How Our Self-Service SEO Works

The WIZ Score is Ranking Wizards' own method of judging the overall SEO quality of a website before we consider it for link building and outreach. It looks well beyond the familiar headline metrics that most people lean on to size up a domain.

And here's the difference. Instead of treating any single metric as proof of quality, the WIZ Score weighs a broad mix of 18 authority, trust, visibility, backlink and performance signals. It goes further with ratio analysis and minimum thresholds to create a holistic view of quality. And, more to the point, it looks at how all these signals relate to each other. A strong figure in one place means little if nothing else backs it up, and a site with modest headline numbers can turn out to be much healthier underneath.

This wider view is what catches the things a quick glance tends to miss: inconsistencies and weaknesses, and even strengths that prove to be a little too good to be true. It's the sort of thing that slips past you when you're looking at one or two standard industry scores.
Based on our experience and research, we also give each factor the weight we think it genuinely deserves, rather than simply averaging a handful of published metrics.

What you end up with is a thorough assessment boiled down to one practical score. It lets us compare very different websites on a level footing, without losing the depth of analysis sitting behind that comparison.

The exact methodology stays under wraps. It comes from many years of hands-on SEO work and from assessing a great many websites, all aimed at answering a more useful question. Not "How high are this site's metrics?" but "How strong is this site when the evidence is considered as a whole?"