Work Through your Site Audit Issues
Issues are ranked Critical, High, Medium, and Low, and each opens with why it matters, how to fix it, and the affected pages. Mark fixed, Reopen, and Ignore track your progress across audits.
Last updated 1 day ago
An audit produces a list under Issues to review. This is about turning that list into fixes without spending a week on it.
Severity
Four levels: Critical, High, Medium, and Low.
Work down from Critical. The severity reflects how much the issue is likely to be costing you, and a Critical issue on one page usually matters more than fifty Low issues.
Issue Status
Three actions: Mark fixed, Reopen, and Ignore.
These carry across audits, which is the point. Without them every audit hands you the same list including the things you already decided about.
What an Issue Tells You
Opening one gives you:
- Why it matters, the reason to care.
- How to fix, the actual remedy.
- Affected pages, where it occurs.
- Resolve, the status actions.
- Next steps, with links such as Open page, Write article, Connect GSC, and Ask ChatGPT.
Read Why it matters before fixing anything. Some issues are genuinely urgent and some are technically true and practically irrelevant for your site, and the explanation is how you tell.
Filtering
Filter by Severity, Category, and Status, and search the issue text.
The Health by category panel is clickable, so selecting a category filters the issue list to it. Useful when you have a developer available for one afternoon and want only the technical items.
Categories are Content quality, Indexable content, Security, Performance, International SEO, Technical SEO, and Not indexed.
Which Issues to Fix First
The list will be long. In rough order of return:
1. Anything Blocking Indexing
Page is set to noindex and Not indexed by Google on a page you want found. A page that cannot be indexed cannot rank, so nothing else you do to it matters.
Check these are not deliberate. Thank-you pages and internal search results are often correctly noindexed.
2. Security
Page is not served over HTTPS, Mixed content, and Form submits over HTTP. The last one is worth immediate attention if it is a real form collecting real data.
3. Broken Things
Page failed to crawl and Broken internal link. These waste visitors and crawl budget, and they are usually quick.
4. Missing Titles and Descriptions
Missing page title, Missing meta description, and the duplicate variants. Cheap to fix and directly affects whether anyone clicks your search result.
For NarraSEO articles this is the SEO tab. For other pages it is your CMS.
5. Content and Structure
Missing H1 heading, Multiple H1 headings, Thin content, Orphan page, Thin internal linking.
Orphan page is worth more attention than it usually gets. A page nothing links to is nearly invisible, and the fix is a link from a relevant page, which takes a minute.
6. Performance
Low PageSpeed performance score, Largest Contentful Paint is slow, Cumulative Layout Shift is high, Images missing width/height, Render-blocking scripts in head.
These matter, and they usually need a developer or a theme change. Do not let them block the cheaper wins above.
Images missing width/height and Images not lazy-loaded are often the easiest real speed improvements available.
7. Accessibility and Correctness
Images missing alt text, Missing mobile viewport meta tag, Missing HTML language attribute.
Alt text matters for accessibility first and image search second. Both are good reasons.
When to Use Ignore
Ignore is for issues that are correct findings and do not apply to you. Deliberately noindexed pages, hreflang warnings on a single-language site, thin content on a legitimately short page like a contact form.
Ignoring keeps future audits readable. Ignoring things because they are inconvenient defeats the purpose.
A Realistic Approach
Do not try to reach a perfect score. Sites in active use always have findings.
A pattern that works:
- Filter to Critical and High and fix or ignore everything there.
- Fix the cheap Medium items, mostly titles, descriptions, and alt text.
- Collect the performance items into one list for whoever handles your site.
- Ignore what genuinely does not apply.
- Re-run monthly and only deal with what is new.
The first audit is the long one. After that you are maintaining.
Notes
Nothing here changes your website. NarraSEO reports, you fix.
Fixes show up as Passed after the next audit, not immediately, because the check has to run against the changed page.
Write article in Next steps links a content gap to actually writing something, which is useful when the issue is thin content rather than a technical fault.
If a filter returns nothing you see "Nothing to review here" and "No issues match these filters."
Related
Running a site audit covers starting one and the page limits. Editing your SEO title, description, and schema covers metadata fixes on NarraSEO articles.