Google Tool Scores Your SEO: Should Google Be Scoring Your SEO?

The other day, Google launched a new portal named web.dev that pretty much has lighthouse, another Google tool, results for your audit. One of the lighthouse results is an SEO score. So I asked SEOs, should Google be scoring their SEO this way?

Here is the score:

Here is the breakdown:

I posted a Twitter poll asking and 337 votes within 24 hours. I asked Should Google show SEO scores and 59% said yes and 41% said no.

SEOs how do you feel that Google on https://t.co/J23gu572IG is showing you an SEO score? Should Google show SEO scores?

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 14, 2018

Here are some of the useful comments back on Twitter:

Totally agree... it's not really an SEO score, it's just data that they're calling "SEO".

— Bill Hartzer (@bhartzer) November 14, 2018

It's too broad to be a useful metric. It would do more harm than good - SEOs would be judged on it incorrectly. E.g. a small site, perfectly "SEO'd" gets score of 100%. SEO is "complete". Create another 50 pieces of great content, score drops, traffic goes up.

— Nathan Amery (@namery) November 14, 2018

The problem is that the "SEO Score" is limited/restricted.
So long as people understand the metric is ham-strung, it's fine.

On the upside - it gives a metric and a set of optimisations to work towards that are "safe" and "advised" - so maybe it will help :D

— Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat) (@darth_na) November 14, 2018

Google provides all kinds of best practices, guides and measurement tools. A composite (understood within perspective) score is helpful.

— Darcy (@DarcyStaley) November 14, 2018

I thought the SEO community would debate it more but hey - what do I know?

Forum discussion at Twitter.