What to fix first after an audit

An audit on a real site returns hundreds of issues. Here's the order that actually helps, rather than working top to bottom.

First: anything blocking indexing. Pages returning 4xx or 5xx, pages blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be, noindex tags on pages you want ranking, broken canonicals pointing at the wrong URL. These aren't ranking problems, they're existence problems. A page Google can't index can't rank no matter how good it is.

Second: broken internal links and redirect chains. They waste crawl budget, they leak link equity, and they're usually a quick bulk fix. If you renamed a section last year and never redirected, this is where it shows up.

Third: duplicate and missing titles and meta descriptions, in bulk. Not one page at a time. Look for the pattern: is it every product page? Every tag archive? Fix the template, not the instances.

Fourth: thin or duplicate content. This is where judgement starts. Some thin pages should be expanded, some should be merged, and some should be deleted. The tool can tell you which pages are thin; it can't tell you which of those three is right.

Last: the long tail of notices. Image alt text, heading order, minor speed warnings. Real, worth doing, and worth nothing if the first four aren't done.

One habit that makes this much faster: fix a class of issue, then re-crawl and watch the count for that issue drop. If it doesn't drop, your fix didn't work, and you've found that out in twenty minutes instead of at the next monthly report.