You've run an SEO audit on your store. Now you're staring at a report full of scores, warnings, and terms like "CLS," "canonical tags," and "crawl depth." It feels like it was written for a developer, not a store owner.
The good news: you don't need to understand every term to take action. Most SEO audit reports boil down to a handful of categories, and knowing which ones matter most for revenue is more important than understanding every technical detail.
Start with the scores, not the issues
A good audit report gives you an overview before diving into details. In RankCart, this is your SEO Health score and AI Readiness score. These tell you at a glance how your store compares to best practices:
- 80–100 — Your store is in great shape. Focus on maintaining what you have and looking for advanced optimisations.
- 60–79 — Solid foundation with room to improve. There are likely 3–5 high-impact fixes that would make a meaningful difference.
- Below 60 — Significant issues are likely hurting your rankings and traffic. Prioritise the biggest ones — you'll see the fastest improvement here.
The scores give you context. A store at 85 with 20 minor issues is in a very different position than a store at 45 with 20 critical ones.
The sections that matter most for revenue
Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Look for your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score — this is how long your main content takes to appear. If it's over 2.5 seconds on mobile, this should be a top priority. Slow pages lose customers before they even see your products.
Product schema and structured data
This section tells you whether your product pages have the markup that enables rich results in Google (star ratings, prices, availability). If most of your products are flagged as missing schema, this is a high-value fix — rich results significantly improve click-through rates.
Image alt text
The audit will flag images without alt text. If you have hundreds of missing alt texts, don't panic — but do make it a priority. Each missing alt text is a product image that's invisible to Google Image Search.
Broken links
Broken internal links waste SEO authority and frustrate customers. Fix these promptly, starting with links on high-traffic pages. The audit should tell you exactly which pages contain broken links and where they point.
Meta titles and descriptions
Look for pages with missing or duplicate meta titles and descriptions. While meta descriptions aren't a direct ranking factor, they affect click-through rates from search results. Duplicate titles confuse Google about which of your pages to rank.
What you can safely deprioritise
Not every audit finding requires immediate action. Some common low-priority items:
- Minor HTML validation warnings — Unless they're causing visible rendering issues, these rarely affect SEO.
- Pages with slightly long URLs — As long as they're readable and under 200 characters, URL length isn't a meaningful ranking factor.
- Missing Open Graph tags — These affect how your links appear on social media, not in search results. Nice to have, not urgent.
- Low-priority accessibility warnings — While accessibility is important, issues like colour contrast ratios don't directly affect SEO rankings.
Building a fix-it plan
The best way to approach an audit report is to sort issues by estimated revenue impact, not by severity label. A "warning" about missing product schema on 200 pages is far more valuable to fix than a "critical" about a single missing H1 tag on your About page.
RankCart's Revenue Recovery feature does this automatically — it attaches a dollar estimate to each issue category so you can see which fixes will have the biggest impact on your bottom line.
Start with the top 3 issues by revenue impact. Fix those, wait 2–4 weeks for Google to recrawl, then re-audit and tackle the next batch. This iterative approach is more effective than trying to fix everything at once.
Haven't run an audit yet? Try RankCart free — you'll get a full report in about 60 seconds, with each issue explained in plain language and prioritised by revenue impact.