People gravitate towards scores and rankings to determine how well they’ve performed.

 

 

While numbers and figures tend to be vanity metrics, there’s a certain glory in achieving a high score over something—and not just some reason to stroke your ego.

This is particularly true with SEO.

While most SEO factors are available for our viewing pleasure, the algorithm for ranking at the top of organic search results isn’t.

Therefore, SEOs have no choice but to rely on an SEO score to determine how well their site is ranking.

At the same time, there’s no definitive SEO score that absolutely determines your ranking.

Lots of SEO tools have developed proprietary data to help people understand how well their website is faring (or not).

In this post, we’ll be looking at the different SEO scores that website owners can use as parameters to measure their site’s success and performance in lieu of SEO factors.

How to Find Your Site’s SEO Score and Scale Its Performance

The SEO scores to measure

Below are some of the most common SEO scores to consider when judging how optimized a website is. You can view all of them directly from your Monitor Backlinks dashboard.

 

 

The tool makes tracking your various SEO scores easy. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to take it for a spin!

Keep in mind that these parameters are not the be-all-end-all of SEO scores. They work best in conjunction with each other. Since no one is fully aware of how Google ranks websites on organic search, the metrics below only provide intelligent guesses on how good a site’s SEO performance is.

Alexa Global Rank

The Alexa ranking is one of the first metrics used to measure a site’s traffic compared to all.

Alexa offers two ranking systems: global and per country. Which rank you want to prioritize depends on your objective. However, for the purpose of this exercise, you want to focus on growing your Global Rank if you want to extend your audience reach.

 

 

Alexa gathers information for a site’s Global Ranking from the behavior of people on their data panel over a period of three months. More visitors and views result in a higher ranking.

However, Alexa rankings are not very accurate beyond the 1,000,000 rank mark. Data for sites ranking here and lower are scarce, so it’s much more difficult to justify the positions and their movements in the ranking.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority is one of the most trusted parameters by SEOs and marketers when it comes to measuring a site’s quality.

This proprietary algorithm developed by Moz helps analyze a website’s score based on the most relevant Google ranking factors such as linking root domain, the total number of links, and more.

Ideally, you want a DA of 30+.

 

 

Backlinks

Backlinks have long been one of the most crucial ranking factors in organic search.

Dofollow links from authoritative sites that generate lots of traffic and are relevant to your niche are difficult to acquire, but will produce the best results for your SEO campaign. The more links like this you generate for your site, the higher your site will rank on Google or Bing search.

 

 

To see the exact links pointing to your site, as well as whether they’re dofollow or nofollow, you just have to click over to the Your Links tab.

From here, you’ll also see a range of SEO scores for the site pages where you have a backlink from.

 

Site speed

Site speed was considered an SEO ranking factor when Google announced its mobile-first index.

Loading speed has an impact on retention rate. A page that loads in more than four seconds will lose 25% of its initial visitors, studies say.

 

 

Page speed doesn’t need to be a requirement for site owners to make their site load faster. But it’s definitely an incentive for people to do so and reap the benefits of higher ranking on Google organic search.

Monitor Backlinks shows you your PageSpeed score out of 100, taken directly from Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

 

 

Spam

In essence, a site is considered spammy when it violates Google’s guidelines or scores low on the most crucial SEO ranking factors. Dead giveaways of a spammy site are thin content, no contact or about page, and low link diversity.

A maximum of 4 for your Spam Score is acceptable. If your site scores higher than that, you need to assess your site’s overall quality.

 

 

Trust Flow

Trust Flow is one of Majestic’s two Flow Metrics that help measure a page’s trustworthiness.

Normally, trusted sites link out to equally trusted sites exclusively. The trust that their audience has for them hinges on the quality of the links they include on their site pages. By consistently linking out to trustworthy sites, your Trust Flow score increases as well.

Trust Flow works best in conjunction with Citation Flow (more on that below). However, as it stands, a Trust Flow score of at least 10 is good enough for a site that’s been around a while.

 

 

Citation Flow

Citation Flow is the other half of Majestic’s Flow Metrics and measures the weight of a backlink. Some backlinks are much more valuable than others because of the number and quality of sites that link to the page where the backlinks can be found.

The more high-quality pages linking back to a page, the higher the Citation Flow.

 

 

3 ways to improve your SEO score

Now that we’ve established that your SEO score is far from being a vanity metric, you need to do everything in your power to increase it.

 

 

With a higher SEO score, you can potentially move up the SERPs for your target keywords. Below are some quick ways to optimize your site and receive higher scores for your site’s SEO performance.

1. Make your site load faster

As mentioned, you lose a quarter of your visitors when your site loads in more than four seconds. If you make sure your site loads faster than that, then you can retain most of your visitors and increase your SEO score in the process.

There are tools you can use like PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom to test your site’s speed and get performance insights and tips to improve it.

 

 

2. Get backlinks from trustworthy sites

Link building is a necessary task in SEO. You can’t rank on top of organic search if you don’t generate backlinks from authoritative sites.

There are lots of effective link building strategies that you can implement in your campaign. However, one of the most essential aspects of just about any link building tactic is to have great content that people want to link to.

Quite simply, by creating content that they love, there’s a good chance that they’ll reciprocate the love with a backlink.

Plus, by creating a steady stream of high-quality content that’s rich in detail and value, you solve the “thin content” problem—Google won’t consider your site to be spammy at all.

3. Increase traffic to your site

Generating traffic to your site will help increase all your SEO scores, and your Alexa Ranking in particular.

Making your site load faster, building strong backlinks and creating content that resonates with your audience are all great ways to get you started with increasing site traffic.

Check out this post and this post for tips to drive more visitors to your site!

Ready to increase your site’s SEO score?

 

 

Making the most out of your SEO score is your best shot at ranking on top.

We’ve established the fact that SEO scores aren’t a direct representation of what Google thinks of your site. However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try and nab a high score nonetheless.

After all, having a high SEO score means that you’re observing the best optimization practices, much to the benefit of your audience.

The more optimized your site is, the more visitors will flock to your site and read your content, if not convert into clients and customers.

How’s that for glory and an ego boost?