SEO is the lifeblood behind any thriving website. It’s the best way to ensure you’re constantly getting a steady stream of organic traffic. But how can you know whether your SEO strategies are working effectively?
Your SEO score will tell you. Getting your SEO score can help you quickly understand where your website needs improvements. Then you can adjust your strategies and priorities accordingly to climb the SERPs and boost your SEO score.
How Do I Check My Website SEO Score For Free?
There are dozens of tools on the market that provide SEO scores. Some are standalone tools specifically for SEO scoring. Others are all-in-one SEO platforms that offer SEO audits and scoring along with other valuable SEO information.
Each tool is slightly different, and some of you may even notice different scores if you’re running audits on multiple platforms. But for a fast and free way to get your SEO score, try Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest runs a full SEO audit on your website in less than ten minutes. Part of the audit includes your SEO score.
The best part about Ubersuggest is that you can get your SEO score for free without having to sign up or create an account. This platform gives you access to three daily searches—100% free as a guest. You can even use it to check the SEO scores of your competitors.
The free audit only scans 150 pages on your site. But this is still a pretty good indication of your SEO score. You’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan to scan your entire site. These start at $29 per month, and you can try any Ubersuggest plan for free with a seven-day trial.
In addition to SEO scoring, Ubersuggest also sends you alerts for any critical issues detected on your site. It helps you monitor your SEO health and gives you daily status updates on your performance.
What is a Website SEO Score?
SEO scores measure your website’s technical aspects and user-facing elements as they relate to search optimization.
A high SEO score indicates that the site meets or exceeds quality standards for searchability and user experience. Lower scores are a sign of technical issues and problems with UX.
Google’s ranking algorithm doesn’t actually use your SEO score to determine rankings. But the factors used in an SEO score are directly related to search engine visibility, as Google does take these elements into consideration when ranking sites in the SERPs.
How Does Website SEO Scoring Work?
SEO scoring is based on a 0-100 scale. When you enter your domain into an SEO checker, the tool crawls your site—similar to the way search engine bots would do the same.
Using a unique formula, the checker will compare your crawled pages against criteria that impact SEO performance. This includes meta tags, site structure, speed, page quality, server response, internal links, titles, mobile responsiveness, and more.
SEO scores are comprised of four main factors:
- Technical SEO
- Content
- User Experience
- Mobile Usability
Each SEO checker will have slight variations in how they weigh these components to determine your SEO score. But generally speaking, they’re not weighted equally.
What is an SEO Checker?
An SEO checker is a tool that audits your domain and provides you with an SEO score.
Each SEO checker is unique, which is why your score may vary from platform to platform. With that said, most of the best SEO checkers should produce a score that’s within five or ten points of each other.
Options include:
You can start with a free SEO checker or trial to test out a platform. There’s no harm in using multiple SEO checkers to get your score.
If you want more than just a number, look for a solution that provides in-depth audits and suggestions for improvements. The score alone without additional information won’t really provide you with too much value.
What is a Good Website SEO Score?
A good SEO scoring range falls between 80 and 100. This indicates that your site meets the highest quality standards for technical SEO, content, UX, and mobile usability.
Some SEO experts will tell you to shoot for a score of 85 or higher. Others say that a score within the 70s is passable.
Either way, you want your SEO score to be as high as possible. So even if you’re in the high 80s, there are still steps you can take that will improve your SEO score.
What is a Bad Website SEO Score?
SEO scores below 30 are bad. These low scores indicate serious technical SEO issues that need immediate attention.
Low SEO scores can also be an indicator that your site isn’t performing well from mobile devices. There’s a good chance that users landing on your site aren’t having a great experience as they’re navigating between pages and consuming your content.
If you have a low SEO score, you need to make major changes to your site structure, metas, and other technical components causing these issues.
SEO scores in the 30 to 70 range aren’t always awful, but there is definitely room for improvement. If you’re in the 50s or 60s, the fixes may not be as drastic. For example, optimizing all of your metas or images could be enough to boost your score by five or ten points—depending on what your SEO report is telling you.
Why is Your Website SEO Score So Important?
Even though your score isn’t directly used in your search rankings, having a good SEO score is important for multiple reasons.
First, the factors used to determine your SEO score are similar to the ones used by search engine algorithms. So higher SEO scores typically translate to higher rankings, which leads to more traffic.
Next, your SEO score encompasses your site’s usability and user-friendliness. If you have a complex site structure or slow loading speeds, it’s going to impact the way visitors browse and behave when they land on your pages. So improving your SEO score can indirectly help you improve your site’s user experience—ultimately generating more conversions.
Not only will people be able to discover your site more through organic searches, but they’ll also have a pleasant experience on your website. Having a high SEO score makes this possible.
How Does Technical SEO Affect My SEO Score?
Technical SEO is arguably the most important factor of any SEO score formula. This refers to how your site gets crawled, indexed, and accessed by search engine crawlers. The idea here is to mimic how crawlers like Googlebot access and index sites for ranking purposes.
If your site has technical problems, it’s a red flag during the crawling process. Google and other search engines won’t rank your site high in the SERPs if there are problems behind the scenes—even if you have great content.
Factors related to technical SEO include:
- Page speed
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- Broken links
- Server response
- Indexability
Many technical SEO problems go unnoticed until an SEO audit gets run through an SEO checker. But if you prioritize the elements above, you can improve your technical SEO and boost your overall SEO score.
How Does Website Content Impact SEO Scoring?
Quality content is something that search engines like Google have been driving home for years now. This factor is directly tied to on-page SEO optimization.
Search engines like it when you link similar pages together and structure your content in a way that’s easy to scan. You always want your content to address the needs of people landing on your pages.
Examples of content-related factors used for SEO scoring include:
- Meta titles
- Meta descriptions
- Internal links
- Duplicate content
- Heading tags
- Keywords
- Optimized images
- Bounce rate
- Average pages per session
- Time spent on page
Sites that have highly relevant information with strong engagement rates are often ranked high in the SERPs for related keywords.
Why Does User Experience Matter For SEO Scoring?
User experience isn’t weighed as heavily when determining SEO scores. However, Google and other search engines do consider a site’s UX when ranking content in the SERPs.
Your site architecture plays a significant role in the user experience portion of your SEO score.
Assess the way things flow from page to page. How many clicks does it take for someone to get from your home page to your deepest internal pages?
Use logic when categorizing your content, products, services, and other pages. Someone shouldn’t have to navigate to your blog before they can browse for a product. That wouldn’t make any sense.
Here are some other factors related to user experience for SEO scores:
- Paragraph length
- Word count
- Bullet points and lists
- Image size
- Mobile optimization
- Third-party scripts
- CSS and JavaScript
- Fonts and text size
- Natural language
Even though the user experience isn’t weighted as high as technical SEO or content for SEO scoring, it’s still something that you need to prioritize as you’re taking steps to improve your SEO score.
What is Mobile Usability in SEO?
Mobile usability holds a medium weight in determining SEO scores. Google now uses mobile-first indexing for websites, which means that websites must have mobile-friendly content to rank high in the SERPs.
Many SEO checkers and audits give you reports that are specifically related to mobile usability. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing tables or dragging a slider to see the different metrics between computers and mobile.
Mobile SEO looks at how fast your site renders across various mobile devices, smartphones, and tablets. It also considers factors like:
- Mobile-friendly designs
- Touchscreen capabilities
- Tapping and scrolling capabilities
- Mobile page loading
- Mobile accessibility
When you consider how much website traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s no surprise to see this factor included in website SEO scores.
What’s the Difference Between SEO Score and Domain Authority?
SEO score and domain authority (DA) are often confused with each other. That’s because they’re both ranked on a 0-100 scale, and many SEO audits include both numbers on a report.
Domain authority is a ranking factor developed by Moz. It predicts how likely a site will rank in searches based on factors like backlinks, backlink relevance, root domains, social signals, SEO performance, and more. These are different factors than the ones used to determine SEO scores.
Many sites with a high domain authority also have a high SEO score. But not all sites with a high SEO score have high domain authority.
For example, a website that’s less than a year old can have a high SEO score as long as it meets the criteria for technical SEO, content, user experience, and mobile responsiveness.
But new domains rarely have high domain authority scores. They just don’t have the same trustworthiness or backlink profile of a domain that’s been getting relevant backlinks for 20+ years.
For domain authority, scores in the 90s are reserved for the Wikipedias, Apples, and Wall Street Journals of the world. But any website can have an SEO score in the 90s.
How Do I Improve My SEO Score?
The easiest way to improve your SEO score is by running an audit.
Relying on platforms like Ubersuggest is your best option, as these reports do more than just give a score. You’ll also be able to detect issues that could be hurting your score.
Reports make it easy to identify broken links, duplicate content, or other technical SEO problems.
Then it’s just a matter of fixing those errors. In many cases, this is a straightforward process. Other times it’s a bit more complex and may require some developer assistance.
How Long Does it Take to Get a Good SEO Score?
Unlike most SEO strategies, which can be a long and grueling process, getting a good SEO score is relatively quick.
Once you address the critical issues and errors that are dragging your score down, your score should improve almost immediately when you run another report.
With that said, don’t expect your site to jump from a 20 to a 95 overnight. You need to have realistic expectations. Sites with lower scores often have larger issues that will take longer to fix.
It’s also worth noting that a higher SEO score doesn’t automatically translate to higher positions in the SERPs—at least not right away.
Google and other search engines still have their own ranking algorithms. Those algorithms are much more in-depth than the factors used to determine SEO scores. But boosting your SEO score is still a great first step on your path to ranking higher in searches and improving your overall SEO strategy.
