SEO score

Tools calculate scores from their own rules: title length, missing alt text, broken links, duplicate tags, blocked pages, and similar checks. Google has no such score. Two tools can score the same page differently.

Treat the score as a summary of technical and on‑page hygiene. A perfect score does not earn rankings. A poor score does not prevent a page from ranking first. The value is the list of concrete issues behind the number.

Open the report and ignore the grade at the top. Go straight to the issues and their counts. Focus on items that affect discovery and clicks first.

• Indexation: pages blocked by robots.txt, noindex on live pages, soft 404s, or redirect chains.
• Critical tags: missing or duplicate title tags, titles cut off past about 60 characters, empty or duplicate meta descriptions.
• Links: broken internal links, orphan pages with no internal links, canonical tag errors.
• Speed signals: Largest Contentful Paint slower than about 2.5 seconds, layout shifts over 0.1, slow interaction over 200 ms.
• Content basics: empty H1s, images with no alt where the image conveys meaning, thin or near-duplicate copies.

Example: the checker flags 12 broken links and a missing title on /pricing. Fix those before you try to nudge the grade upward. That change can recover real clicks.

1. 1

   Make pages indexable

   Remove accidental noindex, unblock needed paths, and fix 404s and loops. Re‑crawl in the URL Inspection tool once corrected.

2. 2

   Restore internal paths

   Fix broken internal links and add links to orphan pages from relevant pages such as /guides/getting-started or /features.

3. 3

   Set clear, unique titles

   Write a concise title for each page, keep it near 60 characters, and remove duplicates. Add a matching H1 where missing.

4. 4

   Clean canonical signals

   Pick one URL per page. Set rel=canonical to it. Remove parameters or alternate slugs that fight it.

5. 5

   Tidy obvious content gaps

   Add missing alt text where the image matters, remove empty boilerplate pages, and merge near‑duplicates.

6. 6

   Check Core Web Vitals

   If LCP is above about 2.5 s or CLS above 0.1, prioritise image sizing, font loading and render‑blocking fixes.

A fixed page looks like this: /pricing returns 200, has one canonical URL, a unique title within length, a clear H1, no broken links, and passes vitals.

• Chasing the number: time spent nudging a high grade higher rarely beats shipping a missing comparison page.
• Tool mismatch: a plugin’s traffic light can disagree with a crawler. Read the specific issue, not the colour.
• Wrong yardstick: a “good” score in one tool means nothing to Google. Measure results in impressions, clicks and signups.
• Sitewide averages: a high site score can hide a broken /signup or a noindexed /docs page. Check key pages one by one.
• Over‑fixing: forcing exact word counts, keyword density or alt text on decorative images can harm usability.

• Search Console: impressions, clicks, and average position for target queries.
• Click‑through rate: titles and descriptions that earn clicks on queries you already surface for.
• Coverage and vitals: indexed pages and Core Web Vitals passing status.
• On‑site outcomes: signups or purchases by landing page from organic search.
• Issue backlog: count of open critical issues from your latest crawl, not the composite grade.