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Auditing your own site tells you how you are doing in isolation. The more useful question is how you compare to the site currently ranking above you. This walks through the ten signals worth comparing, what they mean, and how to read the result.

No signup, no email ten signals, side by side, in about fifteen seconds

Run the comparison

Why bother

SEO is a relative game

Google does not rank pages against a fixed standard. It ranks them against each other. So a report telling you your site scores 72 out of 100 is close to meaningless on its own — 72 against what?

When you can see both sites on the same ten signals, the strategy tends to write itself. If they are ahead on content depth and structured data, that is the shape of the gap. If you are ahead on internal linking and page weight, you know where you are already winning and can stop worrying about it.

Read this first

What the tool reads, and what it cannot

The tool fetches the raw HTML of both pages and compares what it finds. That is the whole method. It is fast and it is honest about what it sees, but it means three things are outside its reach.

It does not run JavaScriptIf a site builds its content in the browser rather than serving it in the HTML, the tool will report a very low word count and possibly no headings at all. That is a limitation of the tool, not a fault on their site. Check view-source before you conclude anything.
It does not see backlinksLinks pointing at a site are usually the single biggest reason one page outranks another, and none of it shows up here.
It does not see rankings or trafficIt compares how two pages are built. It cannot tell you who is winning.

Within those limits it is genuinely useful. The same raw-HTML checks are what we have run across 3,920 UK small business websites, and they turn up plenty: 44.6% had no schema markup at all and 29.4% no H1 tag.

A site can lose every row and still outrank you. What this tells you is whether that ranking is being held up by the page itself or by something external. Those need very different responses.

The signals

Ten things worth comparing

There are hundreds of signals in play. These ten are here because they are both extractable from the HTML and genuinely worth acting on.

Title lengthRoughly 50 to 60 characters. Shorter wastes the most valuable text you control; longer gets truncated in the results page. If you fix one thing, fix this.
Meta description length120 to 160 characters. Descriptions are not a ranking factor, but a better one earns more clicks from the same position, and clicks are the point.
H1 headingOne clear H1 saying what the page is about. Several is confusing, none is a wasted opportunity. Missing H1s are more common on large sites than you would expect.
Word countPages under 300 words rarely rank for anything competitive. Longer is not automatically better, and there is no ideal word count whatever you have been told. But if they cover a topic in 3,000 words and you cover it in 900, that is worth knowing.
Schema types presentStructured data tells Google what a page is beyond reading the copy. A page carrying LocalBusiness, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList is handing over far more than a page carrying none.
Image alt coverageThe share of images with descriptive alt text. Partly accessibility, partly topical relevance, and one of the cheapest gaps to close.
Internal linksHow well connected the page is to the rest of the site. Heavy internal linking signals that a page matters; almost none suggests it has been forgotten.
HTML sizeBigger payloads load slower, and speed feeds into rankings. There is no penalty for a heavy page, but there is a cost.
Canonical tagA self-referencing canonical says “this is the definitive version”. Missing ones invite duplicate-content filtering; wrong ones can remove a page from search entirely.
Mobile viewportThe baseline for mobile. Anything missing it in 2026 has larger problems, but the check still catches surprises on older builds.

Worked example

What a real comparison looks like

Here is our own homepage against a site ranking above us for a broad commercial term. We have left them unnamed deliberately — this is a snapshot of one afternoon, they may well have rebuilt since, and we would rather make the point than make an example of somebody.

Word count, 1,942 against 119A sixteen-to-one gap on the term they rank for.
H1, one against noneNo H1 tag on the page at all.
Schema, three types against oneLocalBusiness, WebSite and FAQPage against WebSite alone.
Internal links, 117 against 27Four times the internal linking depth.
Title length, 64 against 88Theirs truncates in the results page. Ours is also over the ideal 60 and we have not fixed it either.
HTML sizeTheir only win. Their lighter page loads faster than ours.

Six rows to us, one to them, three level. And they still rank higher. The likely explanation is backlinks and the anchor text on them, none of which the tool can see and none of which changes how either page is built.

That is the useful conclusion. Their position rests on something external rather than on a stronger page. It is a beatable position rather than a moat — but closing it means earning links, not rewriting a title tag.

Reading the result

Three things to look for in your own comparison

Where you are already winningMost small business owners assume their competitors are miles ahead. Usually they are not. Win four or five rows and you are in the fight already — the problem is visibility, not quality.
Where the cheap wins areMore schema types than you is typically a short job for a developer. More internal links to their key pages is an afternoon in WordPress. Small moves, compounding returns.
Where the real gap isContent depth is the honest one. If they answer ten questions on a topic and you answer three, the fix is not quick — but you now know what it is, which is more than you had.

Run it against three competitors rather than one. Patterns show up fast. If all three are ahead of you on structured data, that is your first job. If only one is, it matters less. Three comparisons take about a minute.

For a worked example of what closing those gaps looks like over several months, our Paramount Space Cleaning case study has the figures, approved by the client before publishing.

Who wrote this
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. You deal with us directly, and every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.

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