Run any site through a crawler and you will get thousands of “issues”. Almost none of them matter equally. The skill in technical SEO is not finding problems — tools do that — it is knowing which handful actually cost you traffic.
Tier one: things that stop pages ranking at all
Fix these before anything else, because nothing downstream works until they are resolved.
- Pages blocked from crawling or indexing. A stray noindex or a robots.txt rule can remove entire sections from search. Check what is actually indexed rather than assuming.
- Broken canonicalisation. Canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL split ranking signals or remove pages from consideration entirely.
- Server errors on important pages. Intermittent 5xx responses on key templates are far more damaging than any number of missing meta descriptions.
Tier two: things that dilute your effort
- Duplicate and near-duplicate content. Filter and parameter URLs generating hundreds of near-identical pages divide relevance instead of concentrating it.
- Redirect chains. Each additional hop wastes crawl budget and loses a little signal.
- Orphan pages. Pages with no internal links are hard to discover and appear unimportant.
Tier three: things that matter but rarely first
- Core Web Vitals. Genuinely important for conversion, and a modest ranking consideration. Worth fixing — but not before your pages are indexable.
- Structured data. Useful for rich results and for any system parsing your pages, but it will not rescue a page nobody can crawl.
- Image alt text. Important for accessibility. Rarely the reason a page is not ranking.
How to prioritise in practice
Score each finding on two axes: how much traffic it plausibly affects, and how much effort it takes to fix. Do the high-impact, low-effort items immediately. Schedule high-impact, high-effort work properly. Ignore low-impact items until the rest is done.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Treating the crawl report as a to-do list and starting at the top. Crawlers sort by issue type, not by commercial impact. A report listing 3,000 missing alt attributes and one noindex on your highest-value page will bury the thing that actually matters.
If you would rather have someone else do the prioritising, that is precisely what our SEO audit produces — findings ranked by impact and effort, not an undifferentiated export.