Fix These First: Your Next Best Action, Explained

What Is Fix These First?

Fix These First is the action module at the top of your Overview page. Instead of showing you every issue on your site at once, it picks the four most impactful things you should work on next and presents them as cards you can click straight into.

It is designed to answer one question: what should I do next on my website?

You do not need to read a long report or rank issues yourself. RnkRocket does the prioritisation for you and tells you clearly whether each fix is something you can do in a few minutes or something you will need a developer to handle.

Why It Has Two Tabs

The biggest problem with most SEO tools is that they dump every issue on you with no regard for who can actually fix it. A small business owner ends up looking at things like "server response time over five seconds" and has no idea what to do — that is a hosting problem, not something you can fix from your CMS.

Fix These First splits your issues into two tabs so you always know what is yours to fix and what needs technical help.

Quick Wins

Things you can realistically fix yourself in your CMS or content editor:

Missing or too-short page titles
Missing meta descriptions
Missing H1 headings (the main title on a page)
Thin content (pages with very little text)
Missing image alt text
Pages with no internal links pointing to them
Titles or meta descriptions that are too long and get cut off in search results

If you can edit your own pages through a dashboard — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow, or anything similar — these are all fixes you can make yourself in a few minutes each.

Needs Developer

Things that usually require server, template, theme, plugin, or hosting access:

Slow server response times
Mobile responsiveness issues
Missing schema markup (also called structured data or JSON-LD)
Mixed HTTP and HTTPS content
Missing viewport meta tags
Broken canonical URLs
Large page sizes and unoptimised images
Missing form labels for accessibility

These still matter and they still affect your rankings — but they usually need someone with access to your site's code or hosting to fix them properly. If you work with a web developer, you can send them this tab directly.

How the Ranking Works

Fix These First does not just sort issues by raw technical severity. It uses a three-step ranking so the most useful fixes appear first:

1. Bucket split

Every issue is first classified as a Quick Win or Needs Developer based on who can realistically fix it. Each tab is ranked independently, so a Quick Win with moderate impact will always appear on the Quick Wins tab even if a developer-only issue is technically more severe.

2. Page importance

Issues on your most commercially important pages get boosted to the top. Your services, pricing, contact and location pages are weighted highest because those are the pages that actually bring in customers. Your blog posts, about page, and FAQs get a moderate boost. Issues on legal pages, cookie policies, help pages and privacy policies are intentionally pushed down — not because they do not matter, but because they should not outrank a broken title on your pricing page.

3. Variety

If five of your pages all have the same problem, Fix These First will not waste all four cards showing you variations of the same thing. It picks the two best examples of each issue type and moves on to the next most impactful problem. This keeps your top four actions varied and intentional, so you always see three or four distinct fixes rather than four copies of the same issue.

The Primary Card Explained

Your top action sits in a larger "hero" card at the top of the active tab. On the Quick Wins tab it has a purple tint and a "Recommended first" badge with a sparkles icon. On the Needs Developer tab it has a slate tint and a "Developer task" badge with a code icon.

Each hero card includes:

Which page has the problem — the URL is shown at the top so you know where to work
A plain-English summary of what is wrong — no jargon
Why it matters — the impact on your rankings or visibility
What to do — clear instructions on how to fix it, written so anyone can follow them
A primary action button — "Fix this issue" on Quick Wins, or "See details" on Needs Developer

The three smaller cards below the primary are your next best actions, each with a "Quick win" or "Technical follow-up" pill so you can tell at a glance what kind of work each one needs.

Working Through the List

Start with the primary card on the Quick Wins tab. Click "Fix this issue" and you will be taken straight to the Issues page with that specific problem expanded and ready to work on. The Issues page gives you the full fix instructions and a button to mark the issue as fixed once you have made the change on your site.

When you mark an issue as fixed, go back to your Overview. Fix These First will refresh automatically and promote the next most impactful action into the primary slot. This gives you a natural loop: fix → mark → new primary → fix → mark → repeat.

For anything on the Needs Developer tab, click "See details" to view the full technical description. You can send this directly to your developer or web host — the language is written to be clear enough for a technical audience to act on without needing further context.

Why Does My Top Issue Not Say "Critical"?

Fix These First is an action module, not a severity report. The old version of the dashboard showed raw severity badges like "High priority" or "Medium priority" on the top card, but this created a contradiction: you would land on your recommended next action and see it tagged as "only Medium", which undermined the whole point of the module.

The new labels — "Recommended first", "Developer task", "Quick win", and "Technical follow-up" — describe what to do rather than how severe the underlying issue is. If you want to see the raw severity level of any particular issue, click through to the Issues page — the full severity, priority score, and technical metadata are all still there.

What If Quick Wins Is Empty?

If Fix These First tells you there are no quick wins, that is genuinely good news — it means your basic on-page SEO is in good shape. The module will show you a congratulatory message and a nudge to check the Needs Developer tab for any outstanding technical work.

If both tabs are empty, your site does not currently have any open issues flagged by the crawler. You can run a fresh analysis or wait for your next scheduled crawl to see if anything new comes up.

Running a New Analysis

Fix These First reads from the most recent crawl of your site. If you have not run an analysis in a while, the module might be showing stale data. To run a fresh analysis:

Go to SEO Analysis in the sidebar
Click Run Analysis on the project you want to check
Wait for the crawl to complete (usually one to five minutes depending on site size)
Return to Overview — Fix These First will update automatically

For more on how the analysis itself works, see our SEO Analysis guide or the full SEO audit checklist.

Basic Plan Included

Fix These First is available on every plan, including Basic. It is one of the core tools RnkRocket provides to help you improve your site without needing a dedicated SEO agency. Basic includes enough analyses per month for a typical small-business site, and you can always buy top-up packs if you need more.

For a full comparison of what each plan includes, see Which RnkRocket Plan Is Right for Your Business?.