What Is an SEO Score? (And How to Check It for Free)

Vlado Pavlik

Jan 31, 20236 min read
seo core

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What Is an SEO Score? 

An SEO score is a metric that shows a website’s overall technical SEO health and indicates how well it can perform in organic search engine rankings. The exact meaning of the metric may differ between various SEO tools.

A typical SEO scoring example would be Semrush's Site Health metric in the Site Audit tool. 

Site Health metric in the Site Audit tool

A high Site Health SEO score means your site's technical aspects are well-optimized for search engines. The more technical issues and problems you have within your site, the lower your SEO score will be.

Note: In this post, we'll focus mostly on the Site Health score. However, we also cover other SEO metrics that can be great indicators of your overall SEO performance. 

How to Check Your SEO Score?

To check your website's SEO score, run a technical SEO audit to analyze your overall SEO health. Semrush has a dedicated tool called Site Audit that can help you with that. 

Here's what you need to do:

First, create a free Semrush account (no credit card needed).

Then, go to “Projects” and create your first project by entering the domain and project name.

"Create project" in the Site Audit tool

Then, head to Site Audit and select your domain (or subdomain or subfolder). 

The tool will crawl your site the same way Google does to analyze any potential technical SEO issues.

Site Audit Settings

You can crawl 100 pages with your free Semrush account. 

To set up your first crawl, follow the steps in this article. It will guide you through the process.

Then, hit the “Start Site Audit” button.

“Start Site Audit” button

Once the crawl is complete, Site Audit provides a detailed overview of your site's health.

It will look like this:

a detailed overview of your site's health in Site Audit tool

The “Site Health” section gives you two important pieces of information:

  • Your Site Health score: based on the number and variety of errors and warnings found on your site
  • The average industry score: based on the Site Health scores of the top 10% of websites in your industry
an example of “Site Health” section with site health score 85%

Now, let's take a look at what impacts your site SEO score and how to improve it.

What Impacts Your SEO Score? 

Here are some of the most important technical SEO aspects that can influence your website’s overall health:

Crawlability and Indexability

Search engines must be able to crawl and index your website in order for it to rank. 

Further reading

Site Architecture

The architecture of your site influences how easy it is to navigate for both humans and search engines.

It includes things like:

  • URL structure
  • Internal linking
  • Navigation

Further reading:

Website Security

Running your website on a secured HTTPS protocol is an absolute must nowadays.

Further reading

Usability

In order to rank, you need to provide a great user experience and high usability. This includes things like having a website that loads fast and is mobile-friendly. 

Further reading

Structured Data

Implementing structured data can help search engines understand various types of content on your site. 

Further reading

How to Improve Your SEO Score? 

You need to address any issues with your website to improve your SEO score.

Begin by clicking the “Issues” tab in the Site Audit tool. 

“Issues” tab in the Site Audit tool

Start from the top down. The issues in the Site Audit tool are ranked by severity:

  • Errors: high-severity issues
  • Warnings: medium-severity issues
  • Notices: not necessarily issues (But it's good to go through them and see what you can improve.)
The issues in the Site Audit tool include errors, warnings and notices

Each line in the list of issues will include a link to the list of affected URLs. 

Plus an explanation of the issue and tips on how to tackle it. Just click on “Why and how to fix it.”

Like this:

an example of “Why and how to fix it” section in the Site Audit

After you fix some (or all) of the flagged issues, you can re-run your audit to see your new results. 

Simply click the “Re-run campaign” button in the top right corner of the dashboard. 

“Re-run campaign” button highlighted in the top right corner of the dashboard

And after you’ve run more than one audit, you'll be able to view historical results to track your progress over time.

To do this, visit the “Progress” tab and select the desired time period and metric(s)—including Site Health.

Like so:

an example of a historical chart for audits in the Site Audit tool

Other SEO Score Metrics

No single metric can tell you where you stand in all aspects of search engine optimization.

Here are some additional SEO metrics you can use (alongside your Site Health) to see how your site is performing.

Authority Score

Authority Score measures a domain’s overall authority based on the quality and quantity of the backlinks, organic traffic, and other data.

Like the Site Health metric, it’s presented on a scale from 0 to 100.

You can easily check your Authority Score with Semrush's Domain Overview tool.

Enter your domain, click “Search.”

Domain Overview tool

And you’ll see your site’s Authority Score in the main “Overview” tab. 

Authority Score metric highlighted in the main “Overview” tab in Domain Overview tool

To get the most out of this metric, compare your Authority Score to your competitors. 

Do this by visiting the “Compare domains” tab. And enter up to four competitor domains.

compare your Authority Score to your competitors in “Compare domains” tab

You’ll see every domain’s Authority Scores and other useful SEO metrics. 

"Compare domains" table with every domain’s Authority Scores and other useful SEO metrics

Tip: To improve your Authority Score, you need to build quality backlinks to your website. We recommend starting with the Backlink Gap tool, which helps you find backlink opportunities by analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles.

On-Page SEO Score 

Sometimes, you just want to look at the overall quality of a single page. 

Semrush has a handy tool that analyzes the text on a single page and scores it on a scale from 1 to 10. It’s called SEO Writing Assistant

Just open the tool and select “Import text from web.” Then add the page’s URL and click “Import.” 

“Import text from web” box in SEO Writing Assistant tool

You’ll see the page’s on-page SEO score in the first widget on the right.

Here:

You will page’s on-page SEO score on the right side in SEO Writing Assistant tool

It analyzes your text in four categories:

  • Readability
  • SEO
  • Tone of Voice
  • Originality

You can follow the provided suggestions and improve the score of your text in real time.

For a more in-depth on-page SEO analysis of your most important pages, you can also use the On Page SEO Checker.

Enter your domain and click “Get ideas.” 

On Page SEO Checker tool

You'll get an overview of all the ideas categorized by these topics:

  • Strategy
  • Backlinks
  • User experience
  • Technical SEO
  • SERP features
  • Semantic
  • Content

Like this:

"Total Ideas" section in the On Page SEO Checker tool

Click on the “Optimization Ideas” tab. You’ll see a list of all the URLs that could use some on-page SEO optimization. 

Sorted by priority. Pages with high priority have a large number of optimization ideas, lots of potential traffic, and a low difficulty level. 

“Optimization Ideas” tab in On Page SEO Checker tool

To see the ideas for a URL, click the blue button with the number of ideas:

an example of a blue button with the number of ideas: 7

You’ll see a list of ideas for that specific page, sorted by category. 

ideas are sorted by categories (strategy, SERP features, content) in SEO On Page Checker tool

You can learn more about each suggestion by hovering over the “Why should I do this?” link in the right column of the table. 

Here:

“Why should I do this?” section helps you understand more about each idea suggestion

By implementing the ideas the tool provides, you can improve your chances of ranking for your most important pages.

Further reading:

FAQs

Why Is Your SEO Score Important?

Checking your web SEO score gives you a comprehensive overview of your website's overall technical health. 

By using an SEO score checker (like Semrush's Site Audit tool), you can track your SEO score progress over time. You'll also receive alerts any time a new serious issue appears. 

What Is a Good SEO Score?

A good Site Health SEO score is anything above 80. If your score is over 90, it means your website is in the top 10% of the best technically optimized websites on the web. 

Once you reach a high SEO rating, you can:

  • Schedule regular Site Audit crawls to spot any possible new issues 
  • Focus on other SEO aspects

Is SEO Score a Ranking Factor?

No. Google doesn’t consider any third-party metric when ranking webpages. 

Although Google and other search engines consider the aspects that contribute to your SEO score, they use their own algorithms to do so. 

That is why increasing your SEO score doesn’t always mean your rankings will improve dramatically. That being said, checking your SEO score on a regular basis can still be a valuable tool to help you identify common problems and stay ahead of competition. 

How Can I Check My SEO Score for Free?

The best way to get an overview of your technical SEO score is to look at the Site Health metric in the Site Audit tool.

Site Health metric highlighted in the "Overview" dashboard in Site Audit tool

You can create a free account in minutes. 

You'll see your SEO score, compare your score to your top competitors, and start fixing technical issues on your site. And lots more. 

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Vlado has over 8 years of experience in SEO, content strategy, and inbound marketing. He’s the former Head of Content at Mangools, and the owner of several websites. He enjoys explaining complex SEO topics in an easy-to-understand way.
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