Improving brand visibility can feel like an uphill battle. Just when your website is performing well, bringing in traffic and clicks, a sudden algorithm change can mysteriously cause your traffic to drop off. Enter one of the most popular tools for checking your web performance: the SEO score.
Why SEO Scores Are Confusing (and Why That Matters)
SEO scores provide a big-picture overview of how well the technical details and content on your website are optimized for better visibility on search engines. What is a good SEO score? These scores are generally measured on a 100-point scale, but what SEO score is good enough to rank in your industry depends on several factors — and this is where things can get very confusing, very quickly.
What Is an SEO Score? (And Why There Isn’t Just One)
An SEO score is a tool that quantifies your website’s overall search engine optimization health, usually on a scale of 1–100, with higher scores indicating better SEO performance. These tools take into account:
- User experience
- Technical factors
- Page load speed
- Other on-page and off-page factors
Now, here’s the catch. Each SEO rank tool is created by a different company, using its own unique formula. Some scoring tools might weight keyword frequency more highly than your linkmap, for example. So you will likely get variable SEO score results when you use different tools.
Not only that, but your site’s age matters, too. A brand-new site simply won’t achieve the scores that a well-established site with lots of updated content will. Even a 99 SEO score on tools like Benchmark SEO or Ahrefs won’t be an accurate indication of your site’s performance until it has matured a bit — usually after around six months of consistent updates.
What Is a Good SEO Score? (The Real Answer)
Most SEO scoring tools will label a score of 80–100 as “good.” Here’s the crucial point to remember, though: what is a good SEO score for one industry, business, or geographic area might not be a good score for another.
It all comes down to what SEO score is good enough to help you achieve your goals. Depending on your context, “good” depends on a number of factors:
- Industry
- Competition
- Site age
- Specific business goals (traffic vs conversions)
So, a good score is only “good” for your business if it is an accurate reflection of the metrics you want to track. This doesn’t mean SEO scoring tools are worthless. It just means that you need to choose one that tracks the metrics you want to improve — whether that’s content quality or technical details — and then back it up with your own reporting.
SEO Scores vs. SEO Rankings: What Actually Impacts Visibility
Don’t forget, SEO scores are a means to an end, not a goal in and of themselves. A very low SEO score is a good indicator that your Google rankings probably won’t be high, but even a 100 score doesn’t necessarily translate directly into increased visibility.
Not only that, but you might have a relatively low SEO score and still rank pretty well for your industry — or vice versa. It’s all about context. Businesses in low-competition niches might still have high SEO rankings with a low score, for example. If you’re the only Thai restaurant in the city and you have any web presence, you’re probably going to rank well for local searches related to Thai takeout.
Many business owners make the mistake of focusing on maintaining a perfect SEO score while ignoring the fact that their rankings might be falling. You can still get a high SEO score if your website is well-made, but it might not reflect all the reasons that rankings can fluctuate, including:
- Changes in customer behavior
- Algorithm updates
- Seasonality
- Competitor landscape changes
Bottom line: results matter more than scores.
The Importance of Mobile Google Rankings
Mobile rankings are more important than ever. While your website may have a high enough SEO score for your desktop site, you’ll miss out on crucial traffic and clicks if your website is outdated. Many modern SEO score tools, like SEMrush and HubSpot, can check your mobile Google rankings performance and incorporate it into your overall score.
How SEO Ranking Reports Are Used (and Misused)
We get it — it’s handy to have a clear metric to present to managers when they inevitably ask, “So, how are we doing in search?” Many marketing departments will confidently respond, “We’re doing great, we have a 95 SEO score!” But if that score isn’t translating into achieved business objectives, then it is essentially a meaningless number.
Even more problematic, you can only describe whether the score went up or down; not which efforts specifically affected it month to month. This is a big problem for organic SEO ranking, which relies on long-term tracking to show progress and fine-tune your efforts. SEO ranking reports need to be linked to the actual metrics you want to improve.
Comprehensive SEO ranking reports usually indicate key contributing factors, like the number of organic impressions, rank position for target keywords, and session length. Ideally, reports should be tailored to specific goals, like an increased click-through rate. Once you know what kind of goal you’re trying to achieve, you can more effectively interpret SEO rankings, Google Analytics data, and ROI.
Why SEO Scores Differ Across Tools
Each SEO rank tool is developed and owned by a different company. This means that you will probably get slightly different scores, depending upon which tool you use, since they each weigh factors differently. You might get a score of 85 from Moz and a score of 92 from SEMrush. This isn’t an error, and it isn’t necessarily a reflection of your SEO ranking, either. It just means that your site is a better match for SEMrush’s metric than it is for Moz’s.
This reveals the limitation of simple SEO scoring tools. While they can indicate broadly if you’re headed on the right or wrong track, they won’t give you the specific details you need to actually improve real-world rankings.
What to Look at Instead of Chasing a “Perfect” Score
You could pour a lot of time and energy into achieving a “100” on Ahrefs, Moz, or whatever your preferred tool happens to be. But this ultimately just tells you how well you’re matching what the tool is searching for — not your real-world performance among complicated human shopping and searching behavior.
A better framework is to track and report specific elements that both tend to rank highly and tend to lead to more conversions:
- Crawlability and indexability
- Mobile performance and UX
- Keyword visibility trends
- Conversion readiness
- Content quality and relevance
There are absolutely tools that you can use as shortcuts for some of these metrics — for example, Screaming Frog can be a good way to check your crawlability. But be wary of relying only on a single, big-picture number from an SEO scoring tool as your only SEO evaluation tool.
In general, the more closely you can track metrics that Google considers highly in its ranking formula, the more successful your SEO efforts will be over time.
Using SEO Scores Responsibly: A Smarter Framework
SEO ranking tools are a good starting point, especially for websites that haven’t pursued a comprehensive SEO strategy before. But it’s clear that a single round number doesn’t deliver the kind of specificity that your business needs to make long-term, measurable improvement.
Your SEO score from a tool like Ahrefs or Benchmark SEO can give you a good glimpse into how your website is performing technically. Ultimately, it won’t tell you if your website is doing a good job of selling your products and services to the customers who want them. Your traffic and conversions, along with your rankings, are the real results that show what is working and what’s not.
When It’s Time for a Full SEO or Website Audit
Comprehensive SEO audits are customizable and detailed. This means that rather than aiming for a “better” SEO score on an SEO rank tool, you can focus on your weakest areas that will provide the highest ROI.
Some of the specific elements analyzed in a website audit include:
- Website domain ranking
- Home page URL ranking
- Quality and quantity of your backlinks
- Referring domains
- Top 100 ranking organic keywords
- Projected organic traffic
- Mobile performance
- Content quality and originality
A good SEO ranking report should be clearly structured so that you can compare changes over time and see where your efforts are making a measurable difference.
SEO Success Isn’t a Score — It’s Sustained Visibility
As much as we all enjoy a sense of accomplishment, SEO isn’t a one-and-done task to check off the marketing to-do list. While an SEO score can be a good starting point, it doesn’t deliver the depth of information that you need to make long-term, sustainable updates.
Effective, strategic SEO is about being able to clearly track, interpret, and act upon your website’s rankings, visibility, and clicks. This empowers your business to make smart decisions for the long term.
FAQ: What is a Good SEO Score?
SEO scoring tools will tell you that anything between 80 and 100 is a pretty good score. By now, you know the real answer is more complicated. A good SEO score depends on context and can only ever give you a wide-angle lens view of your website’s possible performance — not the actual results you are getting.
For a quick refresher, here are the top questions we get about what is a good SEO score, and why it matters.
What is a good SEO score for a small business?
There’s really no universally “good” SEO score that will guarantee high rankings. Instead, small businesses can improve their rankings by making visibility improvements, monitoring progress in comparison to competitors, and progressing toward specific business goals, like higher traffic or conversions.
What SEO score is good?
SEO scores offer a big-picture view of how likely a website is to rank on Google, usually on a scale of 0–100, with higher scores considered better. However, there’s really no guarantee that high scores will correlate to real-world performance. Furthermore, SEO scores can vary widely based on the criteria used by each tool, making them useful as good ballpark indicators, but not goals in themselves.
Why do different SEO tools show different SEO scores?
Each tool’s SEO score is a summary of a detailed analysis. Each tool uses different data sources, assumptions, and weighting systems. To understand why you’re getting different scores, you need to analyze each tracked metric on its own — which means that the score is less useful compared to the individual elements it tracks.
Do SEO scores directly affect Google rankings?
Google’s algorithm does not reference third-party SEO scores when generating rankings. However, high-quality ranking tools generate a score by analyzing many of the elements that Google website crawlers take into account, like relevance, quality, usability, and performance.
An SEO score can be a useful internal tool for giving an overall picture of your SEO strategy’s effectiveness. If your SEO score isn’t tied to higher real-world performance, though, then it is probably time to find a better evaluation tool, or simply track each metric individually to identify opportunities for improvement.
Is SEO ranking more important than SEO score?
Your website’s rankings in SERPs are a real-world indication of how well your SEO efforts are performing. While an SEO score is a helpful big-picture tool showing if you’re headed in the right direction, it’s not an actual report of your performance in the real world, or if your rankings are helping you to meet specific business goals.
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