Having technical errors on your website can significantly impact how your site performs on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, you’ll want to ensure your site gets the best SEO score possible. The more technical issues your site has, the lower your score will be.
By tracking your SEO score, you can understand which areas of your site need improvement.
Ahrefs has a dedicated tool called Site Audit that can be used for free as part of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Ahrefs’ Health Score is the percentage of internal URLs on your site that don’t have errors.
We take the number of internal URLs without an error, divide it by the total number of internal URLs, and then multiply it by 100 to get a percentage.
You can start by creating a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account.
Once you’ve created your account, you will be taken to your dashboard. From here, go to Create > Project. You will be asked to import your projects from Google Search Console.
You will be asked to connect your Google account and select which projects you want to import.
Once imported, your project will be added to your dashboard. Before you run your first audit, consider adjusting some of the settings. To do so, click the three dots in the right-hand corner of the project and select “Edit settings.” In settings, head to Site Audit.
The first setting you can adjust is the audit schedule. You can customize the audit frequency to your needs by running daily, weekly, or monthly audits.
If you have a large website, you should head to the “Crawl settings” and adjust the crawl limits. Projects automatically have a maximum crawl limit of 10,000 pages, but you can adjust this as you need.
You can add a Google API code so that Site Audit can retrieve the Core Web Vitals using Google’s .
From here, you can run your first crawl. Our tool crawls all the pages it finds on your website—then provides an overall SEO health score, visualizes key data in charts, flags all possible SEO issues, and provides recommendations on how to fix them.
Site Audit considers several different aspects when looking for internal errors, including:
- Performance – Slow pages, “too large” CSS, or HTML.
- HTML tags – Duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags.
- Content quality – Unconsolidated duplicate pages.
- Localization – All issues with hreflang.
- Incoming links – Detecting orphan pages.
- Outgoing links – Detecting links to redirects, broken pages.
Once the tool has finished crawling your site, you will be taken to an audit overview that shows your website’s Health (or SEO) Score.
To improve your SEO or Health Score, you must address any errors your site has. You can see all of the problems your website currently faces in the “All Issues” tab in the left-hand menu.
Issues have a color-coding system that indicates their importance. Errors are marked in red, warnings in yellow, and notices in blue. You want to fix as many of these as possible, but errors are the most important.
When you click on an error, you will be taken to a breakdown of the issue. This can include the URLs that the issue appears on, as well as other metrics such as whether the page has organic traffic, if it’s indexable, etc.
As Ahrefs is dedicated to helping you improve your SEO as much as possible, there is also a “Why and how to fix” button for each issue. This will open a pop-up that explains the issue in detail and advises how to fix it.
You can work your way through fixing any issues you can. However, if you are less experienced and have very technical issues, such as localization problems or issues with schema markup, then you may want to find an affordable SEO service provider to help you.
Frequently asked questions about the SEO score.
What factors contribute to an SEO score?
There are a number of errors that Ahrefs’ Site Audit takes into consideration when calculating your Health Score:
- Crawlability issues
- Duplicate content (canonical issues)
- Localization issues (hreflang problems)
- HTML tag issues (multiple meta, title, and H1 tags)
- Problems with sitemaps
- Robots.txt issues
- Broken or missing internal and external links
- Broken JavaScript
- Broken images and large images
What is a good SEO score?
Any score over 80 would be considered “good,” meaning 80% of internal URLs are error-free. If your site has a score above 90, this is considered “excellent.”
Why is a good SEO score important?
Monitoring your SEO health can give you a comprehensive understanding of how technically sound your website is.
Having an excellent SEO score means your site is free of technical errors that may be hurting its performance in search engines.
Does an SEO score matter for ranking?
Yes and no. Google doesn’t take any third-party metric into account as a ranking factor. So having a top SEO score doesn’t always mean your ranking will improve.
However, Google does use its own algorithms that take into consideration some of the factors that contribute to your SEO score. Therefore, if your SEO score is very low, it’s likely the issues affecting your score may also be affecting your positioning or even blocking your pages from showing up in search results.
How can I check my SEO score for free?
Create a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account and add your website as a project. From here, you can run monthly, weekly, or even daily site audits as you need to check and continuously monitor your SEO score.
