How to check your website SEO score (free and paid methods)

What an SEO score actually measures

An SEO score is a number, typically out of 100, generated by an audit tool after crawling your website and checking each page against a list of technical and on-page criteria. The score reflects the proportion of those checks that pass. A site with 300 pages where 270 pass all checks will score higher than a site where only 180 pages pass, even if both sites have the same number of total errors.

The criteria vary by tool, but most platforms check the same core categories. Technical checks cover crawlability, indexation, HTTPS status, redirect chains, page speed, and Core Web Vitals. On-page checks cover title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, image alt text, internal linking, and content length. Some tools also factor in backlink authority, although this is typically shown as a separate metric rather than folded into the main site health score.

Understanding what your score measures helps you interpret it correctly. A score of 55 does not mean your site is failing at SEO broadly. It means your audit tool found a significant number of crawlable pages with technical or on-page issues. A site with a score of 55 and strong content and backlinks will often outrank a site with a score of 90 but nothing compelling to offer a searcher.

Your SEO score is best used as a trend indicator. Track it over time and watch whether it moves up as you fix issues or down after site changes. A sudden score drop after a site update is a useful early signal that something went wrong during deployment. For a broader view of what a full SEO health check involves beyond the score alone, the website SEO health check guide covers every audit layer in detail.

Best tools to check your SEO score

The tool you use to check your SEO score determines the methodology behind the number. Each platform weights different factors, crawls at different depths, and categorises issues differently. Using two tools and comparing their outputs gives you a more complete picture than relying on one score alone.

Semrush Site Audit

Semrush generates a site health score out of 100 and categorises every issue as an error, warning, or notice. The error category contains the issues that most directly affect crawling and indexation. Warnings cover on-page optimisation gaps. Notices are informational items that are worth knowing but rarely urgent. Each issue comes with a plain-language explanation and a suggested fix, which makes the report accessible even if you have not run an audit before. You can crawl up to 100 pages per month on the free plan, and paid plans increase that limit substantially. Explore the platform at Semrush.

Ahrefs Site Audit

Ahrefs calculates a health score using a slightly different formula: it counts the proportion of crawled URLs that have no errors. A site where 80% of pages pass all checks scores 80. The report is strong for identifying orphan pages, internal linking gaps, and crawl depth issues. Ahrefs also shows which pages are receiving significant backlinks but are not ranking, which surfaces a different kind of problem from the standard technical score. Free access to Ahrefs Site Audit is available for verified site owners through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. See the full review at Ahrefs.

HubSpot Website Grader

HubSpot's free grader produces a score across four categories: performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security. It only analyses the URL you submit rather than crawling your full site, so it is best used as a quick check on a specific page rather than a site-wide audit. The SEO section covers meta tags, page titles, and basic indexation signals. If you want to understand the concept of SEO scoring before committing to a dedicated audit tool, the HubSpot grader is the quickest entry point with no account required. Learn more about HubSpot's broader platform at HubSpot.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console does not generate a numeric SEO score, but it is the most authoritative source of health data available because it reflects Google's own view of your site. The Coverage report shows you exactly which pages are indexed, which are excluded, and why. The Core Web Vitals report shows mobile and desktop performance against Google's thresholds. The Manual Actions report shows whether any penalty has been applied. No other tool can replicate this data because it comes directly from Google's index. Access it through the Google Analytics ecosystem.

Rank Math

For WordPress users, Rank Math scores each page and post individually as you edit, rather than running a site-wide crawl. Each item gets a score out of 100 based on on-page factors: keyword usage in the title and meta description, content length, internal links, alt text on images, and readability. It does not measure technical site health at the domain level, but it is the most immediate feedback loop available for on-page optimisation. Review the full tool at Rank Math.

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO scores pages against the top-ranking competitors for a specific keyword rather than against a fixed checklist of technical criteria. This means a page might pass all standard audit checks but still score low in Surfer because it is shorter, less semantically complete, or structured differently from what is ranking. Surfer is most useful after you have resolved technical issues and want to understand why a page is not ranking despite being technically clean. Explore Surfer SEO at Surfer SEO.

How to interpret your SEO score results

A raw score without context is not very useful. The interpretation depends on three things: what the tool is measuring, how your competitors score, and whether your score is trending up or down over time.

Read errors before the overall score

Most audit tools list errors, warnings, and notices separately. Errors are the only issues that reliably affect crawling and indexation. A site with a score of 72 and zero errors is in a better position than a site with a score of 88 that has 15 errors buried beneath a large number of warnings and notices that inflate the total. Always read the error list first before drawing conclusions from the headline number.

Compare against competitors in the same niche

Both Semrush and Ahrefs allow you to run site audits on competitor domains. If your score is 68 and your three main competitors score between 55 and 72, your technical health is broadly comparable and the ranking gap is more likely explained by content quality, backlinks, or topical authority. If your score is 68 and your competitors score 85 to 95, the gap in technical health is large enough to be a meaningful ranking factor.

Track trend over time, not point-in-time snapshots

A score taken once tells you where you are. A score taken monthly over six months tells you whether your site is getting healthier or accumulating new issues faster than you are fixing old ones. Set a recurring crawl schedule in your audit tool and review the trend line quarterly. A score that improves from 61 to 79 over three months is a meaningful result regardless of where competitors sit.

Separate site-wide scores from page-level scores

Your site health score is an average across all crawled pages. A single large section of thin, poorly optimised pages can drag the overall score down while your most important landing pages are perfectly configured. Filter your audit results by page type or URL pattern to see which sections of your site are pulling the score down.

Free SEO score checking options

Paid tools offer the most complete picture, but several free options give you enough data to identify the most important issues on a small to medium-sized site.

Google Search Console is free, has no crawl limit, and covers the data points that matter most: indexed pages, Core Web Vitals, manual actions, and mobile usability. Every site should have it set up regardless of which other tools are in use. It does not produce a numeric health score, but the Coverage and Core Web Vitals reports give you an equivalent level of actionable information.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives verified site owners free access to Ahrefs' site audit tool. The crawl limit on the free tier is lower than paid plans, but for sites under a few hundred pages it covers a full audit and returns a health score with categorised issues. It also includes Ahrefs' backlink data for your own domain at no cost.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider's free tier crawls up to 500 URLs and returns detailed technical data: status codes, title tags, meta descriptions, H1 tags, canonical tags, and image alt text. It does not generate a scored report in the same way as Semrush or Ahrefs, but the raw data is highly granular and can be filtered and sorted to prioritise the most impactful issues.

Google PageSpeed Insights is free and provides both lab-measured and real-world Core Web Vitals data for any URL. It is the standard reference for page speed performance and produces specific, ranked recommendations rather than a general score alone.

What to do once you have your score

An SEO score produces a list of issues. The score itself is not the goal; working through that list systematically is. The following sequence prevents the most common mistake, which is fixing low-priority issues first because they are easier.

1. Export all issues from your audit tool as a spreadsheet or task list. Most tools allow CSV export. This gives you a working document that can be shared, assigned, and tracked outside the tool interface.
2. Filter to errors only. Set warnings aside for a second pass. Notices can wait until errors and warnings are resolved.
3. Group errors by fix type. Redirect errors belong to one task. Missing title tags belong to another. Grouping lets you batch similar fixes and assign them to the right person, whether that is a developer, a content writer, or a platform administrator.
4. Estimate time and impact for each group. A broken sitemap is a 30-minute fix with significant crawlability impact. Rewriting 40 duplicate title tags is a half-day task with moderate on-page impact. Prioritise by the ratio of impact to effort, not by the size of the error count alone.
5. Fix the highest-impact errors first. Crawl issues, index exclusion problems, and redirect chains affect the broadest number of pages and should always come before page-level on-page fixes.
6. Rerun the audit two to four weeks after your first batch of fixes. Confirm that the issues you addressed are no longer appearing and that no new errors were introduced by the changes.
7. Move to warnings. Repeat the same triage process for the warning category and work through them in the same order.

For the full process of running a site audit from crawl setup through to a completed fix report, the website SEO health check guide covers every layer of the audit in sequence. If you are tracking SEO score improvements alongside keyword ranking changes, pairing your audit data with a rank tracker gives you the clearest picture of whether your fixes are translating into search result improvements.

What this means for your optimisation priorities

Checking your SEO score is the start of a prioritisation process, not an end point. The number tells you the scale of the work ahead. The categorised error list tells you where to start. The trend over time tells you whether your efforts are having the expected effect.

Sites that check their score once and never follow up tend to see the same issues reappear or compound over time. Sites that check quarterly, fix systematically, and track the trend build a progressively cleaner technical foundation that supports every other SEO activity; content, link building, and keyword targeting all perform better when the underlying site health is in good order.

If your score is below 60 when you first check it, do not try to fix everything at once. A focused sprint on errors only, followed by a recheck, will move your score substantially and give you a clear before-and-after measure of the work done. That measure is also useful for reporting progress to stakeholders who may not understand the technical details but can follow a score moving from 54 to 76 over two months.