Prioritize and Resolve SEO Issues

Review issue impact, filter the work queue, choose what to fix first, and update issue states as you resolve technical SEO problems.

How issues are prioritized

After each crawl, SEO Core evaluates every page and produces a list of issues. Rather than dumping every finding in alphabetical order, the list is scored by a combination of factors that estimate how much each issue is costing your search visibility.

Impact scoring

Each issue type carries a baseline impact weight. A missing H1 on your homepage ranks higher than a suboptimal meta description on a low-traffic page.

Page-level context

Issues on pages with existing traffic, search impressions, or strong internal link equity are ranked higher — because fixing them has more potential upside.

Issue severity

Critical issues (broken pages, missing title tags, noindex on important URLs) always appear before informational findings.

Volume weighting

Issues affecting many pages at once — like a missing meta description across an entire category section — surface as a unified finding rather than hundreds of individual rows.

Issue categories

Issues are grouped into categories so you can focus on a specific area of your site's technical health:

Critical

Issues that directly prevent pages from being indexed or significantly harm visibility. These should be addressed first.

Pages returning 4xx or 5xx status codes.
Important URLs blocked by robots.txt or a noindex directive.
Redirect chains (3+ hops) or redirect loops.
Pages with no <title> tag.
Duplicate title tags across multiple important URLs.

High impact

Issues that meaningfully reduce how well pages compete in search, but don't prevent indexing.

Missing or duplicate meta descriptions.
Missing H1 or multiple H1s on a single page.
Pages with thin content (low word count relative to competitors).
Missing or invalid canonical tags.
Broken internal links pointing to 404 pages.

Medium impact

Opportunities that improve quality signals and content clarity.

Title tags that are too short (<30 characters) or too long (>60 characters).
Meta descriptions outside the recommended length range.
Heading hierarchy issues (H2 before H1, skipped heading levels).
Missing schema markup on pages that would benefit from it.
Pages with very few internal links pointing to them (orphaned pages).

Informational

Observations that don't require immediate action but are worth being aware of.

Pages not included in your XML sitemap.
Nofollow links to important internal pages.
Unusually high page depth (more than 4 clicks from the homepage).
Images missing alt text.

Working through your issue list

1
Start with the top of the list
Open Website Analysis → Issues. Issues are ordered by their combined impact score — start from the top and work down.
Tip
Filter by Critical severity first if your site is new or you haven't addressed issues before. Clearing critical issues delivers the fastest visibility gains.
2
Understand each issue
Click on any issue to expand its detail view. You'll see:
- A plain-language explanation of what the issue is and why it matters.
- The specific pages affected.
- A recommended action — what to change and how.
- An estimated impact level.
3
Fix the issue
Depending on the issue type, you have two options:
- Deploy directly from the issue detail — for issues like missing or poor-quality titles and descriptions, you can write a new value and deploy it to your live site without touching your CMS.
- Fix in your CMS — for structural issues (heading order, page depth, broken links), edit the page in your CMS or codebase and re-crawl to confirm the fix.
4
Mark as resolved and re-crawl
Once you've made a fix, run a new crawl to verify the issue is resolved. The issue will disappear from your list when the crawler confirms the page is clean.
Note
If you deployed a fix via SEO Core (title, description, etc.) but the underlying CMS page still has the old value, the issue will remain until either the CMS is updated or the deployment is in place and verified.

Filtering and focusing your work

For large sites, the issues list can be long. Use filters to focus on what matters most at any given time:

Filter by severity — Critical, High, Medium, or Informational.
Filter by issue type — e.g., only show title-related issues.
Filter by URL — paste a specific URL to see all issues on that page.
Sort by impact score, page traffic, or URL path.

Tip

If you're working with a team, tackle one issue category at a time. Assigning "all missing meta descriptions" to one person and "redirect chains" to another prevents overlap and makes progress easier to track.

Enriching issues with search data

When you connect Google Search Console, your issues list gains an additional dimension: real traffic and impression data from Google.

Issues on pages with existing Google impressions are ranked higher — these pages are already in the index and fixing them has direct impact.
The detail view for each issue shows clicks, impressions, and average position for that URL.
Pages with high impressions but low CTR are flagged as priority candidates for title and description improvements.