Fix SEO Audit Results: What Raises the Score

The Short Answer: What Raises the Score

Quick answer: To fix SEO audit results, work through the rows that failed or warned. Our score is the share of checks one page passes, so to improve SEO score you turn those rows into passed ones. For search, start with the rows that decide whether the page can appear, and treat housekeeping rows as optional.

The audit loads the address you typed in headless Chromium on our server and runs about 68 or 69 scored checks in four report sections labeled Seo, Speed optimizations, Server and Security and Advance. A separate AI Readiness block has its own score. The audit never looks at backlinks, domain authority, traffic or rankings.

Run the free SEO score checker on your own page first; a guest can scan with no account. The number is ours, not Google's: Google's guidance on third-party SEO tools says such tools cannot see Google's internal ranking data and cannot promise results. Read your SEO audit score as a to-do list, not a health score.

How Our SEO Score Is Calculated

The formula is passed checks divided by passed plus warning plus failed, times 100. On October 31, 2026 our home page passed 56 of 69 checks, which gives a score percentage of 81.16, shown as 81. One check is worth about 1.45 points, and a warning counts as not passed, so turning one into a pass pays what fixing a failure pays.

There is no weighting by importance. A missing title and a missing ads.txt file cost the same.

Compressing images helps visitors but does not move this number. Totals run to about 68 or 69, partly because the DNS part of Google Site Verification drops out for some domains. New to scores? Start with what a website SEO score means.

How to Fix SEO Audit Issues in the Right Order

To fix SEO audit results in a sensible order, work down four groups, because what decides whether a page is crawlable and indexable matters more than polish. For the number alone, take the quick wins first.

1. Reach and index: NoIndex Tag, robots.txt, Sitemaps, Custom 404 Error Pages, SSL Checker and HTTPS Test, URL Redirects.
2. Reading in results: Title, Meta Description, Headings, Meta Canonical, Language, Image Alt Text, Structured Data, Social Media Meta Tags.
3. Pleasant and safe: the speed rows, Meta Viewport, Mixed Content, HSTS.
4. Housekeeping: rows that only move the number.

The report marks check status, not severity, so this fix order is editorial judgment, not a Google rule. Failed beats warning only inside a group. For weighing findings, see how to read an SEO audit report.

Step 1: Clear the Blockers That Keep a Page Out of Search

The NoIndex Tag row reads only the first robots meta tag and only the word noindex, so it can pass while a page stays blocked. Google also honors a googlebot meta tag, the value none and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and Google's noindex documentation warns that a page blocked by robots.txt means the crawler never sees the rule. Check the rendered page in the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, then follow the NoIndex Tag guide. If staging left a noindex behind, fix it once in the template or SEO plugin setting.

Tip: Type the final address. An http:// address fails the HTTPS check and warns on URL Redirects. A trailing-slash form that redirects warns too: on our own site the slash-free post address passes and the slash form warns.

The sitemap and robots.txt rows are rarely urgent. Google says a well linked site of about 500 pages or fewer might not need a sitemap, and treats a 4xx robots.txt answer, except 429, as no crawl restrictions. Take the point if it costs minutes; our robots.txt guide covers the syntax.

Step 2: Fix the Title, Description, Headings and Canonical

Google sets no limit on title or description length and truncates both as needed, typically to fit the device width. The audit's bands are its own, and our Meta Tag Analyzer uses different ones (a title up to 60, a description of 80 to 160), so write for the searcher.

One canonical tag clears two rows, about 2.9 points, because both rows share a rule. Real alt text belongs on content images; decorative ones can keep an empty alt if you accept the warning.

Tip: The canonical rows also pass an empty or relative href, so read the tag value yourself and make it one absolute canonical URL.

Step 3: Work Through the Speed and Security Rows

The speed rows are lab data from one load in headless Chromium on our server, with no INP (the responsiveness metric) and no field data. The report therefore partly covers Core Web Vitals, and a row near its line can flip between runs. The Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift lines match web.dev's good levels; the rest are ours.

Between the two numbers a row warns, and Page Size counts the rendered HTML only, not images. Google's page experience guidance says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, that other page experience aspects do not directly help a site rank higher, and that a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be time well spent.

HTML Compression/GZIP passes with gzip, br, deflate or zstd. Render Blocking Resources warns on any blocking file, Console Errors fails on any logged error, and HTTP2 Test and HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) are all or nothing.

One trap: Mixed Content fails on any http:// URL in an image, script, link or iframe tag, and Unsafe Cross-Origin Links, whose card text is about links that open in a new tab, runs the same http:// scan today. One insecure asset fails both rows, about 2.9 points. Fix repeated problems once, as a template level fix.

Step 4: Add Structured Data and Social Tags

Structured Data passes when at least one JSON-LD block or microdata item is readable and every JSON-LD block is valid JSON, but it does not check properties against Schema.org types, so run the markup through the Schema Markup Validator. Google no longer shows the FAQ rich result as of May 7, 2026, so skip FAQPage markup for that.

Social Media Meta Tags passes only when all 11 Open Graph protocol and Twitter card tags are present and not empty: og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type, og:site_name, twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image and twitter:url. One missing tag is a warning. These tags shape a link preview, not rankings.

Rows That Only Move the Number

These rows count the same 1.45 points, yet none changes whether a page can be crawled and indexed or how it reads in results. They are housekeeping.

• ads.txt: a file at /ads.txt answering 200.
• Google Analytics: a ga, gtag or dataLayer object exists.
• Google Site Verification: a meta tag and sometimes a DNS record, so a site verified another way can fail.
• Social Media Presence and Plaintext Email: any social network link, and no email address in visible text.
• SPF Records and Server Signature: an SPF record, and no Server header.
• CDN Usage Test and Http Requests: 70 percent or more of resources from other hostnames, and 50 resources or fewer.
• Inline CSS and the JavaScript and CSS rows: no style attribute, minify CSS and scripts, cache them, defer scripts.
• SEO Friendly URL: an underscore, a capital letter or three digits warns, so a /2026/10/ date path does, though Google's URL guidance mentions long ID numbers, not date paths.
• Disallow Directive: a robots.txt that allows everything warns.

Take a row when it costs minutes and skip it when passing makes the site worse: moving files to a third-party host for the CDN Usage Test adds requests and a dependency. Each row has a guide in the SEO checks guides.

A Worked Example: Our Own Home Page

On October 31, 2026 we ran the audit on our home page and got 56 passed, 9 warnings and 4 failed of 69 checks: 81.16, shown as 81. These numbers belong to that date; scan your own page.

None of the 13 is a blocker, a title, a description, a heading or a canonical row; those all pass. Only the Social Media Meta Tags row is about presentation, and it covers link previews, not search; adding the missing twitter:url tag would add 1.45 points and lift the score to 82.61. Render Blocking Resources and HSTS deserve a look next time you touch the theme or server; the other ten are housekeeping. When you fix SEO audit results, stop at this point: what remains is housekeeping, and all 13 rows together are worth 18.84 points.

Eleven runs of the page that day scored 79.71, 81.16 or 82.61, because Total Blocking Time read 0.16 to 0.33 seconds against a 0.2 second line and CSS Caching flipped, so a drop of one to three points with no change is normal.

Re-Run the Audit, Compare and Know the Limits

Before you fix anything, write down your baseline score and the passed, warning and failed counts. A re-scan replaces the stored report and there is no history; a signed-in account can press Save Report and download its PDF first. The walkthrough of the report shows how to run it again.

After a batch of fixes, clear your page cache, since the audit sees what your server sends, then run the same address again and compare which rows flipped, not only the number. To tell whether a fix mattered for search, read that page's clicks, impressions and average position in the Google Search Console Performance report over the following weeks, not our percentage.

The audit reads one page, not the site, times speed in a lab, and says nothing about links, authority, content quality or rankings; the score is not a ranking factor. Google says PageRank is still part of its core ranking systems, and its spam policies call bought links and optimized anchor text in guest posts link spam, so see our link building tips.