This guide is for anyone who’s requested their free Snapshot SEO Audit and discovered their website health score, but needs some extra explanation of the recommendations and the jargon. I’ll walk you through what each section of the report means, why it matters, and which tasks to focus on first — with a handy glossary of the key terms as we go.
(And if you haven’t requested your free Snapshot SEO Audit yet, pop through on this link to find out more.)
Right, let’s crack on! If SEO is new to you, it may be worth grabbing a cuppa and setting some time aside to go through this alongside your custom mini website report.
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Your Audit Results
Your website is given a total SEO score, plus an individual grade for the five areas that feed into it: On-Page SEO, GEO, Links, Usability and Performance. Each is graded on an A+ to F- scale. This helps you see at a glance which elements need the most attention.
As you scan the report, you’ll see green ticks and red crosses. A green tick means your website has ‘passed’ the test for that element. A red cross means something that needs fixing or tweaking.
Near the top you’ll also find a Recommendations list — the biggest opportunities pulled from every section into one to-do list, each ranked high, medium or low priority. Those ranked high hold the most sway with search engines and have the biggest impact, so make a start on those first, then work around to the medium and low priority tasks.
On-Page SEO
On-page optimisation is one of the most important elements in the SEO mix. This is where we build and write web pages and blogs in a way that makes it easy for Google and other search engines (including AI) to ‘read’ what the content is all about. The page content should also include your targeted keywords, in the right amount, in your page titles and headers.
Make it easy for the web crawlers to understand you — because if they can’t, they can’t rank you (or they rank you for the wrong things). The aim is to attract the right customers who are already interested in what you sell. There’s no point getting tons of traffic for the wrong keywords, as it won’t turn into sales.
On-page optimisation should be applied to all of your website pages – not just the home page. Your custom report only looks at the performance of your home page – in an ideal world, all key pages would be checked.
Here’s what each term in this section means:
SEO Title Tag – the snapshot audit shows the SEO title of your home page only. Check that it’s the right length (around 50–60 characters) and contains the main keywords you’re targeting for your home page. Title tags should be checked and improved for your key pages, then all site pages.
SEO Meta Description Tag – again, data is shown for your home page only. The text should fit the required character length (roughly 120–160 characters) and contain the main keywords, just like your title tag. It won’t directly change your ranking, but a good one encourages people to click.
SERP Snippet Preview – this shows how your home page might appear in search results. It’s a guide only, as search engines are increasingly generating this themselves — but it’s a handy way to check your title and description read well together.
Header Tags (H1–H6) – headers are the titles and subtitles used throughout your content to make it clear to both Google and readers what the page is about. Each page should only have one H1, which is usually the Page Title, then other headers show the main sections in order of importance. If you aren’t using headers correctly, please start doing so!
Keywords & Keyword Consistency – single words that the search spiders are picking up and using to decide what your content is about. Consistency shows whether those words are used in the right places (title, description, headings and body) in a joined-up way.
Key Phrases – as above, but longer phrases. Check these are the words and phrases you actually want to be associated with. They should be targeted and related to the products or services you sell and where you sell it, featuring consistently across your title, description and heading tags.
Amount of Content – ideally, all web pages should have a minimum of around 300 words for SEO purposes. If your word count is lower, try to add more useful copy containing your targeted keywords and phrases.
Image Alt Attributes – an ‘alt text’ tag is added to images to tell Google (and the reader) what the image is about. This boosts your chances of appearing in image search results — an extra way to be found — and makes your site accessible to visitors using screen readers.
Canonical Tag – a little tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the ‘master’ copy. It stops similar or duplicate pages from competing with each other and muddling your rankings.
Noindex Tag & Header Test – a tag that tells search engines not to index a page. So don’t apply this to any page you’d like Google to find and list!
Hreflang & Language Attribute – these declare the language (and region) of your page. The language attribute tells search engines which language you’re in; hreflang matters most if you sell across more than one country or language.
SSL Enabled & HTTPS Redirect – your website should have an SSL certificate (the padlock and ‘https’ in the address bar). It keeps visitor data secure, builds trust, and Google tends to favour secure sites. The HTTPS redirect makes sure visitors always land on that secure version. If yours isn’t SSL enabled, ask your web host or designer to sort it.
Robots.txt – this file tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can access on your site. The audit also checks that no major search engines are being accidentally blocked. All websites should have an up-to-date robots.txt file.
XML Sitemap – a file that lists your website’s key pages and tells search engines where to find and crawl them. It also helps them understand your site structure. Your sitemap should be submitted to your Google Search Console account.
Analytics – confirms whether your website is linked to a tool like Google Analytics. You need this to track visitor numbers, organic traffic and what people do on your site — so set it up early if you haven’t already.
Schema.org Structured Data – a type of code (often JSON-LD) that spells out to search engines exactly what your content is — a business, a review, an FAQ, an event. It helps them return richer, more precise results for specific searches.
GEO – Generative Engine Optimisation (AI Search)
GEO is the next big thing everyone is talking about and one to keep an eye on. It’s all about how well your website is set up to be understood and cited by AI-powered search — think Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot. As more and more people ask an AI tool instead of scrolling a results page, being the source those tools quote is becoming a real, growing way to get found.
The good news? The fundamentals still win. Quality content, clear structure and a technically healthy site are exactly what help AI understand and trust you.
Here’s what this section is checking:
Rendered Content (LLM Readability) – how much of your content sits in the raw page code, rather than being loaded in afterwards by scripts. Content that’s readable straight away is easier for AI to crawl and understand.
Llms.txt – a new, proposed standard — a bit like robots.txt, but for AI. It’s a file that helps large language models (LLMs) find and understand your most important content.
AI Crawlers Blocked by Robots.txt – checks whether your robots.txt file is letting the major AI bots in. If you’re blocking them, your content simply can’t appear in AI answers.
Identity Schema & Entity Definition – whether your page clearly states who you are, using Organisation or Person schema, so AI understands the business (the ‘entity’) behind the website.
Answer Alignment (FAQ / Q&A) – whether you have question-and-answer or FAQ-style content. AI tools love lifting a clear, direct answer — so adding an FAQ is often a quick and easy win if you’re missing one.
Citation Readiness – whether your page includes clear, quotable facts, figures or statements that an AI can cite as a source. Having genuinely useful, ‘citable’ content is a great SEO asset.
Content Structure – whether your layout (clear headings, tidy sections, sensible blocks) is easy for AI to read and pull from. This glossary, with all its neat headings, is a good example!
Content Freshness – the signals that show your content is current, like visible dates and recent updates. Pages that look out of date tend to be trusted less.
Authority & Trust Signals – the credentials, testimonials and trust markers that show you really know your stuff. It’s closely linked to what Google calls E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust.
Contact Transparency – clear, complete business and contact details. It reassures both AI and real people that you’re a genuine, reachable business.
Rankings & Keywords
This section shows what your page actually ranks for on Google right now — really, the proof of whether your SEO is doing its job. It shows which key phrases are bringing traffic to your website, which position they rank at (positions 1–10 are page one, 11–20 page two, and so on), and in which country.
What this section is checking:
Traffic From Search – an estimate of the monthly visits your page gets from Google Organic results, Paid ads and AI Overviews. A quick snapshot of where your search traffic is coming from.
Keyword & Position – the terms your page ranks for and where it sits. Around 92% of clicks happen on page one, so the aim is to get as many terms as possible onto that first page.
Total Searches & Estimated Traffic – how many times a keyword is searched each month, and roughly how many visits your current position earns from it.
Organic Keyword Positions – a summary of how many terms you rank for in each position band (1, 2–3, 4–10, and so on). The goal is to keep nudging terms up into the higher bands.
Links
What are backlinks? Simply put, it’s when another website links to a page on your site. They can come from all sorts of places — guest blog posts, business directory listings, online news articles. Getting backlinks improves your website’s authority, because it shows you have content worth linking to. A backlink is like a vote of confidence, so lots of quality ones help push your rankings up.
Backlinks are part of off-page optimisation — the things that happen outside of your own website. This section shows the sites linking to you and their strength. (When you’re ready, here’s how to implement a backlink strategy.)
What this section is checking:
Domain Strength – indicates the overall strength and quality of your website, from 0 (weakest) to 100 (strongest). Aim for at least 20–30 to start ranking better. A score of 50 is considered good, whilst more than 60 is strong.
Page Strength – as above, but for a specific page. The snapshot report only gives page strength details for your home page.
Referring Domains – the number of separate websites linking to yours. If one website adds two or more backlinks to you, it still counts as only one referring domain, as it comes from the same place. Variety of sources is what counts.
Total Backlinks – the raw count of every link pointing to your site, including several from the same website.
No Follow / Do Follow Backlinks – links can carry a tag telling Google whether to follow them or not. No-follow links aren’t a ranking factor, so the code tells Google not to ‘count’ them.
Edu / Gov Backlinks – links from education (.edu) or government (.gov) websites. They’re rare and hard to earn, so they carry a bit of extra trust when you do.
Anchor Text – the clickable text used for a link. Where you can, anchor text should use keywords and phrases you want to rank for. Try not to use ‘read here’ or ‘click here to read more’, as it tells Google nothing — use your business name or words related to your products and services instead.
On-Page Link Structure – these are the internal links within your own website and content. It’s important to link between related pages to help visitors stay on your site and find more of what they need. Longer visits can be a positive signal to Google, compared with a high bounce rate (someone visiting one page then quickly leaving).
Friendly Links – your web addresses (URLs) shouldn’t be too long, and should hint at what the page is about. Any ‘unfriendly’ links, with too many characters or that are hard for Google to read, will be flagged here.
Usability
This section looks at how easy your website is to use, on both mobile and desktop. It’ll flag any problems, and it’s worth noting any differences between the two. Mobile matters enormously — the majority of web traffic now comes from phones and tablets — so your site needs to work beautifully on a small screen for the best rankings.
Speed comes into it too: a slow site gets ranked below a faster competitor. As a lot of this is quite technical, I won’t go through every single point — but do check whether the boxes here have green ticks, and pass anything technical to your web designer.
Here are the terms worth knowing:
Device Rendering – a visual check of how your page looks across mobile, tablet and desktop, so you can spot anything that’s not displaying nicely.
Use of Mobile Viewports – a setting that tells your page to resize itself to fit each device’s screen. Essential for a proper mobile experience.
Google’s Core Web Vitals – a set of Google metrics that measure the real-world experience of your page: how fast it loads, how quickly it responds and how stable it is as it loads. (Smaller sites sometimes don’t have enough data yet for Google to give a score.)
PageSpeed Insights (Mobile & Desktop) – Google’s speed score out of 100 for each. A low score means pages feel slow. If you’re in the red, it’s worth running a Google PageSpeed Insights test and sharing the results with your developer — or read how to make web pages load faster.
The speed metrics (FCP, LCP, TTI, TBT, CLS) – the jargon behind the score. First Contentful Paint is when the first thing appears; Largest Contentful Paint is when the main content has loaded (aim for under ~2.5 seconds); Time to Interactive is when the page is properly usable; Total Blocking Time is how long it’s ‘frozen’ while scripts load; and Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much things jump around as the page loads (lower is better).
Tap Targets & Legible Fonts – checks that your buttons and links are big enough to tap with a thumb, and that your text is easy to read on a small screen.
Performance
This section looks at the technical side of speed — things like page size and loading times. It’ll tell you if your pages are too big and what needs fixing. For slow-loading sites, it’s very often down to the images. Again, there are some technical elements the layman doesn’t need to fully understand (thank goodness!) — if you’re seeing lots of red crosses, that’s one to hand to your web developer.
Website Load Speed – how quickly your page responds and finishes loading, broken down into server response time, when the content appears, and when all the scripts finish. Slow pages frustrate visitors and can drag your rankings down. Important Note: The audit works via a US server and doesn’t always show accurate speed insights. For the most up-to-date reporting, go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights
Download Page Size – the total ‘weight’ of your page (its HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images). Heavier pages load more slowly — and oversized images are usually the main culprit. JPEGs saved at web resolution, then condensed with a plugin, make a big difference.
Compression (Gzip / Brotli) – squashing your files down so they transfer faster. A good compression rate means quicker loads for your visitors.
Resources & Objects – the number of separate files a browser has to fetch to build your page. Fewer, leaner files load faster.
Minification – stripping the spare characters out of your code so files are smaller, with no visible change for the reader.
Inline Styles – styling written directly into the HTML rather than in a separate stylesheet. It’s an older practice that can slow pages down and clutter the code, so it’s flagged as something to tidy up.
HTTP/2 & other technical checks – HTTP/2 is a modern way of serving pages more efficiently. This section also checks for JavaScript errors, deprecated (outdated) HTML, AMP, and whether your images are properly optimised.
Social & Local Signals
Your report also checks a few ‘other’ signals. They don’t directly move your rankings, but they support your reach, your trustworthiness and — if you serve a local area — your visibility on the map.
Social Signals – whether your Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube profiles are linked from your site, plus whether you’re using Open Graph and X Card tags (these control how your links look when shared) and a Facebook Pixel (handy for retargeting if you ever run ads). Social activity doesn’t directly boost rankings, but sharing your blog posts and content helps Google spot that it’s valuable — and keeps it working harder for longer.
Local SEO – whether your business address and phone number are shown on your page, and whether you have Local Business Schema. Any business with a website should set up a Google Business Profile, but it’s especially important if you want to appear in results for local services.
In a Nutshell
Well done for wading through all of that! Your Snapshot SEO Audit helps to make SEO a little clearer (hopefully?!), and starts to show you the sort of tasks that lie ahead. As it’s a freebie, it doesn’t tell you everything — remember it only looks at your home page, and a good grade in one area doesn’t mean the whole job’s done.
Discuss your Mini Audit & Get a Clear Plan
Everyone that requests the free Snapshot audit is offered a discounted Power Hour rate when they book within 7 days. Don’t forget to book before the discount expires!
More details on the SEO Power Hour for Business Success.
Want the full picture (and a peek at your competitors)? Take a look at the full SEO Audit Service, or ongoing help with a monthly retainer. retainer.
If you found this useful, please do share it with your clients, customers and business pals — it’s much appreciated. And if you have any questions, just hit reply to the email your audit came from. 🙂
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