You are probably wondering how your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) is doing right now– is it high-quality? Evaluating your website’s SEO score is sometimes tricky, especially if you are not an expert in digital marketing.
There are several SEO checker tools you can use to determine your SEO score. You can use free SEO calculators and assess your website’s SEO score in less than a minute. You only have to input your website URL, and the SEO checker tool will immediately scan your page.
If you have found a reliable SEO checker tool, let’s discuss the SEO report and score results.
What does my website SEO score mean?
The SEO report will give your website a score from 0 to 100. There’s a range for the scores:
- 100 to 70 is an excellent score for a website’s SEO.
- 69 to 41 is an average score.
- 40 to 0 is a low score that needs further improvement tasks.
You can understand how your website is well-optimized for searches through your SEO score.
Some SEO checker tools provide scores for other SEO elements. The SEO scare will tell you whether your page has passed, needs improvement, or there’s an error for specific components.
Factors of SEO and How It Affects the Score
9 critical factors affect a web page’s search engine ranking of a webpage, and SEO checkers analyze these factors.
1. Page Speed
Web users want pages and websites that load quickly. Almost 85% of the users expect web pages to load in three seconds or less. If your page loads more than 3 seconds, users consider it slow and give up on it, leading them to find another website.
Page speed is a crucial SEO ranking factor, it tells how users can easily access and use your website. If your website loads slow, you need to check how page speed optimization is done to improve your website speed, boost site ranking, and search visibility.
SEO checker tools consider the page speed when calculating the SEO score of your website. The tool will look at the CSS, HTML, images, Javascript, and other elements of your website. Moreover, it provides specific tips on how you can optimize your page speed.
2. URL Optimization
URLs help users navigate through your website. It will tell the search engines about your pages.
Optimize your URLs to improve your website rankings. Google SEO checker will analyze various optimization factors for the URL, such as:
- Keyword use which includes the primary target keyword used in your URL will improve the rankings for the keyword.
- Top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of the domain name (.com, .org. and .net). Choose a well-known TLD to improve your SEO.
- Underscores to separate the words in your URL is not helpful. Use hyphens to improve your SEO.
The SEO report will tell you how your page performs in the above three areas and factor them into your overall SEO score.
3. Title, Meta Description, Heading Tags
Search engines use tags to understand your page and determine which keywords should rank for search visibility. These tags include meta description, title, and headings.
- Heading tags are the H1, H2, H3, and so on inside your content. It helps identify the sections of your page. The SEO checker will determine whether you added your keyword in the heading tags.
- Meta description is a brief description or explanation of your page content. It will appear on the search engine results page under the title tag. SEO checker tool will assess the length and keywords used within the meta description.
- Title tag describes your page to Google. The ag will show up on the search engine results page. SEO checker tools analyze the length of your title tag and the keywords within your title.
4. Content Grade
The SEO checker tool will also assess the content and make a report regarding the length, format, and keyword density of the content. These factors also affect the SEO score of your website.
You can optimize your page for both search engines and users by including target keywords naturally in your content.
You can use an exact-match keyword several times throughout your content. However, you have to be careful and avoid keyword stuffing. If you will overuse the keywords, your content becomes hard to understand and it might hurt your user experience and SEO.
5. Image Optimization
Images help search engines understand your content, that’s why you have to optimize your images and media content to help you rank in searches.
The SEO checker tool will evaluate the file name and alt tags of the images you upload on your website. It helps search engines understand your visuals. Input brief descriptions of your image and include keywords.
For example, you uploaded an image of Jennie of Blackpink on your page. The filename of the image should be SEO-friendly, it would be Jennie-of-Blackpink-.png, while the alt tag of the image has to be something similar to this, “pretty Jennie of Blackpink.”
6. Page Links
In search engine optimization, page linking is a crucial factor. It helps users and search engines find your website. Google will use page linking to determine how to rank your website.
Pages pass “authority” to one another. If your page has more links from high authority or well-known websites, it has a better search ranking.
The SEO report will include data about the page links, which includes the ratio between internal and external links. Internal links are the links between pages of your website, while external links are those from other websites.
You can optimize page links by linking to relevant content that’s helpful for your readers and use descriptive anchor text.
Ensure that each page of your website has a least a few internal links leading to it. Internal links will help search engines find the web page and pass authority to it which boosts the ranking.
The SEO report will include a backlinks score. It gives an insight into the quality and quantity of the links to your page from other domains. Backlinks provide similar benefits as the internal links, links from authoritative websites give a significant impact on the page rankings.
7. Website Security
If your website is unsecured, there’s a greater chance your visitors will leave immediately from your website which can affect your search engine rankings.
It is best to have a valid Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to make your website secure and redirect your URLs to HTTPS pages. Avoid placing your email address to your site in plain text. There are spammers who scrape email addresses and flood your email inbox.
8. Mobile Friendliness
Google utilizes a mobile-first index, it first evaluates the webpages if they are accessible from the mobile user’s perspective. Websites have to be mobile-friendly because of the growing importance of Internet traffic from mobile users. Thus, if your website is mobile-friendly, you will have a good Google SEO score.
SEO checker tools determine the scores of the website and evaluate the following factors:
- Responsive Design: This allows your website to adjust appropriately on the screen on which someone views it.
- Tap Target: It is the buttons pressed by the users on their devices. Buttons must have appropriate spacing to ensure they are easy to see and use.
- Mobile Viewport: It describes how the content appears on various devices. The content should fit appropriately in every viewport size.
9. Index
Search engines have to crawl and index your website for it to rank in the search results. SEO calculator tools can determine whether the URLs of your website are indexed properly.
It will also assess components that help your website index. These components are:
- .txt file: It will tell the search engines which web pages on your website will crawl and not to crawl. It will direct search engine crawlers to your XML sitemap.
- XML Sitemap: The XML sitemap tallies the pages on your website and helps search engines look for the content that they have to index.
Final Thoughts
Check out some SEO checker tools to help you determine the SEO score of your website. There are several free tools available on the web. You only have to input your URL, name, and email address to get your SEO score and report.
Besides the overall SEO score, the SEO report will provide the following data:
- SEO issues of website
- How to fix the SEO issues
- Which issue to prioritize according to its impact on the website’s SEO
- How to improve the website’s SEO issues
You will not determine the SEO score of your website and learn how to improve it without a reliable SEO checker tool.