SEO Score

Why It Matters

• It highlights technical issues quickly. A low score draws attention to missing meta descriptions, broken links, missing alt text, or other problems that are easy to overlook when reviewing a page manually. It acts as a checklist you did not have to write.
• It helps prioritize work. When you have hundreds of pages, you cannot optimize all of them at once. Sorting by SEO score helps you identify the pages with the most issues so you can tackle the worst offenders first.
• It tracks improvement over time. Comparing scores before and after optimization work gives you a measurable indicator that changes are having an effect. It is motivating and helps communicate progress to stakeholders.
• It does not predict rankings. This is the most important thing to understand. A perfect score does not guarantee a top ranking. Rankings depend on content quality, relevance, backlinks, competition, and dozens of other factors that no score can fully capture.

How to Use It Wisely

1. Treat it as a starting point, not a target. Use the score to discover issues worth investigating, then dig into the specific recommendations. The individual findings — missing title, no alt text, slow load time — are more actionable than the number itself.
2. Focus on the recommendations, not the number. A score of 85 versus 90 does not matter. What matters is whether the issues flagged are real problems that affect your users and search visibility. Fix meaningful issues and let the score follow.
3. Compare pages against each other. Use scores to compare pages within your own site and identify which ones need the most attention. Comparing your score against a competitor's is less useful because different tools weight factors differently.
4. Run checks regularly. A page that scored well six months ago may have new issues — broken links from content changes, images added without alt text, or a new script slowing things down. Regular checks catch regressions.
5. Understand what the score does not measure. Content quality, topical authority, backlink profile, user engagement, and competitive landscape all affect rankings but are not captured by most SEO scores. A technically perfect page with weak content will still struggle.

Common Mistakes

• Chasing a perfect score. Obsessing over reaching 100 leads to diminishing returns. Once you have addressed all meaningful issues, the remaining points often come from minor suggestions that have no real impact on search performance.
• Equating score with ranking ability. A page with a 95 SEO score can rank below a page with a 70 if the lower-scored page has better content, more backlinks, and stronger topical authority. The score measures compliance with best practices, not competitive strength.
• Ignoring content quality. The most common version of this mistake is making a page technically perfect while the actual text is thin, generic, or unhelpful. Search engines rank content that serves users, not content that passes technical checklists.
• Using different tools inconsistently. Different scoring tools weight factors differently, so comparing scores across tools is meaningless. Pick one tool and use it consistently to track your progress over time.