Fix cards — how to actually fix it.
Why it matters, numbered steps, copy-paste code, and every URL affected. Sorted by points gained, which means working top-down is genuinely the optimal order.
A score tells you that something is wrong. A fix card tells you what, why it costs you, exactly how to fix it, and every page it's happening on. This is the part of the SEO report you actually work from — everything above it is just the reason you're here.
The order is the strategy
Cards are sorted by points gained when fixed, highest first. The top card is open when the page loads.
That ordering isn't cosmetic. The +N pts chip on each card is exactly what your overall score would rise by if you fixed that check completely — accounting for which pillar it's in, how severe it is, and how many of your pages are failing it. The arithmetic →
So working top-down is the optimal sequence. There is no cleverer order to find. Do the first card, then the second.
On a site that has never been audited, the top three cards typically account for most of the gap to a decent score — because a check failing across forty pages is worth far more than one failing on a single page. Don't try to clear the whole board on day one.
Anatomy of a fix card
Collapsed, a card shows four things: a severity chip (High, Medium or Low), the fix title, an effort pill, and the green +N pts chip. Open it and you get the whole job:
Why it matters
One or two sentences on what this actually costs you in search — not a restatement of the rule. If it's a fix that does nothing for a small site, we say so rather than inflating it.
How to fix it — numbered steps
An ordered list you can follow without knowing what any of the words mean. Not “add a canonical tag”, but the three things you do, in order, to add one.
Copy-paste code
Where the fix has a snippet — robots.txt rules, a meta tag, a JSON-LD block — it's right there in a dark code box with a Copy button. Paste it, edit the parts that are obviously yours, done.
Where to change it
The paragraph that saves the support ticket. It gives you both routes deliberately: where the setting usually lives in a CMS or site builder, and where the file lives if you edit templates directly. We don't assume you're on any particular platform, because you might not be.
Every affected URL
The full list — not truncated slugs. The first five are shown with the rest behind a Show all toggle, and each row has a copy button and an open-in-new-tab link. This is your worklist.
Many cards also carry a Read guide link through to a deeper write-up, and a link out to Google's own documentation where the official word is worth having.
The detail line does the counting for you — “12 of 40 pages affected” — so you always know whether this is a site-wide problem or three stragglers.
The filter tabs
Above the cards is a row of tabs. Each carries a live count.
| Tab | Shows | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| All | Every open fix, in points order. | Any |
| Errors | The serious ones. Blocked crawlers, missing titles, pages not returning 200, no HTTPS. | High |
| Warnings | Real problems that aren't emergencies. Missing descriptions, thin content, weak internal linking. | Medium |
| Notices | Polish. Slug wording, language attribute, Open Graph tags. | Low |
| Passed | Swaps the board for What's working — the green checklist of every check you're already clearing. | — |
The severity chip on a card and the tab it lives under are the same thing wearing different clothes: High is an Error, Medium is a Warning, Low is a Notice.
The Passed tab is worth two minutes of your time. It's the only place the report tells you what you're already doing right, and it's a useful sanity check — if a check you know you've fixed still isn't in that list, your fix didn't land the way you think it did.
The effort pills
Each card is tagged Easy fix, Moderate or Involved.
The pill is a rough guide from two things only: how severe the check is, and how many pages it affects. Anything hitting 25 or more pages is called Involved — not because the fix is hard, but because you have to do it twenty-five times. A one-line robots.txt change and a hundred rewritten meta descriptions can both be a five-minute job or a five-hour one depending on your setup, and we can't see your setup.
Read the pill as a scale question, not a difficulty question. If an Involved card has a copy-paste snippet, it's usually one template change that fixes all twenty-five pages at once — the pill is being pessimistic on your behalf.
The one fix with no card
Core Web Vitals never appears on the fix board. Its points are entirely real — they're inside your Technical pillar and inside the “+N pts to gain” total at the top — but they're shown as a chip on the Core Web Vitals section further down the page instead of as a card up here.
That's to stop the same points being listed twice. Performance has its own section with real metrics and a How to improve list, and that's a better home for it than a card. Core Web Vitals →
After you fix something
Nothing happens automatically. Fixing the site does not update the score — the report is a photograph of the audit you ran, and it stays exactly as it was until you run another one.
So: make your changes, deploy them, then re-audit. The score hero will show the change against your previous run and add a bar to the sparkline. If a fix worked, the card disappears and turns up in the Passed tab.
If you only changed a handful of pages, use Specific pages mode and paste just those URLs — it's faster and cheaper than re-crawling the whole site to check six pages. How to re-run an audit →