Method

7 min read

Price every SEO problem in clicks, not severity

Why 'critical, warning, notice' sends teams to fix the wrong things first, and the simple model we use instead.

Ines Varga

Co-founder, product

Most audit tools sort problems by severity. A broken link on a page nobody visits is ‘critical’; a title that loses a thousand clicks a month is a ‘notice’. The labels describe the problem, not what it costs you.

Clicks at stake

We price each problem with three numbers: how many people search for what the page targets, where the page ranks today, and the click-through rate it would earn one or two positions higher. The gap is the price.

It is a rough number and it is supposed to be. Its job is to put the list in an order people can argue about, which is more useful than a list nobody reads.

What changes

When Northloop switched to this order, the first twelve fixes were all titles and internal links. None of them were labelled critical by their old tool. Together they were worth 4,100 clicks a month.

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