What Is An SEO Score & Why Does It Matter For Your Website
SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the most, if not the most, important facet of creating a thriving and successful website. According to research done by Experience Dynamics, 70% of customers learn about a website and come to make a purchase because of their blog, not any kind of advertisements. This means SEO and your SEO score are critical to gathering organic traffic.
An SEO score is an aggregation of the technical aspects and user experience of your website to understand better how the algorithms might affect your search engine rankings. Ideally, you want your website to be as high as possible on the SERP (search engine results page), so increasing your SEO score is important for higher rankings.
In this article, we are going to discuss in-depth how your SEO score is determined, the different factors to consider when working on improving your SEO score, what is a good SEO score to shoot for and how to get there, and wrap up with some of the best SEO tools to check your SEO score.
How Is An SEO Score Determined?
There are several metrics to consider regarding how Google Search and other search engines determine your SEO score. Depending on which SEO audit tools you use to improve your SEO score, there is going to be a wide range of factors that come into play in your site audit.
An SEO analysis of your web page will give you a good understanding of how an SEO score checker might determine your particular score. Search engines like Google tend to keep the intricate details of how their crawlers and algorithms score each web page close to their chest, which makes it difficult to know exactly what is going on behind the scenes.
However, this list below will give you a good idea of how your SEO score is determined and how you can start working towards earning a high SEO score for your site.
It is also worth noting that your overall website can also earn what is called a domain authority score rather than every individual page having its own score.
Crawlability: Major companies like Meta and Google use a variety of programs called bots or crawlers to work through every single web page on the internet. How easily your website is crawled or scanned by these bots can affect your overall SEO score.
- Page speed, internal links, broken links, meta descriptions, meta titles, alt text, whether you use HTML or javascript, etc., can all affect your site's crawlability.
Indexability: Similar to crawlability, these bots will index, or organize and categorize, your site to make it easier to show up on the search engine results page. This is where target keywords come into play, and other website content optimization tools can be used to boost your SEO score.
- Domain name, redirects, plugins, FAQs, friendly URLs, and external links can all play a role in the indexability of your site.
Site architecture: The most under-developed website ranking factors fall into the site architecture category. These are all the technical aspects of your site that bots use to organize your data into something that makes sense when populated on the SERP.
- Meta titles and meta descriptions, backlinks and internal links, high-quality non-duplicate content, and your overall technical SEO impact your SEO score.
Site security: The overall security of your website is a more recent ranking factor in the SEO landscape. With the increase of phishing and scams on the internet, search engines have placed a higher priority on sites that protect user information and allow them to browse their website safely.
- Making sure that your website is protected and including plugins that deter or immediately report suspicious behavior can go a long way to improving your SEO score.
Usability and accessibility: In recent years, there has been an emphasis on accessibility features on websites, especially for mobile devices. SEO issues here include things that make the user experience better for impaired users.
- Using alt tags and alt text, and offering audio and video options as much as possible on your web page can boost your website SEO score.
Data structure: Like with site architecture, the data structure of your website falls firmly into your technical SEO efforts. There are little-to-no user-facing benefits for data structure improvements, but they can make your website far easier to crawl and index while also streamlining your content readability for users.
- Tags, categories, and simplified domains can help increase your website's ranking SEO score.
Authority score: As mentioned earlier, there is a domain authority score that isn’t often discussed, but it is becoming more relevant as Google specifically places more emphasis on experience and authority for websites to rank higher on the SERP.
- Your authority score is largely determined by the number of people referencing your page through backlinks, external links to other authoritative sources, and even the amount of website traffic already coming through your site.
On-page SEO score: Your on-page SEO is a critical part of your digital marketing, but it is also a major part of your overall SEO score. Creating content that is high-quality, reputable, authoritative, experiential, and leads to high conversions all affect your SEO score.
- Keyword research, homepages built with your most effective target keywords, and other on-page SEO factors should all have a special place in your SEO strategy to earn a high SEO score.
What Is A Good SEO Score?
Like in grade school, you aim for the best score possible. Every SEO score checker will have a slightly different ranking system, but most put your website on a scale from 1-100. With that scoring system in mind, you want to aim for a minimum of 70-80 across all your SEO efforts.
While some of the most technical aspects of your SEO issues might be out of your wheelhouse, many of these can be handled by anyone with the determination to click around and figure things out! This means a good SEO score is within reach for anyone at any stage of their website journey.
How Do I Get A Good SEO Score?
According to research by TPT Digital, SEO content optimization can increase the overall business value of a blog post by up to 429%! Having the right website content optimization tools is critical to earning a high SEO score, but that’s a small part of a much bigger picture.
You can get a good SEO score by following up on every item in this article and staying on top of your SEO maintenance. Even a little bit every day can lead to huge improvements in your SEO score over time.
If SEO content optimization can increase the value of a blog post by 400%, imagine the long-term benefits of continuously improving your SEO score!
Where Can I Check My SEO Score?
- Ahrefs: This site is optimal for improving your backlink and overall linking structure, which can improve your SEO score and pack more value into your website.
- SEMRush: This SEO tool is best for keyword research and ensuring that every shred of copy and content on your website provides as much SEO value as possible.
- Moz Pro: This site helps with your technical SEO efforts and can give you a good idea of how your SEO score is looking as you make tweaks and improvements.
For the complete list of our best SEO tools, check out the full article that breaks down our top 10 SEO score checkers and tools and how we scored each tool, and its impact on your SEO strategy.
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