Does Site Health Affect SEO?

Are you concerned about the site's health and how well it is optimized for search engines? A well-designed website may look good, but it takes more than aesthetics to rank high in search results. That's where a site health report, also known as a website health report, comes into play.

You can get an idea of your site's health and SEO score by performing a website audit. But what exactly is a good SEO score, and how does it relate to your website's Google website health score or website health score? 

In this blog post, seobase will explore the importance of SEO site health and how to interpret your SEO site score to improve your online presence. 

How to Determine Your Website Health Score

Calculating a website's health score involves evaluating various factors that affect a site's overall health and performance.  These factors include technical SEO aspects such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and site structure, and content-related factors such as quality, relevance, and freshness of the content.  You can calculate the health score using specialized SEO tools, which analyze a website's metrics and provide a score or grade based on the analysis. A higher score indicates better site health and a higher likelihood of ranking well in search results. Also, regularly evaluating and improving your website health score can help ensure that your website remains optimized and competitive in the ever-evolving world of SEO.

Conduct a Site Audit using the seobase site profiler tool

Let's start with a website audit or site health report you can get using the seobase site profiler tool. This site health report will assess the overall health of your site by identifying any errors or warnings that negatively impact user experience.  A website audit is essential for improving your SEO site health and optimizing your web pages to rank higher in search engine results.  The report will give you a clear understanding of your website's health score or SEO score, indicating how well your site is performing based on Google's website health score or website health score standards.  Knowing what is a good SEO score is crucial to gauge your site's performance and making necessary improvements to enhance your SEO site score.

Calculate the Score

After conducting a website audit or site health report, the result is a website health score or SEO site health score. To calculate this score, here are some steps to follow:

1. Examine the URLs on your website that contain errors and compare them to the number of error-free pages. 
2. Monitor this score to indicate the percentage of mistakes on your site, which is a key aspect of understanding your website's overall health. 
3. Identify areas for improvement to increase your Google website health score and overall SEO site score. 

The seobase site profiler tool comprehensively assesses your website's health, including the website health score. Furthermore, the website health score is an essential component of the SEO score meaning, as it significantly impacts how search engines rank your website. 

The Site Health Elements of a Website Audit

Conducting a website audit using the seobase site profiler tool gives you a website health report including the three following elements: 

Errors

When conducting a website audit or site health report, errors are issues of the highest severity that require immediate attention. Here are some examples:

• Broken JavaScript and CSS files: scripts on your website can stop running if they're broken.
• Pages with duplicate meta descriptions: search engines may not know which page to load when this occurs.
• Mixed content issues: HTTP and HTTPS on your web pages can negatively impact your website health.
• Broken internal links: dead links on your site can lead to a poor user experience.
• Duplicate title tags: search engines may get confused about which page to load when multiple web pages have the same title tag.

These errors can negatively impact your website health score and lower your SEO site score, making it essential to address them promptly. By fixing these errors, you can improve your Google website health score and overall site health and increase the likelihood of achieving a good SEO score.

Warnings

During a website audit or site health report, warnings are medium-severity issues that require attention. Here are some examples:

• Issues with unminified JavaScript and CSS files: code with extra spaces and comments can slow down your website's performance.
• Images that don't have alt attributes: search engines may not understand the context of your images without alt attributes, making it difficult to rank them in search results.
• Links on HTTPS pages go to HTTP: links pointing to an old HTTP version of your website can confuse search engines about which page to rank, leading to a lower website health score.
• Pages with a low text-to-HTML ratio: having more code than actual text on your web pages can negatively impact your website's health score. Ideally, your text-to-HTML ratio should be less than 10%.

These issues can impact your SEO site health and lower your website health score. However, they are less severe than errors, and you can fix them easily. By addressing these warnings, you can improve your Google website health score and increase your chances of achieving a good SEO score.

Notices 

As part of a website health report or site health audit, notices are minor issues that should still be fixed to improve your website's overall health score. Here are some examples:

• Outgoing external links contain nofollow attributes: while this isn't necessarily a significant issue, it can prevent search engines from following them and may affect your link juice. Consider removing the nofollow attribute for pages you want search engines to find.
• Pages that require more than three clicks to be reached: to ensure a good user experience, important content should be easily accessible within a few clicks. If pages require too many clicks to be reached, it may indicate that your website's navigation needs improvement.
• Pages have more than one H1 tag or main heading: having multiple H1 tags on a single page can confuse users and search engines. Make sure each page has a single main heading to improve your website's health score.

While these issues are considered notices and not as severe as errors or warnings, addressing them can still positively impact your SEO site and overall website health score.

How to Interpret Your Site Health Score

Let's look at a couple of examples to understand the health score and how to interpret it.

1. Example #1: A website has 100 pages, and 20 have errors. The health score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of pages with errors from 100, which in this case is (1 - (20/100)) x 100 = 80%. At first glance, this seems like a good score, right? However, reading the tip below is essential because this number needs to be more accurate.
2. Example #2: Another website has 10 pages, and 8 have errors. The health score is calculated as (1 - (8/10)) x 100 = 20%. This score could be better, indicating that only 20% of the pages on this website are free of errors.

Although an 80% score might seem reasonable, it's vital to investigate further to determine whether the pages with errors have critical issues that affect the most important sections of the website.  For example, there might be dead links on those pages, which could be crucial resources that prospects need to make buying decisions. Alternatively, these could be critical pages about your products and services that can't be found on search engines when potential customers search for you. Therefore, paying attention to the specific errors identified in the site health report is essential, rather than just relying on the overall health score. 

Also read XML Sitemaps: Best Practices And Common Mistakes

Site Health: Conclusion

In conclusion, maintaining a website's health is crucial for its success in organic search results and for providing a good user experience. A website health report, which includes a website audit and a Google website health score, can help identify issues that impact the SEO site health and the website health score.  A good SEO score means a high website health score is achievable by addressing errors, warnings, and notices in the site health report. It's important to note that website health scores decay over time, so regularly updating and optimizing a website is essential to maintaining a high SEO site score.  The seobase site profiler tool lets you get the best site health report. In addition, it helps you to improve your ranking.