An SEO score is a metric given by an SEO tool to give you an idea about the health of your website regarding SEO. The exact meaning will differ depending on which tool you use. But generally speaking, it refers to the technical SEO health of your site.
Having technical errors on your website can significantly impact how your site performs on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, you’ll want to ensure your site gets the best SEO score possible. The more technical issues your site has, the lower your score will be.
By tracking your SEO score, you can understand which areas of your site need improvement.
To improve your SEO or Health Score, you must address any errors your site has. You can see all of the problems your website currently faces in the “All Issues” tab in the left-hand menu.
Issues have a color-coding system that indicates their importance. Errors are marked in red, warnings in yellow, and notices in blue. You want to fix as many of these as possible, but errors are the most important.
When you click on an error, you will be taken to a breakdown of the issue. This can include the URLs that the issue appears on, as well as other metrics such as whether the page has organic traffic, if it’s indexable, etc.
As Ahrefs is dedicated to helping you improve your SEO as much as possible, there is also a “Why and how to fix” button for each issue. This will open a pop-up that explains the issue in detail and advises how to fix it.
You can work your way through fixing any issues you can. However, if you are less experienced and have very technical issues, such as localization problems or issues with schema markup, then you may want to find an affordable SEO service provider to help you.
Frequently asked questions about the SEO score.
What factors contribute to an SEO score?
There are a number of errors that Ahrefs’ Site Audit takes into consideration when calculating your Health Score:
- Crawlability issues
- Duplicate content (canonical issues)
- Localization issues (hreflang problems)
- HTML tag issues (multiple meta, title, and H1 tags)
- Problems with sitemaps
- Robots.txt issues
- Broken or missing internal and external links
- Broken JavaScript
- Broken images and large images
What is a good SEO score?
Any score over 80 would be considered “good,” meaning 80% of internal URLs are error-free. If your site has a score above 90, this is considered “excellent.”
Why is a good SEO score important?
Monitoring your SEO health can give you a comprehensive understanding of how technically sound your website is.
Having an excellent SEO score means your site is free of technical errors that may be hurting its performance in search engines.
Does an SEO score matter for ranking?
Yes and no. Google doesn’t take any third-party metric into account as a ranking factor. So having a top SEO score doesn’t always mean your ranking will improve.
However, Google does use its own algorithms that take into consideration some of the factors that contribute to your SEO score. Therefore, if your SEO score is very low, it’s likely the issues affecting your score may also be affecting your positioning or even blocking your pages from showing up in search results.
How can I check my SEO score for free?
Create a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and add your website as a project. From here, you can run monthly, weekly, or even daily site audits as you need to check and continuously monitor your SEO score.
