Are SEO Scanning Tools Accurate?
Online SEO scanning websites are a dime a dozen. Almost every week we have a client send us an SEO report from one of these tools and ask us about the report. But when it comes down to these scanners, there is a cold hard fact – online SEO scanners are not accurate.
Let’s discuss the fallacy of some of these scanners and what the best way is to monitor your home inspection website’s SEO.
What a Great SEO Looks Like
Let’s consider a website with a fantastic SEO. It’s InterNACHI’s website at nachi.org. InterNACHI has one of the largest websites you can find on the internet. What kind of score does it get?
Lighthouse, which is Google’s own scanner, gives InterNACHI’s website a 91 out of 100 score, which is excellent. We encourage you to use Lighthouse. It is a trusted scanner that can’t be argued with. Google is the authority on SEO and represents over 80% of online searches.
But when you scan InterNACHI’s website on multiple scanners (which we did) we come up with many different SEO “scores”, but not one of them matches Google’s score. Do these scanners know better than Google? No – they are trying to sell you something. So if you have a good score, they can’t sell you SEO services, so these scanners make scores look bad so that you will want their services.
At Full View Home Inspector Marketing, we sometimes have clients come to us with information from an online scanner company saying that they got a low score on their website. So, we show them what Google scores them as – which invariably conflicts with the score they were given. This is the case whether you are just using a random online scanner, or you had a company do it for you.
How the Scanning Industry Works
As a website developing company, scanning companies try to sell us their tools all the time. Their pitch is asking if we want to make our website development and SEO look way better than our competition, by basically having the scanner spit out any information we want… including bad scores. We don’t go for that. We have our own internal scanners that we use for day-to-day stuff, but we primarily rely on Google Search Console and Lighthouse to determine if there are any gaps in SEO on a client’s website, and then we make it better.
But these online scoring tools do the opposite. They create a lot of skewed information. One scanner for example is Seobility. They gave InterNACHI a score of 76 out of 100. That’s not the worst score ever but also not accurate. As we said earlier, Google gave them a 91. Small SEO Tools gave InterNACHI a score of 67. There was one scanner that rated InterNACHI a score of 52, which is very low and inaccurate. One site didn’t even render the mobile version and marked it as being an issue, and they count on you not noticing that. So hundreds of thousands of reports that are spit out each year are full of inaccuracies.
How to Get an Accurate Score
So, what is the best way to know how your website is doing? A simple way to measure its success is if your rankings are going up and people are contacting you for business. That means your website is being found. But using Google’s own free tools is by far the best way to measure your website’s SEO.
Check out Google Lighthouse, which can be found in Chrome’s browser under “Developer Tools”. It is an easy and reliable source to scan your website and get an accurate SEO score. Please reach out to us at any time if you have questions. Give us a call at 518-878-4845, or email us at [email protected].
