SEO Scorecard: Simple Checklists to Check Your SEO Fast

SEO scorecard

Did you know that it is possible to check your site’s SEO health in 15 minutes or less? You only need to refer to the SEO Scorecard. It will help you assess your competitors’ SEO and improve your own.

Although you can refer to Google’s 200 ranking signals to check the overall health of your site’s SEO, you do not want to waste time getting into these details. It will take too much time and lead you to neglect your other tasks, which are just as important. You deserve to have time to focus on the core of your business and not to spend all of it checking every detail to ensure that your site’s SEO is doing well.

Here is the SEO Scorecard you can refer to if you only have 15 minutes or less to spare.

Top 8 SEO Scorecard Checklists

The SEO Scorecard uses eight considerations in determining the SEO health of a website. These considerations cover the most important areas in Google’s 200 ranking signals.



SEO Scorecard Checklist
SEO Scorecard Checklist

Header Tags

Header tags are also known as the H-tags, which indicate the hierarchy of importance in a page. The rule of the thumb is there should only be one H1 tag. The H2, H3, H4, and so on should be applied depending on the hierarchy of importance.

You can also check a page’s header tags by right-clicking on the page and clicking the ‘view page source. ‘Press Ctrl + F’ and type <h1>  for h1, <h2> for h2, and so on, on the field. You should see which is H1, H2, and so on in your content.

Sitemap

A sitemap tells search engines about your site’s structure, making it easier for them to navigate and find your website. Therefore, you should check to find out if you have it.

To check, type your site’s URL in the address bar followed by ‘/sitemap.xml,’ depending on how you generated your sitemap. If you can’t find your sitemap, you can use a sitemap generator, create it manually, or use a CMS plugin.

If you have a CMS plugin like Yoast or Rankmath, these plugins can generate the sitemaps automatically.

Content

Content is the most crucial consideration for SEO, as it can make or break your website. Your blogs should be evergreen or constantly updated.

If you want to spy on your competitor’s blogs, you can easily find them on their website. If you can’t find them, use Google’s search operator inurl. For example, type ‘inurl:yourcompetitorsdomain.com blog.’

Loading Speed

Google loves websites with fast loading speeds. Understandably, Google only wants to provide the users with the best experience. A slow-loading page doesn’t give this experience as users will most likely turn to other websites instead of waiting for your page to load.

To determine the loading speed of your site, you can go to Google PageSpeed Insight. It is a tool that measures the site’s Core Web Vitals, which comprise interactivity, loading, and visual stability.

For your site to get a good loading performance rating, the site should take no longer than 2.5 seconds to load. The interactivity should not be more than 100 milliseconds, while a strong visuality score is 0.1.

You may also use other tools, such as Pingdom to test your website speed.

Using Google PageSpeed Insight or Pingdom is easy. You only have to paste the site’s URL in a designated field, pick a location where it will be tested from, and you’ll get the results in seconds.

Keywords

The free method to test your keyword is to use it on a search engine manually. Before you use this method, use a private window or sign out from Google. It is also advisable to use VPN if your website is targeting an audience from a country you’re not currently in right now.

Type the long-tail keywords on the search engine and look at the results Google will provide you. You can use this method to determine your competitor’s performance on the SERP or assess your website.

If you’re on the first page of the SERP, especially if you are in the first top four positions, it means that you’re doing well, unless your competitor is ranking on top of you.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt consists of simple codes that tell search engines which page they should or shouldn’t follow. It is a helpful simple code if you have a page you’re not ready to show to the world.

For example, if you have an eCommerce site with a product page that is not ready for marketing, use the ‘disallow’ command to inhibit the search engine from crawling to that particular page.

However, sites with excellent SEO do not ‘disallow’ primary pages that need to be crawled and indexed. That’s why you should check your site’s robots.txt file to make sure that you’re only disallowing the pages you don’t want the search engines to index and not the major ones.

Check your site’s robot.txt by typing your domain’s URL in the address bar, followed by ‘/robots.txt.’

Domain Authority

Domain authority is a 100-point scale score assigned to your website. A high score means that your site is authoritative. Unless your site is new, you won’t want to have a domain authority rating of 10 and below. Aim to get a domain authority rating of 41 and above. The higher your rating is, the better it is.

Your site’s domain authority is significant. It matters whether the other websites would want to link their page to you or not. If you have poor domain authority, don’t expect other websites to link their pages to you, as this will also affect their SEO performance.

Domain authority is also a consideration if you want to link to other sites. Linking to websites with high domain authority can help your site because it proves to Google that you only want to provide the best experience for your users. However, it will affect your SEO negatively if you link to websites with low domain authority.

To check your site’s domain authority, go to Moz’s Open Site Explorer. All you need to do is type your site’s URL in the field and click ‘Search,’ and you’ll see your site’s domain authority.

Meta Components

Most of the time, you can find the web page’s meta components by right-clicking on the web page and clicking the ‘view page source’ on a browser. Important meta components consist of the title and description. You see them on the SERP when you put in a query on a search engine.

Sites with good SEO have the page’s primary keyword in the meta title and description. The description is also catchy enough to entice the audience to click a site on the SERP.

Conclusion

We understand that you want to rank higher on the SERP and not be left out by your competitors. We also know that you do not want to waste all your time focusing on just a single task when you should be doing something else.

You can follow this advice for a quick check of your site’s SEO performance. If you see that your site needs help, contact Results and Co and let’s create a plan that will improve your SERP ranking, outrank your competitors, and generate more leads and sales.

See how our team can drive an insane amount of highly targeted traffic to your website and then convert it.

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