What Is an SEO Score? : A Guide to Improved SEO Rankings in 2024

What is an SEO score? In short, it’s a way to measure how well your website is optimized for Google by considering factors like content quality, keyword use, backlinks, and technical aspects.

That means the higher the score, the better your visibility will be in search results.

There are different tools, plugins, and site analyzers to check your SEO score, such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. But the results will slightly differ because every SEO tool uses its unique algorithm and methodology to calculate SEO scores. You better use a combination of those tools and manual assessment for a comprehensive view.

Let’s dig deeper and know more about SEO scores.

What is an SEO Score?

An SEO score measures the quality of your website’s technical aspects and user friendliness and how they impact your SEO.

There are three main criteria used the assess health and overall performance of a website:

1. Technical

Technical SEO is about optimizing your site’s technical aspects to improve its search engine performance. It includes elements like site speed, mobile-friendliness, indexability, crawlability, HTTPS security, structured data, XML sitemaps, canonicalization, server considerations, URL structure, and more.

A technical SEO score measures how easily search engine bots can crawl, access and index your site. In fact, on-page and off-page SEO can’t save a site from technical errors.

2. On-page

On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages through keyword research, high-quality content, meta tags, headers, URL structure, and internal linking. An on-page SEO score calculates if every web page on your site follows on-page SEO’s best practices and helps identify areas for improvement.

3. Off-page

Off-page SEO focuses on optimizing factors outside your website, such as link building, social media promotion, influencer outreach, and online reputation management. This is necessary to enhance your authority, credibility, and visibility.

We will know more about these factors later in the article.

What is a Good SEO Score Out of 100?

Most SEO scores are usually graded from 0 to 100. A high score means your website is well-optimized for Google and your SEO campaign is a success so far.

So, what is considered a good SEO score?

• 80 – 100 = Great
• 41 – 79   =  Average
• 0 – 40     =  Poor

Along with an overall assessment of your SEO, you will also get insights on other SEO elements such as how well your images and meta title tags are optimized. You can use these metrics to focus on improving the weaker areas of the site while maintaining its strengths.

Popular Tools to Check Your SEO Score

1. SEMRush

SEMRush’s free SEO score checker is very popular in the SEO community. It offers various functionalities for competitive research, keyword research, site auditing, backlink analysis, and more to help businesses and digital marketers optimize their online presence. The SEO Score feature can be found in their site audit report.

The report provides information on –

• Internal Linking- This score is calculated using data from page crawl depth, internal links and their distribution

• Crawlability – The crawlability score is calculated using site indexability, crawl budget waste, incoming internal links, crawl depth and HTTPS status code

• Site Performance- This is calculated using the speed of a page, JS (JavaScript) and CSS size

• Markup – Calculated using the number of pages with markup, type of markup used and structured data items

• HTTPS Implementation- SSL certificate, HTTPS protocol and website architecture are used to calculate this metric

Packages	Price
Pro	$119.95 per month
Guru	$229.5 per month
Business	$449.95 per month

2. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another all-in-one SEO tool that can be used to measure your SEO score, generate reports, and track growth. From site audit to rank tracking to keyword research to backlink analysis, Moz has everything to help level up your SEO.

This is what you can expect from Moz’s Free Domain SEO Metrics –

• Mobile performance- The performance of your website on mobile devices

• Desktop Performance- The performance of your website on desktop devices

• PA (Page Authority)- This is a proprietary Moz metric that scores the authority, trust and relevance of a page between 1 and 100. It is calculated using metrics like traffic, issues, crawl depth, and keywords.

• Website crawler- a crawler bot that can analyze up to 3000 links for a URL

• Insights into crawlability factors- Duplicate content and dead pages that affect your SEO score negatively

• DA (domain authority) – This metric determines the credibility of a website

• Top ranking keywords- keywords categorized in terms of their ranking positions

• Top featured snippet- keywords in the website that trigger a featured snippet

• Branded keywords- keywords with the highest search volume that represents the brand

• Top search competitors- All the websites that compete and rank for the same keywords as you

• Spam score- a proprietary Moz metric that is calculated using an algorithm that was created based on 27 common issues found among millions of penalized and banned websites
• Keywords by estimated clicks- The number of clicks that top keywords get based on their volumes and click through rates (CTR)

Package	Price
Free Trial	30 days free
Standard	$99/ month
Medium	$149/ month
Large	$249/ month
Premium	$599 / month

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another advanced SEO toolset available with a wide range of features to help with various aspects of SEO, competitive analysis, and content marketing.

One of the most popular features of Ahrefs Seo scoring tool is the ability to schedule regular SEO checks to keep track of your site’s health regularly.

The primary features that Ahrefs SEO checker uses are –

• Website performance – load time of a webpage

• HTML tags – Title tags, H1 tag and Meta description

• Quality of content – Repeat and duplicate content

• Localization – Hreflang issues

• Incoming links – Number of orphan pages

• Outgoing links – Broken links and page

• Issues- Problems with sitemaps, Robots.txt

• Broken links, JavaScript and images

Package	Price
7 day free trial	$7
Lite	$99 per month
Standard	$179 per month
Advanced	$399 per month
Agency	$999 per month

4. Google Search Console

Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is a free web service provided by Google for webmasters and website owners. There are a lot of tools and reports to help website owners monitor, manage, and optimize the way their websites appear in Google’s search results.

Google Search Console is a valuable resource for understanding how Google’s search engine interacts with your website, and it provides insights and data related to your site’s performance in Google Search.

Some elements that Google Search Console can help you monitor and measure-

• Google Index – The number of web pages in Google’s Index

• Crawling error – the number of crawl errors on your website

• Keywords – Ranking of keywords

• Mobile Responsiveness – The speed and user experience of your website on mobile devices

• Average position – Average position of the highest result from your website

• Position – Average position for your URL in search results

• Clicks – number of clicks from Google’s SERP that lands the user on your domain

• Impression – Number of links to your website that a user sees on Google’s SERP

• CTR (click through rate)- the number of clicks divided by number of impressions

5. Hubspot

Hubspot’s Website Grader Tool can help you measure the quality of your website and SEO efforts. They use various metrics to generate a report card for you. Some important metrics used to measure the score are-

• Permission to Index- How easily search engine bots can crawl your website

• Meta Description- The description of your page that appears on SERP (search engine result page)

• Content Plugin- Browsers plugins that help search engines understand content such as Flash

• Descriptive Link text- Helps visitors know what they will see if they click on the link

Package	Price
Starter plan	$45 per month
Professional	$800 per month
Enterprise	$3,200 per month

Hubspot’s website grader tool is absolutely free, but they have paid plans as well that offer many more features, such as-

• Email marketing – personalized emails for your brand at a large scale

• Automated marketing campaigns- Dynamic marketing campaigns for different audience segments

• Analytics- Insights and reports on your marketing campaigns along with other elements from your SEO efforts

Factors that Affect Your SEO Score

1. On-Page Factors

a) Keywords

The words or phrases used to search for a query in Google or other search engines are known as keywords. You should target specific keywords related to your product or services. Sometimes they are single words and sometimes they are phrases. For example, Amazon will try to target keywords like “e-commerce” and ‘ecommerce business’

Search engines try to show results which are most relevant to the user’s query. They measure this using keywords. Google has a complex algorithm used to measure relevancy. One of the ways they do this is by calculating the frequency, location, and use of keywords in the text. This helps them understand if the webpage is what the user is searching for.

You need to find the right keywords for each page on your website. The keywords you choose should be relevant and define your webpages. Every page needs a primary keyword and a few secondary keywords. Do keyword research by looking at search intent, volume and competition for words and phrases related to a topic.

The primary keyword needs to naturally appear in meta title tags, meta descriptions, headings, alt tags, and a few times in the body. Make sure the keyword feels organic in the text as keyword stuffing often results in negative scoring.

b) Content Quality

According to Google, their goal is to provide quality and reliable content with an intention to benefit people. They have their own guidelines that you can use to measure the quality of your content.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Does my content give original and complete information?

• Does my content offer complete coverage of a topic or product?

• Does my content offer intriguing information or a different product from the competition?

• Will users like to bookmark or share my page?

• Will my content or product be shared on other online and traditional media outlets?

c) Meta Title Tags 

Meta title tags appear under the URL and above the meta description in the search engine results pages (SERP). Meta title tags should include attractive and catchy keywords that are optimized for search engines.

Your title tags should not be more than 60 characters because Google will rewrite it themselves if it exceeds that limit. You should also include your primary keyword and try to catch the user’s search intent in a catchy manner. Remember, the meta title tag needs to be relevant to the content because inaccurate titles will increase your bounce rates.

d) Internal Linking

Internal links have a major impact on an SEO score because they distribute link equity around the website and help optimize anchor texts to the next page. The anchor texts should be optimized with your primary keywords and other internal links should be placed wisely.

e) User experience (UX)

User experience may not have the top priority when measuring your SEO Score but Google considers this when ranking a website. UX mainly revolves around:

• Page loading speed
• Mobile responsiveness
• Images and multimedia
• Navigation, accessibility, and functionality

2. Off-Page Factors

a) Backlinks

Google uses backlinks to measure the reliability and trustworthiness of a website. Quality inbound links from relevant and high-DA sites (Domain Authority) help improve your online reputation as well.

Backlinks are another crucial factor when calculating an SEO score. In fact, Google considers it one of top 3 ranking factors.

So, how can you improve your backlink profile?

• Number of linked root domains: the more relevant and credible domains you have linked to your website, the higher your SEO score will be.

• Link quality: Links from high authority websites

• Anchor text: Anchor text is the text in a hyperlink. Google uses anchor texts to understand the context and relevance of a backlink. Keywords included in anchor texts will help you gain a higher SEO score

• Relevance: If you are a doctor, a link from a pharmaceutical website will bring more value to your site than a link from a bicycle website.

b) Social Signals

Social media has now become an important aspect of off-page SEO. Google displays links to social platforms on Google Business profiles. When your social media campaign is successful, you earn more followers and awareness that leads to increased web traffic.

Social signals are a measure of your brand’s performance across different online channels. They are calculated using all the linking, mentions and comments regarding your business on different social media platforms.

c) Mentions and citations

Businesses can build a valuable citation profile in both structured and unstructured ways. You can earn structured citations through listing yo