Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to any website’s visibility and rankings. Improving it is necessary for anyone that wants their site on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Knowing how a website is ranking means monitoring some key aspects routinely. The SEO score provides a way to do this. If you need to track how your site is doing, SERPResults can help you know where your website needs improvement for better rankings.
What is an SEO Score?
Your website has pages and other features that a visitor interacts with while on it. These are known as user-facing elements. Along with technical SEO, user-facing elements are crucial for website analytics. An SEO score offers a way of knowing how well user-facing elements and technical SEO are helping your website’s rankings. An SEO score is ranked out of 100. The higher this score, the better your website’s general SEO.
It helps to think of an SEO score as a measure of your website’s quality as far as SEO goes. A low score is a clear indication that there are serious issues, both technical and for the user. An SEO score of 80 and above is generally considered good.
Components of an SEO Score
An SEO score is created based on certain factors. These include:
1) Technical SEO
This is everything that is done to ensure that your website is easily found by search engines. For example, building structured data is an example of technical SEO. Search engines like Google have web crawlers like Googlebot. These autonomous computer programs access and index websites. If such bots can easily access, crawl, and index your website, then you’ve done a good job as far as technical SEO is concerned.
2) Content
When it comes to getting a good SEO score for your site, content is crucial. Content includes all the things that you post on your site, from written articles to video files. Content is just as important for your SEO score as it is for your site’s overall rankings. Unlike your SEO score, search engines consider your site’s content as a criterion for rankings.
Your site’s on-page SEO, the quality and relevance of what you post there, and things like page structure are all crucial aspects of content. How you arrange such content is equally important. Using internal links, head tags, and relevant keywords are some of the numerous things that contribute to great content.
3) User Experience
User experience may not be as important as website content and technical SEO. However, it is still relevant. Google and other search engines consider it when ranking your site. It is all about ensuring that visitors to your site have a great experience. A poor score for user experience means you need to do more to improve your site’s general navigation and some key features.
4) Mobile Usability
More and more people are using their smartphones to surf the internet. Search engines are aware of this trend. This means the better your site can render on phones and other portable devices like tablets, the better.
It’s crucial to remember that all the above factors are not equal in relevance. For example, technical SEO is more important than all the others. Regardless of how much you optimize your site for all the other three factors, it will still have poor rankings if its technical SEO is poor.
Improving Your SEO Score
Improving your SEO score means optimizing all the factors that directly affect it. You can do this in the following ways;
– Conducting routine website maintenance to identify any issues that could mean poor technical SEO. For example:
i) If page speed is slow, fix it. You can use fast hosting while minimizing the use of scripts and plugins.
ii) Indexability. This has to do with how search engines index your website’s content. Adding structured data markup to your website to ensures good indexing.
iii) Ensure to have an updated XML sitemap. This is like the blueprint that search engines follow when crawling through your site’s content. It directs them to each exact page while providing crucial information like how relevant each page is among your site’s pages.
iv) Using secure socket layer (SSL) technology. This helps to encrypt communications between a server and a web browser.
– Ensure that whatever content you post is of high quality. This means that written content should not have grammatical errors and misspellings. Endeavor to use short sentences and paragraphs without any fluff. For images, ensure that they are of the highest quality. As much as possible, endeavor to post content that is evergreen. This means such content should continue to be relevant for years to come. If not, ensure to update your site’s content regularly. Whenever possible, use relevant keywords strategically throughout your content without ‘stuffing’ them.
The bounce rate is the frequency with which visitors leave a site. The higher the bounce rate, the more likely your content is considered irrelevant or of low quality. Google and other search engines factor in things like your bounce rate when ranking your site. Good, relevant, good-quality content helps to avoid such problems while ensuring a good SEO score.
– Ensuring that your site is as mobile-friendly as possible. This is because Google and most other search engines now prioritize mobile friendliness. Your website will not rank high if it is not well optimized for mobile devices, even if other SEO aspects are on point. This means that pages should load quickly, and functionalities like touchscreen compatibility should be available.
– For improved user experience, examine your SEO score critically to determine areas for improvement. A key issue with many sites is slow loading time and several layers of internal links (click depth). If a visitor to your site has to follow several links to get to a specific page, it becomes annoying. This is a classic example of something that detracts from the user’s experience. Ensure that navigating your site doesn’t have a click depth of greater than 3.
By focusing on the above factors, you can see a significant increase in the amount of traffic to your site as your SEO score improves.
