A Second Opinion score measures how findable and trustworthy a business looks to search engines and first-time visitors, not how good the business is. Of the 28 checks it runs, 15 affect the score. Your Google Business Profile and business identity carry 35% of it across just two checks, which is why profile fixes move the number faster than anything on the website itself.
You ran the audit, you got a number, and the number arrived without much explanation. Let us fix that.
The short version: your score is a starting position, not a grade. It measures how findable and trustworthy your business looks from the outside. It does not measure whether you're good at your job.
What the score is built from
Second Opinion runs 28 checks. Only 15 of them affect your score. The other 13 get reported because they're worth knowing about, and they deliberately do not count against you.
The 15 that count sit in four categories, and the categories are not weighted evenly:
- Your Google Business Profile and business identity: 35% of the score, across 2 checks.
- Whether search engines can reach and read your pages: 25%, across 8 checks.
- What your pages say about what you do and where you do it: 25%, across 4 checks.
- How fast the site loads on a phone: 15%, resting on a single check.
The part worth noticing
Two checks carry more than a third of your score. Eight technical checks share a quarter of it.
That asymmetry is the most useful thing on this page. If your score came back low and you have one afternoon, the afternoon goes to your Google Business Profile.. not to your website. Most owners assume the opposite.
Passing is not the only outcome
Checks are not pass or fail. A partial result earns partial credit. A profile that is mostly filled in scores better than an empty one and worse than a complete one, which is closer to how the real thing behaves.
And when we genuinely cannot verify something from outside, the report says so instead of guessing. An unavailable check is not a failed check. We would rather show you a gap in our evidence than invent a finding.
What the score does not measure
- Whether your work is any good.
- Whether your website looks nice.
- Whether your customers like you.
- How much revenue the site brings in. We cannot see your analytics from out here.
If your score came back low
It is common, and it is not an emergency. Most low scores come from three or four missing basics rather than anything broken. Nearly all of them start in the same place.