What Is a Good SEO Score? (And How to Raise Yours)

A good SEO score is 85 or higher out of 100. It means the technical and on-page basics are in place, so nothing obvious is holding the page back. Between 60 and 84 there's work to do, and under 60 something important, possibly even indexing, needs fixing first.

But an SEO score is a checklist, not a ranking. Here's what it actually measures, what it can't tell you, and how to raise it efficiently.

What an SEO score measures

SEO checkers load a page and test it against a list of best practices drawn from Google's own documentation. Each check passes or fails, and the results are weighted and turned into a number. A typical score covers four areas:

You can see all of these for any page with our free SEO Score Checker, which also measures the page's mobile speed with Google PageSpeed.

SEO score ranges

Different tools weigh checks differently, so the same page can score 78 in one tool and 91 in another. Compare scores from the same tool over time, and focus on the individual checks rather than the number.

Google's Lighthouse, the engine behind PageSpeed Insights, has its own SEO score too. It checks a smaller set of basics, such as whether the page has a title and meta description, can be crawled, and has descriptive link text.

What an SEO score can't tell you

A score of 100 doesn't guarantee rankings, and a page scoring 75 can be number one. The score leaves out the things that matter most for ranking:

• How well the content answers the search. A thin page with perfect tags won't beat a genuinely helpful one.
• Links from other websites. Trusted sites linking to you remains one of the strongest signals.
• Competition. Ranking for "credit cards" and for "how to clean a cast iron skillet with rust" are very different challenges.
• Real-user experience, such as Core Web Vitals measured from actual visitors.

To see where you really rank, open the Performance report in Google Search Console: it shows your average position for every search that showed your site.

How to raise your SEO score, in order

Work through problems in order of impact, not in the order a tool lists them.

1. Make sure the page can be indexed

Look for a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule blocking the URL, a canonical tag pointing to another page, or a status code other than 200. Any one of these can make every other improvement pointless. The Canonical Tag Checker and Robots.txt Tester help pin these down.

2. Fix the title and meta description

Give every page a unique title of about 50–60 characters, with the main topic near the start, and a meta description of 120–160 characters that gives searchers a reason to click. Preview both with the SERP Preview Tool, or generate the tags with the Meta Tag Generator.

3. Structure the content

Use one H1 that says what the page is about, and H2 subheadings to break it into sections. Make sure the page fully answers the question it targets.

4. Cover the technical basics

Serve the site over HTTPS, turn on compression, use a responsive viewport, avoid redirect chains and add alt text to meaningful images. Most hosting platforms handle the first three automatically.

5. Improve speed

Compress large images, remove unused scripts and use caching. The Page Speed Checker lists the biggest opportunities for any page.

6. Add structured data and social tags

Open Graph tags make your links look good when shared, and schema.org markup helps Google understand the page. These are worth doing, but last.

When to stop chasing the score

Once a page scores in the high 80s or 90s, extra points rarely change anything. Your time is better spent writing more useful content, improving the pages that already get impressions in Search Console, and earning links from relevant sites.

Check your score now

Enter any URL in the SEO Score Checker to get your score, every check explained, and your mobile speed. Then fix the failed checks first and run it again. If a page doesn't appear in Google at all, read why a website might not show up on Google.