page
• The number of internal and broken links
• The presence of duplicate content throughout the site
• On-page SEO factors like optimized heading tags, keywords in content, and image optimization
• User metrics like bounce rate, time on page, and average pages per session

User Experience

Although this is a low priority for SEO scoring, search engines still take user experience into consideration when ranking. Therefore, it’s good to know the user experience of your site and look for ways to improve this. The following factors are what make up the SEO score for user experience:

• Images are retrievable and load quickly
• Navigation doesn’t include too many links
• It takes 3 clicks or less to get to any one page on the site

Mobile Usability

Google now uses mobile-first indexing for website content. That means your website must have mobile-friendly content or it will not rank as high for its target queries. This factor measures how fast your website renders across a range of devices and the following aspects affect your SEO score:

• Responsiveness of the design
• Touchscreen compatibility for tapping and scrolling
• Page speeds load quickly for the user

Checking Your SEO Score

To check your SEO score, you need to enter the domain name or URL into the given field of an SEO checker and click “Check SEO Score.” The tool will scan your website and measure the user-facing and technical aspects of search engine optimization and report the score in a number format.

SEO Score Checker Tools

There are many tools out there that can be used to check your SEO score on your website. Here are just a few.

Ahrefs Site Audit Tool

Ahrefs performs a complete analysis to give you an accurate score for your website. The search crawler goes deep into your site and checks for over 100+ technical issues that could be affecting your rankings.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an SEO score checker that can give you instant insights into the health of your website. You can analyze the overall health score, check Core Web Vitals, and get a list of the top detected issues based on their level of significance and prevalence across the website.

SEO Analyzer

SEO Analyzer gives your site a complete check to uncover errors that are hindering your content from achieving the top ranking positions on Google. It also prioritizes each fix based on potential traffic impact and ease of implementation so you can speed up your ranking improvements.

Siteimprove SEO Score Checker

Siteimprove measures how well your website performs across a number of key SEO factors like content and technical setup. It also gives you recommendations on how to improve to increase your SEO score and get more visibility on Google and other search engines.

Website Grader

Website Grader is more than an SEO score checker. It’s a free online tool that grades your site against key metrics like performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security.

WooRank SEO Score Checker

WooRank scores your site on a 100-point scale that is based on 70 different criteria. This checker will help you optimize and measure your website’s performance for the keywords that matter most to you.

How to Use SEO Score to Improve Your Website

Checking your score is an important part of the upkeep of the maintenance of your website. By regularly checking your score, you will be able to see which parts of your website are working in your favor and which ones are not. Knowing your SEO score gives your company or business the information needed to grow.

FAQ:

• What is SEO?
• What is an SEO score?
• How is an SEO score determined?
• How can you check your SEO score?
• What is a good SEO score?