Most technical SEO audits fail not because they miss problems, but because they surface all of them at once, flat and unranked. You export ten thousand rows, your eyes glaze over, and the genuinely urgent 404 sits in the same undifferentiated list as a cosmetic title-length warning. The checklist below is ordered the way a triage nurse works: stabilise what's critical, then treat what's serious, then optimise the rest.
Every item maps to a check RacingRoach runs automatically, so you can read this as both a mental model and a walkthrough of the Issues screen.
Critical — fix these first
Critical issues actively break the relationship between your site and a search engine. They waste crawl budget, return no content, or send both users and bots into dead ends.
- Server errors (5xx). A
500or503means the page didn't render at all. Repeated server errors make Google slow its crawl rate. - Broken internal links (4xx). Links to
404pages leak link equity into dead ends. Fix the link or add a301to the moved destination. - Redirect chains. Each hop adds latency and dilutes link equity. Point the first URL straight at the final destination.
- Missing page titles. The
<title>is the strongest on-page signal and your headline in search results.
If a change would remove a page from the index or send a user to an error, it's critical. Everything else can wait a sprint.
Warnings — serious, not on fire
Warnings degrade performance in search without breaking anything outright. They're the bulk of most audits and the place where consistent effort compounds.
- Missing meta descriptions. Not a ranking factor, but the snippet under your result — a missing one lowers click-through.
- Duplicate titles. When many pages share a title, engines struggle to distinguish them.
- Multiple H1 tags. Usually a templating bug. Keep one clear top-level heading per page.
- Images without alt text. Both an accessibility failure and a lost image-search opportunity.
Rule of thumb: if fixing an issue changes how a page is ranked or displayed but not whether it's reachable, it belongs in warnings — a scheduled pass, not a fire drill.
Opportunities & notices
Opportunities are pages that already work but could work better — Core Web Vitals, response time, page weight. Notices are informational: a noindex page is usually intentional, a tracking-parameter URL usually harmless. Skim, verify, move on.
Run a full crawl on a regular cadence, fix everything critical the same day, batch warnings into a recurring block, and revisit opportunities when you have engineering time. Treat the health score as one number the whole team can rally around.