Today, almost everyone wants to have the best score to have their business on the first page of search engine results. SEO score checkers show you how your website is doing.

But why does it matter to your business?

A while ago, webmasters would use PageRank to see their SEO scores. However, Google stopped updating PageRank, and now, only Google has your SEO scores. This score shows how your website fairs on search engines. A higher score means your website will appear on the first pages of search engines and a lower score means you may even miss out on the search engine pages.

In this guide, we show you how to check the SEO score of a site and how to make sense of the numbers.

SEO Score Checker: What an SEO Score Includes

An SEO score shows how your website fairs on different aspects that contribute to page ranking. These aspects might be technical or user-facing. Under that, there are subcategories, which include:

• Technical
• Content
• User Experience
• Mobile

Your website’s score on the four categories above determines where you rank on search engine pages. You can check the scores by inspecting different elements on your website and recording the scores for these elements. The inspection may involve checking the presence or absence of an element in your website, say robots.txt or sitemaps files.

The score comes as a percentage.

Technical Scores

The technical aspects of a website relate to its design. When you need to check SEO score of website, you will consider:

• Page load speeds
• Ease of navigation
• Ease of indexing
• Responsiveness to different devices

If search engines fail to properly index your website due to design inadequacies or flaws, your website will not appear on search engine results. Technical SEO forms the basis of all other SEO strategies you will implement. If the technical aspect of your website is not in order, all other optimizations and content you update will not help rank you higher.

Your technical SEO needs to be addressed during the web design process and not after the website goes live. During design, you need to plan and get the URLs in order, responsiveness, navigation, and any other technical aspect. Once the site goes live, you can check your SEO score through an audit.

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Domain Authority

Domain authority is also referred to as thought leadership. It refers to how relevant the information you offer on your website is in the industry. These metrics come from a third party such as Moz.

Moz offers content, guides, and tools for link building, content marketing, and inbound marketing among others. Your domain authority is determined by a number of factors including:

• Linking Root Domain
• Quality of Content
• Social Signals
• Search Engine Friendliness
• Quality or External Links
• Strength of External Links

Moz uses the tools MozTrust and MozRank to help determine the quality and strength of your external links. The tools rank your site on a scale of one-ten, with ten being the highest or strongest score. If you get above three, which is the average score, you are good to go.

Once Moz, or any other tool you may choose to use, checks all the factors, they then give your website a score between one and 100. A small business should aim to get between 31 and 40. From there, you can work your way upwards one score at a time. The image below shows what Moz’s Domain Authority tool should look like:

(Image Credit: MonsterInsights)

This score keeps changing based on the factors that Moz and other tools use, and based on the content and features of your website. Again, the score is best used to compare your position in relation to that of your competitors. If your score is 40 and all your competitors are between 35 and 45, then your business is good. If you are at 50 and most of your competitors are at 80, then you will lose space on search engine results pages to them.

How to Improve the Domain Authority Score of a Website

It is not enough for me to check my SEO score. I need to work to keep the score high and beat the competition. The process of bettering your score starts during the design of your website. For starters consider the following tips:

• Choose a domain name that visitors remember and associate with your brand
• Optimize your page content to include image alt tags, title tags, meta descriptions, and also optimize the content
• Create content that other webmasters can link to
• Improve the internal linking structure of your website
• Remove broken links and links from bad sources
• Design a mobile-friendly site
• Create unique content that visitors can only find in your website
• Ensure your website pages load in less than 3 seconds
• Be an authority on social media
• Improve user experience on your website

Which Domain Authority Score is Right?

Below are possible scores:

• 1 – 10: Poor. This is for young and weak sites, and it means you have a lot of work to do.
• 11 – 20: Decent. Your site is launching in the right direction.
• 21 – 30: Fair. Your site is beginning to improve in its SEO, but there are still hundreds of things you need to do to improve it.
• 31 – 40: Average. This is where most startups fall. If your site is here, you are doing relatively well, but it means there are so many competitors around you.
• 41 – 50: Good. Once you leave the stage where most competitors are, you land here where most ecommerce sites are.
• 51 – 60: Very Good: This is a strong and healthy score occupied by some of the most popular sites you see online.
• 61 – 70: Excellent. This score is for sites with a lot of recognition, quality content, quality links, and so much traffic. This is the category most .edu sites fall in.
• 71 – 80: Outstanding. This is for sites that appear on the first page of search engine results.
• 81 – 90: Very Outstanding. This is for accomplished sites that tick all SEO boxes.
• 91 – 100: Impeccable. This is a spot for a few websites such as Facebook and Wikipedia. You may never get to this level, but you should aim for it to land on a better spot than the one you are on.

Alexa Global Rankings

Alexa doesn’t give you a numerical score. Instead, the service compares your website performance in terms of the traffic you receive to the performance of so many other websites.

You can opt to see your global ranking or your country ranking. If you run a local business, you can check SEO score free and compare that with the competitors’ score. Alexa ranks you based on the number of visitors you receive and the behavior of these visitors. For you to get a rank, Alexa needs to observe your business for at least three months.

(Image Credit: Kinsta)

Website Indexability

Not all websites appear on the search engines results page. If search engines fail to index your site, the traffic you get reduces significantly. Once your site is indexed, search engine bots will crawl your site with ease and collect all the information needed to rank you. Some of the factors that determine how easy it is to index your site include:

• Good site structure
• Simple internal linking structure
• Having no looped redirects
• No server errors
• Having no unsupported scripts
• Having an XML sitemap
• Presence of Robots.txt file
• Having no duplicate content

If your site meets all the above, search engines will index it, and you will start getting traffic from them.

URL Structure

How do your URLs read on the address bar? Do they show the full title of the content, a snippet of the content, or just numbers and symbols?

Your URL should be easy to read. Your visitors should know what the website is about before they click on the link. Search engines consider the keywords in your URL when ranking your pages. If there is a keyword, you might rank higher. However, this doesn’t mean that you stuff keywords in your URLs.

To have the best URLs, keep them simple, make them definitive, separate words with hyphens, and only use lowercase letters.

Backlinks

Also referred to as inbound links, these are links to external websites. The links show your confidence in the website your readers landed on. Backlinks show that a specific website has quality that other websites can link to. If many other websites link to your website, search engines view your site as an authority, and you rank higher.

As a result, you need to have as many trustworthy backlinks as you can. The process of link building is part of off-site SEO.

You can have as many backlinks as possible, but it depends on the value of the links. A Link can be followed or nofollow. Follow links are great, but only if they are from authoritative sources. The process of researching and building backlinks can be challenging. You might have to write content for the business in authority in your niche to earn a link.

There are many link research tools such as Moz and Ahrefs that will help you find the best sites to link to and from. For example:

(Image Credit: Ahrefs)

Site Speed

This is another factor that determines the technical SEO score of your website. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, you will lose more than 25 percent of your visitors.

There are many tools you can use to check your website’s speed, including Pingdom, Speedtest.com, Testmy.net, Speedof.me, and many others. You need to aim for page load speeds of three seconds or less to avoid losing visitors to your competitors. Here is an image showing the website speed test GTmetrix:

(Image Credit: GTmetrix)

Many factors can contribute to slow site speeds including:

• Large-sized images
• Sophisticated website structure
• Redirects
• Slow host
• Broken links

To ensure your pages load faster, you need to optimize your images to ensure your visitors can see the images on your website without waiting for the site to load for more than 10 seconds. Use a simple web design to reduce the HTTP requests you need to send before you receive the information you need. You should also enable caching to reduce the time it takes pages to load for the repeat customers.

Site load speeds are as follows:

• 0 – 1 second: Good. Keep doing what you are doing.
• 2 -3 seconds: Fair. This is average for most sites, but you should always aim to improve.
• 4 seconds or more: Poor. You will lose visitors at this speed. You can change from a slow host to a faster host or use a CDN to improve speed.

We hope that you found this article useful.

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Site Content 

When you check the SEO score of a site, a large part of that score is determined by the content. Content affects more than your search engine rankings. It is through content that your visitors can create a connection with your brand.

SEO scores based on content consider:

• The quality of your current content – Here, you need updated content, easy to navigate, concise, free of spelling and grammar mistakes.
• Indexable meta content – Search engines should index the meta-titles and the meta-description in your content. These elements of your content help search engines determine what your site offers. They will also help your site visitors find the content they need fast.
• Unique content – You need to avoid copying content from other sites and instead develop your content from scratch. You should also avoid duplicate content on your website. You can use tools such as Grammarly and Copywritely to see the uniqueness, grammar, and choice of word scores for your content. You can then use that score to improve your content. Always aim for a score of at least 90 percent.

(Image Credit: SEO Review Tools)

User Experience

When you check the SEO score of a website, the score should include user experience. This refers to how easy it is for users to access different parts and features of your website. Basically, user experience refers to how pleasing visitors find it to use your website. Here, the score considers:

• User friendly visuals
• Ease of navigation

There are so many tools online that can help you measure the user experience of your website. These tools show you what happens when visitors get to your website. The tools include:

• UsabilityTools
• ClickTale
• Usabilia
• Pidoco
• Balsamiq

These tools have different scoring methods and scales, but they all check how easy and pleasing it is for visitors to use your website. If you need to improve your user experience score, you need to have:

• A simple landing page with amazing visuals
• Choose relevant and high-quality images
• Be consistent on all your web pages
• Use simple icons
• Use white space to differentiate elements on your website
• Limit the content and refine your words
• Have a simple menu with clear labels
• Make pages easier to locate
• Have search functionality with advanced search filters
• Use readable fonts and font sizes

Mobile Responsiveness

Your website needs to be easy to use on PC and on mobile devices. Today, most people who access the internet do so on mobile devices. Statista estimates that traffic from mobile devices is about 50 percent of the traffic that sites receive. With at least half of those coming to your website doing so on mobile, you need a site whose pages and functionalities are accessible on mobile.

Today, website design platforms allow you to create mobile friendly sites without coding or complicated processes. Be sure to pick a responsive platform, responsive theme, and everything else should be responsive.

Some platforms allow you to create different sites for PC and mobile. While this means you create two different sites, you are able to better optimize the features of your website for mobile users.

When I check my SEO score, I use Google Mobile Friendliness checker. This checker does not show a numerical code, but shows how different pages appear on mobile. The checker will tell whether your website is mobile friendly and show you a screenshot of your website. For instance:

(Image Credit: Google Support)

Test Keywords

Your keywords determine where you rank on search engines. To start the keyword test, sign out of your Google accounts to make the research more effective. Research on all long tail keywords you use on your website on Google. Count the sites before your site to see your rank. If your site is not among the first few websites on search engine results, use tools such as SERPWatcher, Moz Rank Tracker, SEMRush, and SEOprofiler to see where you rank on Google. For example:

(Image Credit: SEMrush)

If you are in the first five positions, your website is performing excellently. If your site is on page two, you are performing fairly. Page three is also not so bad, but if you are on page four onwards, you need to start working on your SEO.

Diib®: Check and Improve Your SEO Score Today!

There are many tools that allow you to check SEO score free. A tool such as Google Analytics allows you to check your SEO score for different aspects of a website. The scores from different tools and on different aspects and elements of your website give you the aggregate score that shows the health of your website. Diib offers minute-by-minute updates on your SEO Score and your overall website health. Along with this, you’ll receive actionable insights into their improvement. Here are some of the features of the Diib dashboard we know you’ll love:

• Bounce rate monitoring and repair
• Social media integration and performance
• Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
• Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
• User experience and mobile speed optimization
• SEO score monitoring

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