📝Content Quality Checks
How Hugo evaluates your heading structure, word count, image accessibility, and text-to-HTML ratio for content quality scoring.
Content quality directly impacts both user engagement and search rankings.[5] Hugo's content checks evaluate the structural and quantitative aspects of your page content — the elements that search engines can easily measure and use as ranking signals.
H1 Heading
Every page needs exactly one H1 heading — it's the primary topic signal for search engines.[1] Hugo checks for presence, uniqueness, and length.
H1 Tag
Heading Structure
Search engines use the heading hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3 → ...) to understand content structure.[2] Skipping levels (e.g., jumping from H1 to H3) makes it harder for crawlers to understand your content organization.
Don't use heading tags for styling purposes. If you need large text, use CSS — heading tags should reflect your content hierarchy.[2]
Word Count
Word Count (words)
Image Alt Text
Alt text serves dual purposes: accessibility for visually impaired users and SEO context for search engines.[3] Hugo checks what percentage of your images have meaningful alt attributes.
Alt Text Coverage (% coverage)
Text-to-HTML Ratio
This metric compares the amount of visible text content to the total HTML code. A low ratio suggests the page is code-heavy with little actual content — often seen with framework-heavy SPAs or pages with minimal text.[6]
Text-to-HTML Ratio (%)
References
- [1]W3C WAI — Page Structure: Headings — w3.org
- [2]MDN Web Docs — HTML heading elements — developer.mozilla.org
- [3]Google Search Central — Google image SEO best practices — developers.google.com
- [4]W3C WAI — Images Tutorial: An alt Decision Tree — w3.org
- [5]Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — developers.google.com
- [6]Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide (Make your site useful and interesting) — developers.google.com