SEO
Metadata, crawlability, structured data, and indexability of your key pages.
Discoverability: whether search engines can find, crawl, and correctly understand your pages.
Like Performance, SEO is evaluated across 5 representative pages - every page must pass for full marks, so a well-tuned homepage won't carry a neglected template.
On-page SEO
| Check | Passes when |
|---|---|
| Title tag present and ≤ 60 chars | All 5 pages pass |
| Meta description present and ≤ 160 chars | All 5 pages pass |
| Single H1 and correct heading hierarchy | All pages valid |
| Viewport meta tag present | All pages have a viewport |
Length limits reflect where search engines truncate in results - a longer title isn't invalid, it just won't be shown in full.
Crawlability and indexing
| Check | Passes when |
|---|---|
Valid robots.txt | Present and parseable |
| Canonical tags on all pages | All 5 pages tagged |
sitemap.xml discoverable | At /sitemap.xml or referenced from robots.txt |
hreflang valid | Valid, or not applicable - full marks either way |
Single-language sites are not penalised for hreflang: not applicable scores the
same as correctly configured.
Image and link SEO
| Check | Passes when |
|---|---|
| All images have alt text | 100% of images have alt |
| Zero broken internal links | No broken links across the sampled pages |
| Structured data present | Valid schema.org JSON-LD |
Alt text carries the most weight here and does double duty - it's both a discoverability signal and an accessibility requirement.
Because scoring requires all 5 pages to pass, a single templated page missing metadata can hold the whole category down. Fix the template, not the page.