An SEO score is a number from 0 to 100 that measures how well a single page is set up for search engines: its meta tags, technical setup, performance, social tags, and basic accessibility. A good SEO score is 70 or above, which is a B grade. Across the audits we have run, though, the average page already scores about 73, so 70 is closer to "normal" than "ahead". The score that separates a page from the pack is 80.

SEO Score API is a REST API that runs 80+ automated checks on a URL and returns one composite score with a letter grade, so developers and agencies can measure and track SEO health in code. The score and the SEO grade bands below are the ones that API returns.

What Does an SEO Score Measure?

An SEO score measures the technical and on-page health of one URL across five weighted categories. Each category returns its own sub-score, so you can see which area is pulling the total down. Meta and technical count for most of the score; social and accessibility count for the least.

The five categories are:

  • Meta and content: title tag, meta description, H1 and heading order, content length, readability, internal and external links
  • Technical: HTTPS and the SSL certificate, status code, response time, canonical tag, viewport, robots meta, robots.txt, sitemap, structured data
  • Performance: HTML size, DOM size, compression, render-blocking CSS and scripts
  • Social: Open Graph tags, Twitter Card tags, favicon
  • Accessibility: the lang attribute, alt text coverage on images, landmark elements

It does not measure backlinks, keyword rankings, domain authority, or whether the content is any good. Those decide a lot of where a page ranks, and no on-page score sees them.

The accessibility category is a lightweight check within the SEO score. If you need a full legal-grade audit, our dedicated ADA compliance checker runs the complete WCAG 2.1 AA ruleset (via axe-core) and returns an accessibility score plus a lawsuit-risk assessment.

What Is a Good SEO Score?

A good SEO score is 70 or above. A score of 80 or higher is great, and 90 or higher is excellent.

That is the grading answer. The practical answer comes from the data. In roughly 8,000 audits run through the API, the average score was about 73, about 90% of audits landed between 70 and 79, and about 8% reached 80 or higher. Almost nothing scored below 60. (The numbers and their caveats are in what we're seeing after 8,000 audits; the sample is pages somebody chose to audit, not a random crawl of the web.)

So a 73 means the basics are in place and the page has the same handful of gaps as nearly every other page. An 80 means you have closed them.

SEO Grades: What A+ Through F Mean

An SEO grade is the letter attached to the score. The bands are fixed:

SEO Grade Score Range What It Means
A+ 90–100 Excellent. Every category is in good shape
A 80–89 Great. Ahead of about nine in ten audited pages
B 70–79 Good, and the most common grade by far
C 60–69 Below average. Usually one category is failing
D 50–59 Poor. Several basics are missing
F 0–49 Failing. Something is blocking the page outright

Two things are worth knowing about how the grade is worked out. It comes from the weighted total, not from an average of the category grades, so a page can earn an A overall with a weak social score. And a grade says how many known problems the page has, not how it will rank: an A+ page with no links and nothing useful on it still will not rank.

Is 75 a Good SEO Score?

Yes, 75 is a good SEO score. It sits in the B band (70–79) and a little above the average of 73 in our audits. It is not holding the page back. The quickest gains from there come from whichever category has the lowest sub-score, which is the social category more often than any other.

Good SEO Scores by Number: 60, 70, 80, 85, 90

Here is a quick answer for the exact scores people ask about most:

  • Is 60 a good SEO score? No. 60 is the bottom of the C band (60–69) and well below the pages we usually see; very few audits score that low. It normally means a whole category is failing, most often missing meta tags or no HTTPS. It is fixable in an afternoon.
  • Is 70 a good SEO score? Yes. 70 is the start of the B band and the pass mark. It is also slightly below average, so treat it as a floor.
  • Is 80 a good SEO score? Yes. 80 earns an A, and only about 8% of the audits we run reach it. It is the target we would set for most pages.
  • Is 85 a good SEO score? Yes. 85 is a strong A. Past this point each extra point costs more work and buys less.
  • Is 90 a good SEO score? Yes. 90 and above is an A+, and it is rare.
  • Is 100 a good SEO score? It is a perfect one, and it is not worth chasing. See the FAQ below.

Not sure where your page lands? Check any URL's SEO score for free. No credit card required.

What Score Do You Need to Rank on Google?

There is no score that gets a page ranked. Google does not use this score or anybody else's; an SEO score is a third-party checklist, and Google has no "SEO score" of its own. Pages with a 72 outrank pages with a 95 every day, because links, relevance, and content quality are not in the number.

What the score tells you is whether something on the page is getting in the way: a noindex left on by accident, a missing canonical, no HTTPS, a title Google has to rewrite. Those are worth fixing whatever the page is trying to rank for.

Our view: get to 80, then stop working on the score and work on the content and the links. Going from 85 to 95 is usually wasted effort.

How Do You Check Your SEO Score?

You can check your SEO score with the SEO Score API by making a single GET request. The API returns a full JSON audit in seconds, including your composite score, letter grade, and per-category breakdowns.

curl "https://seoscoreapi.com/audit?url=https://yoursite.com" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your_api_key"

The response includes:

{
  "url": "https://yoursite.com",
  "score": 82,
  "grade": "A",
  "audit": {
    "meta": { "score": 90 },
    "technical": { "score": 78 },
    "performance": { "score": 74 },
    "social": { "score": 85 },
    "accessibility": { "score": 80 }
  }
}

Sign up for a free API key at seoscoreapi.com. No credit card is needed. The free tier is 20 audits a month and returns the score, the grade, 2 checks per category, and the top 2 priorities; paid plans return every check.

What Causes a Low SEO Score?

A low SEO score is caused by missing on-page elements or a broken technical setup. Five issues turn up among the top priorities on roughly nine out of ten audits we run:

  1. No structured data (JSON-LD)
  2. No sitemap.xml
  3. No meta description
  4. No canonical tag
  5. Thin content on the audited page

Those five are why so many pages sit at 73. The issues that drag a page lower than that are less common and more serious:

  1. Missing or empty title tag
  2. No H1
  3. HTTP instead of HTTPS, or a broken SSL certificate
  4. No viewport tag, so the page is not mobile-friendly
  5. A server response slower than a second

Performance is rarely the problem. The performance category averages about 97 out of 100 in our audits, while the social category averages about 41, mostly from missing og:image and Twitter Card tags.

The audit response includes a priorities array listing the failed checks in order, with what to fix for each.

How Do You Improve Your SEO Score?

You improve your SEO score by fixing the specific issues flagged in your audit report, starting with the highest-impact failures. The fastest wins are usually:

  • Add a meta description. It is not a ranking factor, but it is what searchers read before they click, and it is missing on most pages we audit.
  • Add a canonical tag. One line in the <head>, and it stops duplicate URLs competing with each other.
  • Add structured data. An Organization, Article, or Product JSON-LD block that matches the page.
  • Publish a sitemap.xml and reference it from robots.txt.
  • Complete the Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, including og:image. This is where the social sub-score is usually lost.
  • Fix the title tag. Aim for 50–60 characters, unique per page.

After fixing them, audit the same URL again to confirm the score moved. Teams that run the API in CI/CD catch regressions the same way: a deploy that drops the meta description fails the check before it reaches production.

How Often Should You Audit Your SEO Score?

You should audit your SEO score whenever you deploy changes to a page, and run scheduled audits at least weekly for important URLs. Score drops of 5+ points usually indicate a broken element introduced by a recent change: a template update, CMS migration, or plugin conflict.

On paid plans, score monitoring re-audits a URL daily or weekly and alerts you by email or webhook when the score drops past a threshold you set.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good SEO score for a new website?

A good SEO score for a new website is 70 or above, the same as for any other site; the score does not know how old the domain is. New sites tend to lose points on a missing sitemap, no structured data, and thin pages. Fix the title, meta description, H1, canonical, and Open Graph tags first.

Is an SEO score of 100 possible?

Yes, 100 is possible, and it is rare: only about 8% of the audits we run reach even 80. A 100 means passing every check, including ones that depend on server response time. It is not a sensible goal. The last few points come from details that do not change how a page ranks.

What is an SEO grade?

An SEO grade is the letter version of an SEO score: A+ for 90–100, A for 80–89, B for 70–79, C for 60–69, D for 50–59, and F below 50. Different tools draw the bands differently, so a B from one tool is not the same as a B from another. Compare grades only within the same tool.

Does a higher SEO score guarantee better Google rankings?

No. An SEO score measures technical and on-page factors. It does not measure backlinks, domain authority, or content quality, and Google does not use it. Fixing the issues behind a low score removes obstacles to indexing and ranking; it does not create the reasons to rank.

What is the difference between an SEO score and a PageSpeed score?

An SEO score is a composite measure across meta, technical, performance, social, and accessibility checks. A PageSpeed score (Google Lighthouse) measures only performance and Core Web Vitals. Our SEO score includes performance as one of five categories, giving you a broader picture.

How accurate are automated SEO scores?

Automated SEO scores are reliable at what they check: whether a tag exists, how long it is, whether the page is served over HTTPS, how large the HTML is. They cannot judge whether the content answers the query or whether the title is persuasive. Treat the score as a defect count for the page's setup, not a verdict on the page.

Can I check my competitor's SEO score?

Yes. The SEO Score API audits any publicly accessible URL, including competitor pages, so you can compare your score with theirs and see which checks they pass that you do not.