MCSR MARKETING CONSULTANCY

When reviewing an SEO audit with numerous errors, prioritizing which to fix first requires a strategic approach. Here’s a breakdown of how to tackle this:

1. Categorize by Impact:

First, group errors by their likely impact on your website’s ranking and user experience. High-impact issues should be addressed before low-impact ones. Consider these categories:

• Critical Errors: These directly hinder search engine crawlers from understanding and indexing your content. Examples include:
  • Broken links: These disrupt user navigation and signal a poorly maintained site.
  • Server errors (404, 500): These prevent pages from loading, severely impacting user experience and SEO.
  • Crawlability issues (robots.txt errors, noindex tags improperly used): Prevent search engines from accessing and indexing key pages.
  • Duplicate content: Confuses search engines and can dilute ranking power.
• High-Impact Errors: These significantly affect your website’s performance and user experience, though not as severely as critical errors. Examples include:
  • Slow page speed: Users abandon slow-loading pages, and search engines penalize them.
  • Missing or incomplete meta descriptions: Reduces click-through rates from search results.
  • Thin content: Pages with insufficient text are less likely to rank well.
  • Poor mobile experience: With mobile-first indexing, a bad mobile experience is critical.
• Medium-Impact Errors: These are important but less urgent than high or critical errors. Examples include:
  • Missing alt text on images: Impacts accessibility and search engine understanding of images.
  • Internal linking issues: Poor internal linking hampers navigation and SEO.
  • Low keyword density: While not always crucial, insufficient relevant keywords can hurt rankings.
• Low-Impact Errors: These are generally minor and can be addressed later. Examples include:
  • Minor schema markup errors: While helpful, these don’t usually have a major impact.
  • Small issues with page titles: Unless severely problematic, these can be adjusted later.

2. Prioritize Within Categories:

Once categorized, prioritize within each category based on:

• Traffic impact: Focus on fixing errors on pages with the most traffic first.
• Keyword importance: Prioritize pages targeting high-value keywords.
• Ease of fixing: Tackle the easiest fixes first to gain momentum and build confidence. Some issues might require significant developer intervention, while others can be quickly solved.

3. Example Prioritization:

Let’s say your audit reveals:

• Broken links on your homepage (Critical)
• Slow page speed across the site (High-Impact)
• Missing alt text on some product images (Medium-Impact)
• Minor schema errors on a blog post (Low-Impact)

Your prioritization should be:

1. Fix broken homepage links: This is a critical error affecting your most important page.
2. Improve page speed: This has a significant impact across your entire site.
3. Add alt text to product images: This improves accessibility and SEO for important product pages.
4. Address schema errors (later): This is a minor issue and can be tackled after the more impactful problems have been resolved.

4. Monitor and Iterate:

After implementing fixes, monitor your website’s performance using Google Search Console and other analytics tools. This will help you identify if your changes are having a positive effect and guide further prioritization. SEO is an ongoing process; continuous monitoring and improvement are essential.