What the WooRank Score Is
The WooRank score, given to any website evaluated by a Review or Project, is a snapshot analysis of the key factors that impact the search engine optimization and usability of a particular website or webpage.
A website’s score is based on 3 main factors:
- Accessibility: Can search engines and humans visit your site and properly load your pages?
- Readability: How easily can search engines properly interpret the content on your pages, the context surrounding and its relevance to a particular topic?
- Quality: Does your website provide a good user experience for human visitors?
This analysis is presented on a 100-point scale.
A website’s score is a measure of how ready a website is to start promoting by a digital marketing campaign. It’s also a measure of how readable, accessible and/or usable a website is compared to another website.
How We Calculate a Website’s Score
As mentioned above, the 100-point WooRank score looks at factors that impact a site’s SEO and user-friendliness. These factors include around 70 data points we collect directly from the Reviewed website such as structure, content, performance, metadata, mobile friendliness and others.
We also include data from search engines themselves, social media platforms and other sites around the web.
We algorithmically assign point values to each data point, weighted according to SEO and usability best practices. This algorithm assigns a score out of 100 points according to those best practices.
For internal page Reviews, we calculate a page’s score based on 30 criteria that are specific to that page.
We use different scores for internal pages because we don’t look at the exact same criteria for each. Some things — such as robots.txt, sitemaps or domain registration and availability — work on a site-wide level. The data included in an internal page Review is applicable only to that specific URL.
So since the data we analyze is different, we use a different scoring system.
How to Interpret or use a Website’s Score
While any website can always be improved, we generally consider websites with a WooRank score of 70 or higher to be well optimized for both search engines and users. This doesn’t mean your job is done, but rather a website is ready for a marketing or other promotional campaign.
A website with a score of 40 or lower has lots of areas to improve before starting any such campaign.
A website with a score between 41 and 69 has some opportunities to improve that can help its marketing from good to great.
Using the WooRank score as a benchmark
The WooRank score is an effective tool to compare the quality of one website to another. Adding competitors to a Review or Project gives users a side-by-side comparison with up to 3 other websites. Comparing one website’s WooRank score with another site’s score will give you a top-level look at how well each stacks up against the other.
See how your website compares to the wider market using data from the WooRank Index.
It’s worth noting that the WooRank score (or any third-party metric or score) can’t be the last word when it comes to ranking a website — that’s always going to be Google itself. A site with a lower WooRank score can rank higher than a site with a higher score for a few reasons:
- Google sees the content on the lower-scored page as more relevant to the user’s query.
- How important any individual factor is to a page’s ranking depends on the query a person entered in Google. For one query, h1 content could matter more while for another it might be backlinks.
Finally, Google does not rely on the WooRank score, or any other third-party scoring system (like Moz’s Domain Authority or Ahref’s Domain Rating), in any way to rank websites.
Improving a Website’s WooRank Score
If your website’s score isn’t quite what you wanted or you want to just improve it in general, delving into the site’s Review or Project will show you how to go about improving a website and, therefore, its WooRank score.
As explained above, the WooRank score is derived from the data collected in a site’s Review or Project. We present this data in a way that will tell users what’s impacting a website’s usability, readability and accessibility.
Each data point is color-coded to help users prioritize tasks:
- Green: This site is following best practice for this element. It could still be optimized to improve rankings or user experience(test different keywords, tweaking content, building new links, etc.), but it’s not taking away from your marketing efforts.
- Orange: There’s nothing technically incorrect about this element but it could be improved or better optimized to help a site rank better.
- Red: There’s a serious error with the site in regards to this data point. Depending on what’s shown as red, it could mean that a site is inaccessible or unreadable.
- Gray: This data is shown solely for the user’s information and does not impact the site’s WooRank score.
Improve a site’s score by fixing issues marked in red or orange. Tooltips under each data point will tell you how much impact fixing an error can have as well as how easy they are to fix. Click the question mark next to the Review or Project data to see an explanation of the data and some advice on improving your site:
Changes to a website’s WooRank score
WooRank scores a website as we collect data about that website. So when opening a Review or Project (either a new or existing one) you’ll probably see the score go up and down as it loads. This is totally normal and the website will receive a final score once all the data has been collected and analyzed. This usually takes just a few seconds.
You might notice that a website’s WooRank final score has gone up or down despite you not making any updates to that website. This could be for a couple of reasons:
- We’ve made a change to our scoring algorithm based on developments in the SEO industry (search engine updates, changes to best practices, new technologies, etc.). We try to alert our users to any major scoring updates, but since SEO changes rapidly and often subtly, not all algorithm updates will be released publicly.
- Something has changed off-site. A website could gain or lose backlinks, gain some new engagement on social media or build a new citation. Check the Promote section of your Project or Review if you think this is the case.
- WooRank has lost access to some or all of your website. Sometimes a website will add a firewall or other security measures that will block our crawlers from accessing a site. This can happen after a server migration, site redesign or some other major update to a website. If you think this is the case, please contact support at support@woorank.com.
Tracking a Website’s Score
The digital marketing world is constantly changing to keep up with advances to technology, search engine algorithm updates and evolving SEO best practices. At WooRank, we’re constantly tweaking and updating our scoring algorithm to keep up.
Therefore, we don’t save a website’s historic score in our database because a website’s score from a few months ago would not necessarily be relevant to the world today.
However, if you want to track your website’s WooRank score over time, there is a way.
Simply sign up for access to the WooRank API and store as much historic Review or Project data as you’d like.
Next Steps
Now that you know everything you need to know about a website’s WooRank score, it’s time to move on to creating, customizing and downloading your PDF reports.