SEO scores are worthless

School has taught us that getting good grades is important. That's their primary measuring stick to compare yourself to others.

Everyone knows we are more than our grades. School grades just measure what the test is designed to quiz on. It doesn't even measure academic performance.

A grade can be useful but it has to be taken in context.

That's why when Shopify stores mention their "SEO score" and optimizing for it, it gives me pause.

The point of SEO is to get more qualified traffic. Rankings, indexing, and everything else are just the ways to get that traffic. If traffic changed to be based on how many happy rabbits you had on your homepage, there'd be a new Happy-Rabbit-Ratio websites would use to measure their SEO.

The issue is that there isn't one single thing you can do to get more traffic over the life of your store.

SEO scores are ways for companies to try to distill thousands of things down into a single number.

Like grading one test when you were 17 and using that as a predictor for how smart and successful you'll be in your entire life. Bit of a stretch right?

Even if you do score well, the most damning thing about SEO scores is that they aren't measuring reality.

You can get a perfect score and still have no traffic. Or a horrible score and see your web servers melting down handling all the traffic.

Every SEO score you see was invented by companies who think they know what Google and search engines do. None of them actually know and quite a few outright lie about things.

The closest thing to an SEO score from Google is the Pagespeed Insights SEO score. Even that only looks at a handful of things on one specific page. Backlinks, keywords, competitors, and more aren't part of that score at all but have huge impacts on your traffic.

SEO scores are rubbish and should be ignored. Look at the reasons why you got a score and see if you need to improve in those areas but don't trust a score as any actual measurement.

The same applies to AI. Most AI tools hallucinate or are flat-out wrong on even the most basic things. There's no way those tools have a clue about SEO as a whole. My favorite is when an SEO "Expert" created the AI tool to optimize your SEO when they aren't privy to Google's algorithm. So tell me again how that AI tool knows what no one else does? ... Ok rant over.

Instead of using a score, what should you do?

Focus on the things that can actually make a difference.

Create content.

Earn links through partnerships and media.

Introduce and sell high-quality products that customers want to talk about.

You know, run-of-the-mill business and marketing.